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Hey, everyone - we've got updates to share in regards to our Minecraft server, and some changes on how we'll be approaching game updates going forward. First and foremost, you can now connect using MC 1.21.3! Some newer features from those updates may not be available yet - the reasoning of which we'll be going into a bit later - but if you tend to play on the latest version of Minecraft, you'll now be able to connect without issue. If you're still on MC 1.21.1, however, you'll still be able to play - which, for some of you, may give an indication as to what we've introduced. However, we're gonna save that for a bit later. SkyBlock and The End in Survival In terms of features and functionality, we've finally reintroduced The End in Survival, allowing for Durite (and the newly introduced Durite Temples) to be discovered - along with the other goodies in The End, of course. However, more significantly, SkyBlock has finally been reintroduced - and has been given a brand new spawn area! Inside, you'll find an expanded shop, weather controls, the new selection of various crates, and most of the other stuff you've come to expect from Survival. Additionally, the old system for using Cobblestone as a currency is no more - kind of. SkyBlock now has a proper economy, much like Survival. Some SkyBlock challenges will reward money, however the primary way to obtain currency is, in fact, still through Cobblestone. Inside the shop, you'll find a sell shop that allows you to sell any Cobblestone for 1$ per block, sort of like a Cobblestone ATM of sorts. Going forward, we'd like to expand this and allow for additional ways to earn currency - however we're going to be approaching this with care. For now, though - we figure it's good to get things switched over, removing the need to haul huge amounts of cobblestone back and forth to the shop. What Took so Long? Now, some of you are likely wondering - why is it that this took so long? We first updated to 1.21.1 in early September, and only two months later are major features and gamemodes finally being introduced. What gives? Well, it all comes down to plugins that we rely on - as well as technical changes with Minecraft and some of these plugins. The reason we had to delay The End in Survival for so long was because we rely on a plugin, Custom Ore Generator, in order to generate Durite Ore throughout The End. This plugin relies on something called NMS, which is short for net.minecraft.server - to avoid getting too technical, this means the plugin interacts directly with Minecraft code, rather than the Bukkit API. This Minecraft server code does not remain consistent between server versions and will break with every update, no matter how minor. There's no real way around this - outside of using only the Bukkit API. This API is what plugins are intended to run through, and in most cases, old plugins will just continue to work throughout many updates. There are exceptions to this, and larger updates can and do still cause breaking changes, but many plugins often do not need to be updated with every Minecraft version change. We've even got a few that have remained in place since CU relaunched in 2014, never having required any updates of any sort. There have been a number of cases where plugins we relied on were discontinued or simply stopped functioning - where we ended up taking the plugin and running our own private fork, with our own customizations and compatibility fixes. The most significant example of this is MobMoney - the same plugin that old CU used for dropping money rewards upon killing mobs. We've continued to update it to add support for dropping money when mining certain blocks (mainly ores), as well as some security fixes to prevent some potential exploits. In theory, we could have, with enough effort and time, done the same for Custom Ore Generator - but then, we're on the hook for continuing to maintain this fork. Additionally, the initial time investment is significant - and given that I work full-time outside of CU nowadays and have other projects I like to work on, this isn't ideal. Thankfully, in the case of that plugin, there was a development build which was available - which has support for MC 1.21.1. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for our SkyBlock plugin of choice, uSkyBlock - which hasn't been updated for 1.21 at all, and still requires MC 1.20.x. However, we didn't go to the effort of updating it ourselves, either - so, if that's the case, how do we have SkyBlock back again? Changing our Update Approach Thus far, our update approach has been fairly straightforward. A new Minecraft update comes out, we wait for Spigot/Paper to release stable builds for that new version, we wait for any major breaking plugins to update, and then we update. In the past, this was a fairly simple affair, and didn't take too long. However, with the switch to BungeeCord, despite this process being relatively simple, the time required to actually perform an update has ballooned - because we have to do this