At long last, I'm happy to announce that the achievements system is BACK ONLINE! It's been a long time, so I'll reexplain how it works for the sake of our newer players. You can also find further down some information about how things evolved since the last time this was available.

The achievements system on the Creeper's Lab is a completely separate thing than the ones available in vanilla Minecraft, with different targets. These go from the simple (Tarzan Hates Jungle - Destroy 100 vines) to the more challenging (Master Creator - Place 100.000 blocks), making you travel the server (Sunset Ride - Ride the Transoceanic Line) or scratch your head (Master of War - Unlock the power of magic). As of this writing, there are a total of a HUNDRED achievements available, all of which return from the initial set (more on that below). You can see the full list on the forums, while you can track your own progress from your profile.

The newly earned achievements can be viewed on the website itself, below the list of servers, and are also announced in-game by a global announcement. These lists are updated every 30 minutes, so you won't immediately be able to tell if you've earned one. To get an initial update on your profile, you'll need to login to any survival server and wait a bit. This means that, in the upcoming days, you'll see plenty of messages as people make their initial login!

Note that the statistics used for this are only pulled from the survival servers. Actions done at affiliates or in the upcoming Games section aren't counted.

What happened between then and now?

This section will explain what happened and changed in the past year for our more veteran players.

As a reminder, the achievements system used to have 150 targets and was taken down when the Laurasia (then-Survival) server was upgraded to 1.8. What was meant to take a few weeks eventually turned into a rather difficult upgrade process due to various unexpected developments:

- Name changes needed me to port everything to be UUID-based instead of player name-based, and the plugin I was using at the time to track the player stats wasn't compatible with that. As such, I had to pick a new plugin, which stores its data in a completely different format, and adapt to that.

- Internal MC stats aren't reliable. I initially wanted to base the new system on the internal stats tracking system by Mojang, and made some decent headway in that direction, until I realized that every time a player first connected post-1.8, the server would actively WIPE their data instead of migrating it over to a new format. That was enough to tell me I needed to use something more reliable instead, something that I could control.

- Multiple servers are now available, with Rodinia and Gondwana being run separately. I wanted to make sure that players could also score achievements from these locations, as limiting the goals to Laurasia would probably make some players feel like they had no other option if they wanted to build AND earn achievements.


A change of plugins means some reorganization, too. Since the data format is different, I was forced to reset everyone's numbers to 0 on most goals. Only the number of visits done were kept (such as, say, the number of lighthouses found). I retained which achievements were earned in the past, though, so you won't need to do things you already completed succesfully before the system was put to sleep. You can already confirm this from your forum profile. Additionally, I've granted for bragging rights a special forum badge to the 7 players who managed to top the leaderboard before the reset!

I removed 50 achievements from the previous set, as many of the statistics that I tracked are no longer available under the new system. I'm planning to return some of these at a later date through other means. This unfortunately means that we're missing some of the classics (Smitten By God - Take damage from lightning) that I know you loved to work on!


What's next?

My goal is to add another 50 targets once we've upgraded to 1.9, with a mix of previously seen targets and brand new ones focusing on the newer content. There's no specific deadline for this, especially since no release date for 1.9 is known yet.

Until now, have fun earning those achievements, or thinking about what new challenges will be coming to the future!