Information overload!

Thank you for sticking with us throughout the many updates. We started on the 1.12 update also known as the colour update. Now we're four updates ahead and the Nether is getting an overhaul, how exciting!

In this forum post I will be going through what will change, our thoughts behind these changes and what you can expect from Minevictus going forward. Development and preparation for the Nether update from our side have started in February, and we can't be happier to show everyone what we've got for them.

Table of contents

Mission and vision
Improvements and additions
a) Wither changes
b) Shulker supplies
c) Villager behavior
d) Ironfarm nerfs
e) Piglin aggression
Technical changes
Base transfers
Summary
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🧚 Mission and vision

We've been listening closely and we've heard that Minecraft and specifically Minevictus didn't offer a challenge or is just too easy. This is mainly because we offer keep inventory, flight, and other (easy to get) commands.

It would be senseless for us to remove features like these which our current player base has gotten used to. If we did have the guts to do that, the outcome wouldn't be in our favour — instead, we're taking a more pragmatic approach to focus on core gameplay elements whilst simultaneously raising the barrier to use certain commands like above.

Starting the release our focus will be to bring back challenge in this game and preserve a healthy economy.

We will be doing this by continuously releasing changes and additions we believe in those and have been pitched and supported by our community. The best example of this would be the newly improved Wither, waiting for release.

This also means that we are no longer a semi-vanilla server. However, we still believe in keeping the game as vanilla as possible to keep the Minecraft feel as we want to bring back strategy, teamwork, nostalgia, and the challenge.

Never will we add custom enchantments, RPG elements such as McMMO or anything which might defy the game itself too much. The changes we are introducing will mostly small, but there will be outliers now and then. We haven't seen a project which improves the game Mojang Studios has created. We will be taking that candle from now on, and we shall excel at it.
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📕 Improvements and additions

We have changed many things behind the scenes. Most of these (believe it or not) are performance and stability related as the way our server is handled has been completely rehauled. Many unimaginable improvements have been rolled out thanks to @Nahu and @Proximyst for Minevictus. If you're interested... scroll down for more technical dabble!

Wither changes
The Wither is a boss which needed a bit more spice to it. It rewards you with a Nether star and ultimately allows you to get an end-game item such as the beacon. However, the Wither is able to be trapped and cheat. It really lacks any challenge in its normal state. We're mimicking the Wither from Bedrock Edition and recreated it in Java Edition, courtesy of @Nahu

We believe that by doing this the feeling of reward will be higher and that beacons will be more worth. This also increases the playtime of players considerably, which is always welcome on a server.

Shulker supplies
It's been a common complain that players are having a shortage of shulker shells as once the End gets opened, it would get raided leaving others without any shulker boxes, ultimately inflating the price of shulker shells. We've resolved this issue with the help of @Nahu by respawning the killed shulker in a week, month or later.

Villager behaviour
We're trying to rebalance villagers by giving them hard-capped trades. In the previous version, mending books (which is an endgame item) has been going for one emerald. This is due to the trading system being flawed. Starting the new update mending books will have a trading range of 18 - 24 emeralds or four diamonds. This is subject to change.

In the next update, we will also have a limit on how many offspring a villager can have so it doesn't degrade server performance. There is no need to have (literally) 1400+ villagers in one small spot. Thank you @Proximyst

Iron farm nerfs
At one point you were able to get 64 iron blocks for one diamond in the previous update. We're nerfing the iron farms for good reason to mimic the behaviour in bedrock edition. Note that the production rate of mid to large farms are heavily nerfed whilst you are still able to profit off of the work you put into making a smaller farm.

Iron is supposed to be a finite resource ultimately increasing the worth of this commodity over a longer period of time. If we continue to allow iron farms to be built bigger, the challenge, the grind to get iron will no longer be there.

We understand that this change might be the most hard-hitting of them all. However, in this case, we will monitor the effects closely and we may change our stance in regards to this in the future.

Piglin aggression
If you try to mine quartz ore in the nether, you better beware of any piglings in your surrounding area as they have a very small change to bust you mining their ore. If they catch you... well, you will face their wrath!
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🧙‍♂️ Technical improvements

In order to get more features out the door, we created MV-Util which is a plugin to help us with writing less code more quickly; we're able to write and manage much more than before with little effort. Note that this plugin is FOSS.

With our private Gradle plugin, boilerplate is reduced even further. We've been also experimenting with Papercut since 1.15.2 which is our own server software, forked from Paper for our own use. This way can add improvements by ourselves — we miss stuff in the Paper API, therefore we write it ourselves. That being said, we often give this up to the community through requesting it be added to Paper. Our software is your software, and we stand by that religiously.

Homes, teleport requests, warps, inventories, and several other aspects of the server have been moved to using Redis and SQL storage with the help of MV-Util and redis-channels which you can find on our GitHub page.

You might be asking yourselves, why go all through this trouble? The answer is simple... we noticed that many servers don't have good performance and we really want to be the survival server which doesn't have that issue. If you've come so far we'll tell you a secret. Every world you're in is its own separate server and this is why synchronization to this level is required for a smooth experience. The goal is for the average player not to notice this. If you didn't, mission achieved.

With this new setup your data will be stored and accessed with both Redis and an SQL server. If your data is on our server, it has most likely been through Redis a couple of hundred times and stored on an SQL server for long-term storage.

Our servers communicate with one another to exchange information about you. They tell each other where a player is supposed to be going and naturally a ton more. You might be shocked, however, at its peak more than a gigabyte of data might be flowing between servers at any single moment without any interruptions or performance decrease.

This is naturally only doable with the help of free, open-source software such as Redis and MariaDB.
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🏡 Base transfers

If you have a base on 1.15.2 which you wish to have transferred. Please fill in this form after you have messaged myself (Bobcycle) on either Discord or via the forum. We have put a new system in place in regards to transfers and by messaging me I will personally get on the server to prepare your base for transfer.

Note that we will only transfer bases. If you want to transfer items because they have sentimental values such as, but not limited to event rewards, heads and/or other items, you can do so by discussing this with me! 😃

🍄 Summary

We've spent an incredible amount of time to perfect what we're so passionate about. The past flops and experiences we have gathered are what we reflected upon. Now, with all these lessons bundled we've been able to create a focus, improve performance and solve pain points of our players by actively listening to feedback.

Starting the new update we're introducing many performance improvements and other gameplay mechanics and improvements to bring back the challenge which we've lost. We're changing the difficulty of the wither and we're having shulkers respawn in the end after a certain period of time.

Iron farms are being nerfed, paired with hard capped prices of villagers trading books such as mending to ensure a stable economy which everyone can enjoy. Other minor changes are that piglins have a small percentage to attack you when you mine quartz ore and that villagers can't have an unlimited amount of babies.

Thank you for sticking with us!