entire process for every individual gamemode. This results in the entire server being offline for several hours at the point of an update - and if any major breaking changes come up, we're often stuck and unable to downgrade. This has come up a few times, and has resulted in some gamemodes being offline and unplayable for some length of time after the rest of the server is up-to-date. This, to say the least, is not ideal whatsoever. Additionally, Mojang has recently announced a new approach for updates on their end - with smaller, more frequent updates being released, similar to how they did updates in the early days. For Minecraft, that's great - for us, that means even more time and work required just to keep the server up-to-date. So, we've decided that we are not going to keep these servers up-to-date. Going forward, we're going to be relying on ViaVersion - which allows newer MC clients to connect to older servers. This means that we don't have to update the backend servers at all, or even all at once, in order to support the latest version of Minecraft. This is how we're able to support MC 1.21.3 already, and is why some of the newer features of the update won't work yet - most of our servers are still on 1.21.1. As for SkyBlock, it's still not up-to-date either - and so we've opted to just keep it on 1.20.4, in order to get it up and running once again. As Spigot and Paper are updated, along with the plugins we rely on, we'll be doing updates more selectively - things such as Minigames and Hub will likely update very infrequently, and may end up remaining on 1.21.1 for a while. SkyBlock may end up falling into that category for a while as well, until uSkyBlock gets updated or if we decide to update it ourselves. Survival and Vanilla, we'll likely still try and keep these running on the latest version of Minecraft whenever possible, since having all of the new features is a bit more important with those gamemodes. Our hope is that this will allow us to remain "up-to-date" much faster, and remove the need for us to update so many servers constantly - reducing workload for us, and reducing the likelihood of new bugs being introduced with updates. When we do major backend server updates, we'll continue to announce them, and world resets will be handled similar to before based on these updates. However, in cases where we simply support newer versions of Minecraft through ViaVersion, we likely won't announce it whatsoever outside of changelogs and the server MOTD. For now, though, that's all we've got! If you run into any new issues as a result of us using ViaVersion (or if you find a more basic server bug somewhere), be sure to let us know on our bug tracker, or with /bugreport ingame!

Hello Everyone! When I was reading the forums I ran into a topic that made me sad. It was about a Map Restart. It means that we would get a brand new map full with minerals but it would also mean that every single item you have and block you placed would gone (not sure about in-game cash). Yes, it means, no house, no faction home, no items, not a single dirt block. Nothing! I would like to give some Points why we should be against the map restart, and how could be the current problems solved: 1) Loose everything: After a Map Restart, we would loose all our stuff. I worked so hard for my diamonds and with my house, as everybody else. Furthermore we are still building our faction home we started 2 weeks ago (!!) I don't want to start it again. Nobody wants. I read that people would loose their 3 cities with over 100 people in it. Big projects would *poof* disappear. 2) PvP would cause trouble immediatelly: After the restart everybody would spawn at the same place and as PvP is on some idiots would just start to hit you till you die or make some stone tools to hunt you down and grief your house, making you unable to build a home. Some would fast-mine diamonds and start griefing even before anyone would have a house. Even if PvP would be turned off for a short time, people would be able to destroy your houses and believe me, there are many idiots out there who prefers destroying your house than building one for himself. 3) Loosing the Arts: Wool Arts(like Megaman Arts). Pixeltown. And such things. These would be gone. No Eyegasm (sorry for being kinda vulgar ) I would miss them very-very much and I think I'm not the only one who would miss them (+Think the ones who built those them!). Why people support Map Restart then? - you may ask 4) Get rid of "Ghost Towns" If you don't know what a Ghost Town is I explain it fast. Ghost Towns are small (or simetimes big) villages where no people play at all. Only griefed houses, floating signs and doors and creepy atmosphere. People want to get rid of them so we would get much more building space, so Restart Map - NO! I have a better idea: a New game! You ask "dafuq?". Well: admins would fly across the map searching for ghost towns. When they find one, they would enclose it with obsidian or bedrock, as they wish and get rid of doors, signs, chest and all protected stuff. Then they would turn PvP off in that area and set /warp destroy (or something like this) Then the moderator would invite the players who would be able to destroy everything there and keep the stuff (kinda...legal griefing.. sounds fun isn't it?) If turning PvP off isn't possible just invite trustworthy players only or admins could destroy things in creative mode, or just replace the blocks of the area with Air blocks (if thats possible). See? Maybe a new game/block collecting method or a simple solution (sorta simple...) 