Greetings to you, gentle folk of Cubic Worlds!
It’s the start of May and I’ll shortly be getting to work on the weekend-long Egg Hunt for you all to enjoy. Apologies again that it was late (real life sucks), but we got there eventually. Hopefully the hunt will be as enjoyable as last year and the prizes will be shiny enough for your liking!
What else comes in May, though? It’s a special month for our server, and I wanted to talk more about some things regarding the broader future of CW – the Minecraft 1.14 update, our 8th birthday, the Meepling appeal, and… other things. Click below to read on!
Minecraft 1.14
“Village and Pillage” was released last month with some great features. New blocks, new items, new crafting stations, and more mobs and enemies – even some biome tweaks! It’s a pretty meaty update with a lot to keep any player entertained whether you’re building or adventuring.
Though the Spigot server software team have said that this version isn’t such a technical nightmare as 1.13 was, it’s still going to take some time before bugs are ironed out and plugins have updated. Unlike last time, the wait shouldn’t be a long one. However, Mojang are already working on a bugfix version 1.14.1 to cure poor chunk loading performance amongst other things. Totally unexpected, am I right? 😋
It’s extremely unlikely we’ll update before that bugfix is available, but once it is – and as soon as PaperSpigot includes it – I’ll get to doing the usual testing so I can let you know more of our update plan.
The question you’re bound to ask is: “Will we get a new main world for 1.14?” Nope! That’s not something I’m planning to do given how fresh Arcadia still is. You’ll be able to enjoy the new features and biome changes (such as bamboo plants) through the Ore realms as usual.
Our 8th Birthday
Like a marmot riding a firework-powered elytra, time flies! Cubic Worlds will enter its 8th year this month. Blimey. It might be that you’re wondering what the celebration will involve… well, about all I can say at this stage is that there will be cake. I might even let off eight fireworks. Bah, and indeed humbug! If there’s anything extra to that then you whippersnappers should count yourselves lucky!
Whatever birthday fun we do end up arranging will probably be held on Saturday 25th May at the usual event time of around 18:00 GMT.
Finalising Tesseract Moves
Move requests have slowed to a trickle, but there are several outstanding requests that have been left to gather dust for rather too long – sorry about that! I’m aiming to get all of the remaining moves processed before the end of this month, and as soon as the queue is clear, I’ll announce a date when the files for Tesseract will be removed from the server.
The Meepling Appeal
Donations to the server have been closed since the great Chaos of last year. Things have gotten better after a new host and a fresh 1.13 world, but with 1.14 on the horizon and ever-increasing server overhead as new features are added, there are still things to be done before I reopen the appeal.
I don’t want to have to make any more red tape beyond the policies Smoke and I have already created for Arcadia – e.g. the changes to make spawners more vanilla. Instead, when I get chance between event prep and move request handling, I’m concentrating on how to optimise our Ore world setup and trying to make sure our plugins do exactly what they should. When I feel confident that I’ve done all I can to guarantee reasonable server TPS for all of you, the Appeal will open again.
Infinity and Beyond?
There are other things about the future of CW in a more general sense that I want to announce soon, but now isn’t quite the right time. My little grey cells are struggling to get the details framed and pinned down in the best way. That’s the problem with the future – just like Brexit, it’s tricky to plan for things that aren’t concrete!
Oh boy. Things must be bad if I’ve fallen low enough to make political references…
I generally don’t like foreshadowing things because it either tends to upset people or leads to wild rumours. Still, in this case, I feel it’s better to get people in the frame of mind for some interesting news later in the month, rather then just announce it straight off the bat. I regret nothing!