New beginner's world: Cimmeria

Many potential new players join us, discover the requirement to be registered, then quickly leave without bothering to do so. I can't help but think that many would jump in with us if they only had a chance to learn how we do things.

To help with this, I'm introducing today a new survival world: Cimmeria. This new place is playable even by visitors and is meant to serve as a starter world. Accessible from the lobby, this is a standard world: much like the cores of Laurasia and Rodinia, it's set to normal difficulty on normal land generation. This creates a basic, easy to understand location for new players. Of course, established players can also explore and build there - it's by no means reserved only for the new faces! You can check out its new map to get a feel of the place. A nice balance of biomes means that most blocks and structures are available from the get-go.

The standard rules apply there, including the same family-friendly attitude that is expected across the network. Likewise, the same standards will be applied to determine if anyone needs to be kicked or banned. To help with this new setting, the same automatic filter used in the minigames and UHC will be in use here.

There is obviously a higher risk of griefing there since the whitelist doesn't apply, although I'm confident that we have the tools in place to handle this. There are still several perks to registering, so I'm hoping that many will decide to move ahead with that. Locked behind the registration are the ability to earn achievements, participate in contests, got involved in Events Nights, and visit some of the other worlds.


Multi-version compatibility

Another of the reasons why we lose some potential version is through version bounces: some people don't realize that we're running 1.10, (or whatever version is active at the moment), so they fail to connect and might move on to another server.

To prevent this, the lobby is now accessible to all players from 1.8 to... 1.11! Only the lobby is, and I don't plan to spread this to the survival servers as there is a risk of instability or strange behavior. Besides, changing game versions is simple enough to do nowadays. The primary goal of this is to allow both returning players and potential new ones to connect, see various signs explaining which version we're actually running, and maybe get help from others in the chat.


Minecraft 1.11 news

Mojang released Minecraft 1.11 earlier today. The Spigot team, which creates the server software that we use, plan to release a first version next weekend. We also need to wait for several plugins to be compatible before we can upgrade, so we'll be staying with 1.10 for a week at least, and likely for a bit longer. I'll share more news on this when I have them.

Until then, as I've noted above, the lobby is accessible to 1.11 players so they get a chance to switch to the right version.