You might want to grab yourself a hot chocolate, this post is going to be a long one. It's been a while since I've done one of these, and in fact two weeks ago marked 10 years since I first wrote one of these threads. Let me think, what's a good excuse for it taking so long? I watched the new series of Bake Off, moved into a new flat, bought a new computer, got two degrees, almost sent something to space - just a couple of little things. But they're not important, let's get to the exciting news!
VillageCraft is now running Minecraft 1.20.4!On a serious note to start with, I'd like to make a quick apology about taking so long for this. In the 4(!) major updates to the game since VC last updated, Mojang made some very serious changes to the game, including expanding the world, recoding a bunch of internal game mechanics, and switching to a new scheme where they seem to make a bunch of breaking changes on the 0.00.x "minor" patches. Each of those were difficult to deal with, and each update that came out made the process harder still. VillageCraft is twelve years old now, updating a server with this much history and this much complexity is hard, and I'll always prioritise safety and security when updating to make sure as much as possible continues to work correctly, without anything breaking. But now we're running the very latest Minecraft version once again, and with (hopefully) most of the major changes out of the way, it should be a lot easier to keep up with things. There's only one major change that I sense is on the horizon that could delay an update this significantly again, and it's a feature I've been wanting for close to a decade, so quite frankly I'm looking forward to re-coding everything if that happens.
For 1.20, a few of our essential core plugins once again broke, so I've continued the tradition of taking them under my wing and re-coding them. In fact, this update has ended up with me doing more coding than all my previous plugins combined. I've written over 32000(!) lines of code (that's what GitHub claims anyway), including making a couple of pull requests to Paper to change the core server API in order to get some of our plugins working, and with 17 (I think?) entirely new plugins, there's no shortage of changes this time around. I've taken this opportunity to clean things up and make it more flexible, and I'm excited to be back into the full swing of coding up brand-new things to make VC even more awesome. As of this update, VC has 45% of its plugins entirely custom-coded specifically for it. And with Minecraft making the leap from Java 8 to Java 17 (and soon to Java 21), developing is quite a different experience given there's a decade of new language features to use and abuse.
But enough about that, here's what's new on VillageCraft right now!
Minecraft 1.17, 1.18, 1.19, and 1.20! With four major versions in this update, there's a whole plethora of brand-new content from Vanilla just waiting to be explored. The world has expanded to include another 64 blocks below bedrock, and 64 blocks in the sky, and
all your villages should have automatically updated to protect this additional space (let us know if not and we'll fix it). There's brand-new biomes, many mobs, scary wardens, bright berries, ancient archeology, awesome axolotls, adorable allays, horny goats, chests with boats, cosy candles, friendly frogs, and more new blocks than I can remember, to name but a few changes. Go forth, explore, and enjoy!
First up, following the votes in both Parliament and the Senate, now
only 50% of players need to sleep in order to skip the night. This is something I know has been annoying for a while, and after trialling a similar system on VillageCraft Vanilla a while back, I'm happy it'll be a good change on VillageCraft.
I've also added the Mojang-approved recipe for
bundles, so you can now craft an extra perk to help with inventory management. Having used them on VCV quite a bit, they're super useful for collecting different items when exploring the new world.
The resource pack is now compulsory, as its use will be expanded more and more to take advantage of the new opportunities it presents. Thanks to some changes Mojang have made to the game, it should now load faster and fully apply before you join the server, and I've made some changes to how it gets compiled, so now the pack is
smaller than it was before the update. Even with all the additions I've made, it'll be even quicker to download and update. As always, the resource pack will never change anything from vanilla, so you can use it alongside any other packs you have without interference. Your game should automatically download any updates as they happen, but as always, if there's any problems, let me know and I'll try and work out a fix for it.
Voting rewards have been updated to include new items from across the past four versions of Minecraft, including the full range of goat horns, and armour trims at the highest tier level. As always, you can upgrade your reward bags by combining nine of them in a crafting table to move up a tier. Due to some internal changes Mojang's made it's possible any old ones you have stored up won't stack or combine in the crafting table anymore - if that's the case and you want to keep them, let a member of staff know and they can swap them out for a new one for you, free of charge.
With all the new blocks added across the updates, I'm happy to say there are now
65 brand-new microblocks representing the additions from the updates, which will join the rotation of random microblocks available in the store on the Qualia seafront. And as before, all microblocks are available via the wandering trader. On that note,
the wandering trader now sells items from the new biomes, including the new types of woods, loot from the deep dark, and a new pool of items from that wandering trader who got stuck in the new caves and wants to sell you all his ores. The default trades are pretty bad, so I'm happy to say on VC they're hopefully slightly less useless of a mob.