5) New biome: Jungle This biome will be awesome. New area with ocelots scaring creepers away , maybe slimes will spawn on ground. Cool! People say: we want that biome so we need to Restart Map- NO! As Minecraftwiki says:"Added jungle biomes (requires a new world or new chunks) with ferns and new wood and leaf types." See? New chunks. I don't know if moderators or anyone can replace chunks but as far as I know the territory of the map could be increased to reach new chunks. -Possible solution. 6) Running out of resources - mainly diamonds Many people complain about that soon we won't have any diamonds on the server, so we need to Restart Map - NO! Check the Map Render. we have 12.000+ diamond blocks on the map. Find it! Furthermore, if we have less diamond it will worth more. If you still have problems maybe moderators could make more games for winning diamonds or replace chunks (Jungle biome + ore replacements). This could be done in place of unused chunks, or the place of ghost towns. Or, maybe the chunks of /warp mine could be replaced (but I don't know what's above ) 7) Buildings aren't designed for Factions Yes, we have many problems with factions. I wrote a topic about it you can read it if you are interested: http://chaoticunited...__fromsearch__1 I know that we haven't prepared for factions, but a Map Restart wouldn't solve the problem. As the new map would not have any buildings you can't really hide or escape from the players, which mean you won't be able to build a faction home peacefully. (Same problem as in point 2 )Most players would know where is the base of the Faction XY and if you were enemies, he would attack you even before finishing the building. On the current map there are huge houses, buildings which may hide where you go and make people hard to follow you. In a nutshell, the current map provides more hiding spots. /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// 8) Supporters of Map Restart If you read the topics about Map Restart you can find some people supporting a map restart. But please, most of these people say that they recently lost their stuff, got their home destroyed or simply new on the server. They are "poor". A new map wouldn't really mean anything to them. But those people who are against map restart say that they would loose their stuff, melon farm, towns etc.... Those people are against it who currently have something important. So they would become poor from rich. I think the word of these people is more important as they are the ones who would really lose something. 9) Lack of information/ people who know about it If you check the topics about Map Restart, it's obvious that not too many people know about the idea of the Map Restart, which means they can't express their opinion. When this issue becomes very hot, we should ask many many players about them listing the points for, and against Map Restart (so they can inform about the pros and contras) 10) Loss of players After a Map Restart, many of those players who wanted to keep their stuff/building would definitely leave the server. This could mean a great loss (maybe loosing some donators!). On the other hand, those people who want a map restart wouldn't leave the server if we would keep the current map, I think. ___________________________________________________________________________________ People suggest creating a New Server for a new map and leave the current server for the current one. This would be great, but unfortunately Chaotic United doesn't have much money. Managers have financial problems with the maintenance of the current server so I think a new server is impossible. (I'm very sad they don't have money because they would REALLY deserve it!!) Important: I don't want to tell anyone what to do. (This mostly refers to the points concerning Managers and Moderators) They don't get paid for their work on the server as far as I know, but they are still working on solving the problems, so Congratulation for everything, Staff! Great Job! Furthermore, I don't know which of these points are able to be fulfilled. These are just my ideas. For now that's it. If something will come to my mind I will edit the post. Please fill the poll after considering my points, or if you filled it, you can change your vote if my Points changed your way of thinking . If you have any problems or solution ideas please leave it in the comment section so maybe I and/or the managers or anybody can find something out. If you agree with my point please put the "NO Map Restart" sign into your signature . No map restart pic.png 2.97K 3 downloads