We've also
renamed the stonecutter to the Cutting Table, and expanded what you can do with it.
You can now cut wood, including getting all the nice one-to-one conversion ratios for items that you could normally only get with stones before. This includes stairs, trapdoors, signs, fences, and other wooden items. It works for all woods (including the Nether ones and bamboo), and you can
jump from logs directly to individual items. Not only that, but
the Cutting Table can now be used to craft microblocks! Just place any block into the Cutting Table, and if there's a microblock version of it available, you'll be able to craft 8 of them directly! No longer do you have to trade with a wandering trader or wait for them to show up in the microblock shop, so decorate to your heart's content with the cute little blocks!
On top of that, you can now
click on any item frame with a glow ink sac, and it'll change it into a glow item frame in-place, so you don't have to break and replace them all. I've also made it so if you
click on an item frame with a feather, it'll stop showing the name of the item inside it if it's been renamed, so you have the option for that cleaner look. And finally, to top off the item frame changes, if you
click on one with a golden carrot, it'll make it invisible, so only the item will be shown! When you remove an item, the frame will be shown again so you can always see it, but it remembers it should be invisible, so next time you put something in there it'll hide itself again automatically.
A very tiny but useful thing, if you're
walking on top of a path block now, you'll get 2.5s of Speed I, to help you traverse around that little bit quicker. It's a change I've found useful when testing, but I'm happy to remove it if you find it annoying.
The
Mob Catcher plugin has been entirely re-written from scratch, and in doing so I've made it a lot more resilient to breaking again in the future. Now eggs can be crafted using a chicken egg in the four corners, an iron ingot on the four edges, and then either a copper block, gold block, or emerald block in the middle. The three tiers (in that order) have a 33%, 67%, or 100% chance of catching a mob, and each attempt costs $500, $1500, or $2500 respectively. You throw them like a snowball, if they hit a mob that can be caught, it'll try and catch it, and drop a mob egg if so. There's a couple of mobs you can't catch, for obvious reasons. I've not yet had time to backport old mob eggs to the new format, so if you've got mobs caught already, please keep them in their eggs for the time being until I can make them releasable!
I've also re-coded the mob heads plugin, to add
heads for every single mob, and all their variants. Kill a green sheep? You'll get a green sheep's head! Most mobs have a 2.5% chance to drop a head, which increases by 1% per level of looting, which is the same scale as Wither Skeleton heads. I've made some rarer mobs a bit more common though. Every single mob head will also play the
corresponding mob's sound when placed on top of a note block, including some slight variations for some mob types, such as the head of a sneezing panda making a sneezing sound. In addition,
players will now drop a head every time they're killed by someone else, and the head will include details of who killed them, and when it was, so you can keep them as a little trophy. Again, these will play a fun little sound when placed on a note block.
After far too long trying to figure it out, I'm very happy to say that all player heads, mob heads, custom skulls, and microblocks, will now
keep their name when they're placed and broken, so everything will stack properly when you're placing and replacing them. This will only apply to new heads placed from now on, so any existing heads you have may be a little weird, just because of some changes Mojang made to them.
We're also introducing a
brand new currency in the form of Gems, which are designed to reward actual playing rather than the slightly skewed economy we've built up over the last 12 years. For every
15 minutes you are on the server (and not AFK!), you'll be granted 1 gem automatically. You can check how many gems you have at any time by doing
/gems. Gems cannot be traded between players, and cannot be exchanged for regular VC dollars, so the only way to get them is to play on the server. Aside from the standard time-based system of getting gems, they can be obtained through interacting with the server in various ways, either as prizes from events, loot from minigames, or rewards for getting advancements. But the question I hear you asking is, what's the point of this new currency?
Well, joining Hughbert as a visitor of Qualia, I'm happy to introduce to you
Toni the traveller, who you can find in Qualia Outskirts every Thursday, at the same times as Hughbert visits on Tuesday (18:00 - 06:00 UTC). Toni is a unique addition to the market, as they
sell items you can normally only get by exploring, which on a server as old as ours, are usually items that are hard to find without travelling millions of blocks. Toni sells three different items each week, each of which will have a different starting price depending on the rarity of the item, but the
price increases by 10% every purchase, and you're limited to one per player. These numbers might change over time depending on feedback, but hopefully this is a good balance between making sure the harder-to-get items remain hard, but still accessible to people who've put a reasonable amount of time into the server without needing to fly around forever looking for chests people have already looted. Toni does a lot of travelling into weird and wonderful places, and they're happy to bring it all to you each Thursday evening, so be sure to pay them a visit!
Speaking of Hughbert, I'm also happy to say he now has
brand new hats in his rotation, which will be randomly showing up every Tuesday like normal, so be sure to pay him a visit every week to see what hats are up for grabs, and to claim one for yourself. All the old ones are still in the mix and will continue to show up randomly, so don't worry if there's any you've missed. There's also been some changes to the
/hats GUI to expand its functionality. First up, the colour change options will only show up if the hat you're wearing can be coloured. There's two new colour buttons, to randomise the colour, or to reset it to your personal default colour. On the right, there's a new button to randomise your hat (including colour if possible) so it's easy to find one you like. Finally, certain hats can now have different styles, and some of the existing hats have been grouped up into the new styles. Different styles are considered as the same hat, so unlocking one will unlock all styles for you automatically.
And the fun doesn't stop there, there's yet another visitor in Qualia, as every Saturday evening, you'll find
Kay on the stage in the record store, who will be happy to perform a new song every week to add to your collection. The Minecraft music is really underrated, so I'm happy to announce now you can any song from the game, not just the music discs, in the form of a
cassette (remember those kids?) which you can play on any jukebox anywhere in the world, just place a block of amethyst below a jukebox and click on it. With the ability to loop tracks, it's a great way to enjoy the game's soundtrack.
I think they're the only people who visit Qualia, but I feel like I'm forgetting someone... Can't think who though, so can't be too important. Especially not on
Wednesdays, why would you even suggest that?
Moving on to some changes with how chat works. Firstly, almost everything has now been converted to using modern game mechanics behind the scenes, including the use of channels. Now, you can
hover over someone's nickname on any chat message, from any channel, and see their full in-game username, as well as their UUID, how long they have played on VillageCraft (since January 2014), if they're a new player, and a brief summary of any important tags they have. It's just a nice convenient, easy-to-use, yet unobtrusive way of getting some more context about someone.
Also, for the first time,
Discord is now treated as a channel in-game. This means if you've chosen to
/ignore anyone, their
Discord messages will also be hidden, completely automatically, finally fulfilling Parliament vote #32. There's no extra commands to remember, and already includes everyone you've ignored in the past. To find out who someone is from Discord, just like regular chat, you can hover over their name and see basic information like their Minecraft username, even if they're not online. Oh, and also Discord messages are now tinted a subtle purple, to differentiate them from normal chat.
In addition, you can now choose to
completely ignore all messages from Discord if you wish. Through the new
/chat command, you can show or hide entire channels at once, so any messages from them can be hidden. Through this command, you can disable listening to messages from local chat, as well as, for the first time ever,
completely disable global chat. Hopefully this will make it a bit easier for you to choose which messages you want to see, and make it a little less chaotic when the server is busy,
On top of that,
tips are now in smooth VC purple, so they're a bit less jarring on the eyes. They've been made less frequent, and the list of tips has been revamped, to remove some of the out-of-date ones, clean up some of the silly ones that haven't aged well, and added some more useful ones that give info about things you might not know. Tips are also treated as a channel, and you can use
/chat to completely
disable showing tips if you wish. However, critical information, messages, and news will always be shown, so you'll never miss anything important.
It's not just text chat that's had a revamp either. With this update, I'm happy to announce that
VillageCraft now supports the Simple Voice Chat mod! This is an
optional client-side mod, which introduces positional voice chat directly in the game, without needing to use things such as Discord. Once you've got the mod installed, you'll automatically hear people around you, and they'll fade away as they move around. As always, we'll
never require anyone to install mods to play on VillageCraft, so you are completely free to never use this feature, but it's there if anyone wants it. A couple of things in the future will hook into voice chat, to add additional features for anyone who chooses to use it. Oh, and one thing I forgot, if you're using this on a group adventure to an ancient city, maybe try not to shout too much. Wouldn't want to wake up any wardens now would we?
You can download Simple Voice Chat here - it'll require installing Fabric, which is a nice, lightweight mod loader for modern Minecraft. If you've never modded the game before, I've put together a MultiMC instance you can import, which will have the mod installed already. Simply
download MultiMC from their website, fire it up, click "Add Instance" in the top left, click "Import from zip", and
copy and paste in this url. If you're more comfortable using the vanilla launcher you can also manually install the mod yourself, although note due to microphone permissions issues if you're using macOS the mod will only work via MultiMC.
I mentioned some of our oldest plugins breaking earlier on, and one of those unfortunately was Lockette, which is what is used to lock chests so people can't steal from them. As this is obviously quite an important plugin to have, it took quite a long time to get working, however it has been replaced with a new, modern version of the plugin, which I'm keen to work with the developer to fix any bugs that may occur. The first time you see a chest with a lock on it, the signs will look a little weird, however when you (or anyone) tries to open it, they'll convert over to the new format. One effect of the new plugin is now only the owner is shown on the chest, and you can add as many additional members as you like by clicking on the sign and doing
/lock addmember [user]. Changing a plugin as important as this in this way isn't something I'm particularly happy about, and I'm quite hesitant to update the server right now given it, but people keep asking for 1.20 so I'm taking the risk it'll be okay. If there's any problems, let a member of staff know and we'll fix it for you. Sorry about this, and if you see any problems at all, please do let me know so I can work to get them resolved. If anyone is caught exploiting these problems to steal from chests or open doors they do not have access to, they will be given a 30-day ban, no exceptions.
Now, I've been teasing something on Discord for a while, and you've all thought it's me just teasing the update itself. But no, alongside this update, I'm very proud to announce the
grand opening of a new minigame - The Dungeon. This is something I've been planning for a few years now, and thanks to help from the wonderful Dallas and Myst, it's finally become a reality. The Dungeon is a solo competitive minigame, focused around strategy, in which you are given a compass and must find where it is pointing to in a dungeon filled with dangerous things. There's loot to be found, prizes to be won, and importantly a leaderboard to compete against each other over. I'll be doing a full write up of how The Dungeon works and everything you need to know to play it soon, ready in time for its
grand opening weekend, on the 27th of January. We'll be opening the gates at 20:00 UTC (15:00 ET) with a reduced entry price, so you can get a feel for the game for a few days, before setting the entry fee back up to its normal price alongside the release of other features down the line. The Dungeon uses some of the new features from the update, as well as using the resource pack in ways we've never done before to add brand new content to the game. This is something I've very much been looking forward to playing myself. I've spent hours inside the dungeon testing it while coding it all, and it really is a genuinely fun and anxiety-inducing game. There's plenty of secrets hidden throughout, achievements to be discovered, and three whole levels of places to explore, and I'm looking forward to seeing you all enjoy it as much as I have.
It's worth mentioning, I'm using The Dungeon to trial some new features before committing to rolling them out across the whole server. One of these is a new shop mechanic, with fewer items bobbing around, less lag, and a brand-new tooltip system which shows you exactly what it is you are buying, and how much it will cost you. There'll be some more changes made to it before it comes to Qualia, or - if you hate it - it might never come to Qualia, but this is one of many things I'm looking at gradually modernising and improving over time. But please do give me feedback on it (and other changes) so I can tailor how I develop things to better match what you want. Now we're running the latest version of the game, I'm keen to do smaller, more gradual roll-outs of changes, including adding new features in between updates. Like I said, I've got a long list of ideas, I'm sure not all of them will turn out good enough to make it to VC, but there's plenty of things I'd like to try in the new year.
If you're someone who uses
Optifine, the lead developer is currently going through some tough times right now, and progress on updating it to 1.20 has been slow. The Optifine team has been actively
recommending people use Sodium in the meantime, which is a "competing" (I hate that word) mod aimed at improving performance. It also uses Fabric, so it's super easy to install alongside Simple Voice Chat, and is specifically designed around modern versions of Minecraft to improve how the game runs. I've been using it since around 1.14, and have found it consistently better than Optifine when it comes to making the game run better. If you mainly use Optifine for shaders, there's a mod called
Iris which builds on Sodium, allowing you to use any shader that you previously used with Optifine. The MultiMC bundle I linked above includes Sodium by default, and Iris can easily be added if you wish.
Unfortunately, the plugin we used to add VR support on VillageCraft has stopped working, and has not yet been updated for 1.20.4. For the time being, I've removed the plugin, but I'll keep my eye on it and will add it back in if it ever gets updated. If you're someone who has used VR via this plugin, let me know, and I'll see what I can do to get it working again.
Finally, I'd like to remind you that VillageCraft is community funded, and not cheap, so if you're enjoying the new features, and if you're financially stable enough to do so, please do consider donating to help cover the costs of running this amazing server. It's not something we like to mention too much, but your help really does go a long way to keeping VillageCraft going.
Enjoy!
Luis <3
(Oh, and of course I've added plenty of easter eggs in a whole bunch of places. Good luck finding them all!)
