a bunch of yapping. changes are coming, feeling optimistic, hope you are too.

First, I’d like to open by saying sorry. The server has fallen behind, and it’s largely because of my disinterest in anything related to it.

Here’s what you need to know: changes and updates are coming, very, very soon. They are positive gameplay changes that will make the server more accessible to the general Minecraft audience (which may be a downside depending on how you feel about that), and will ultimately take a huge stress off my plate so I can go back to caring about the server in a normal way.

I’d also like to thank the community who stuck around through this dry period, and a big thank you to Kelsifur (rip), Dusk, Tadog, and Octapoo who all allowed me to step back without giving me a hard time and also made it okay for me to lean on them through this so my animosity towards the server didn’t continue to grow.

The rest of this is just going to be me writing about what’s been going on and the pivot in decision-making that I’m going to be taking to lower my responsibility so the server can continue to be healthy. Thank you for everything, seriously.

It depends on how you look at it, but I’d consider it an open secret that I’ve been done with the server for a long time. I don’t even know how long it’s been since I actually played last, but it’s been a long time. I’m hesitant to say life is hard because I’m complaining about being burnt out from a stupid little Minecraft server, so I’ll say life is busy. When I started the server, I was still in high school, and I just wanted a nice place for my friends and me to play because every existing server seemed to have a fault in one way or another, and I always felt like I wanted to create a space for people to play like I wanted to play. I still hold that value. I’ve been bitten by the Minecraft bug recently and playing other servers who all still seem to suffer from the same problem: I think I could do it better. Our server at its core is that, an attempt at the best way to play Minecraft with a bunch of strangers on the internet. There’s no donations, there’s no pressure to grow the player count because it’s really just a place for me! And you’re all allowed to be graced by my presence.

Anyways, high school is over, and the real responsibilities start. I took some time off where I was really able to hone in on the server. In that time, I developed the egg hunt, teleporters, graves, and a bunch of other random stuff. It was my job, I guess you could say. Even though it didn’t pay, I spent every moment I had working on it or playing on it on my stream. I was happy with it too; it was nice that other people were enjoying my hard work. Well, reality bites, and it’s time for me to go back to school and get a real job. The server is still one of my top priorities at this point, but now I have significantly less time and energy for it. It’s starting to become a drag. Instead of going out with my friends or spending time with my family, I’m holed up in my room working on something I don’t really want to be working on, just to keep true to my core values. That spiral continues until now. I have a bigger job to manage, people who depend on me in real life, still have relationships with friends and family to maintain, a house to take care of, and I’m still supposed to find time to work on something that I’ve completely lost interest in, for the sake of the community I’ve grown. I started to dread turning on my computer because I didn’t want the 2 hours of free time I had a day to be faced with all the bugs on the server or griefers or whatever stupid little kid drama is going on at the time. I believe you could call this a champagne problem, and it's true. This is a Minecraft server, not a PhD in physics. The stress and the burnout got to me, and at that point, I stopped pretending like I was going to work on it eventually and I just muted the Discord and stopped thinking about it. And that was bliss. Yes, I felt bad about abandoning everyone, but finally, I had peace in my mind. I just had to wait for the server to die so I could unplug it.

...Or so I thought. That was until a little bit ago. As I mentioned, I got bit by the Minecraft bug hard, and as I played by myself, I found myself missing my server, the world, the community, and my friends. Don’t get me wrong, I was still one bad day away from unplugging it, but I didn’t want to anymore. For the first time in a long time, I wanted to work on it, and I felt determined to find a way to make that viable for myself while still maintaining a healthy work-life balance. So what does that look like to me? Well, while less than ideal, it means I needed to abandon my larger custom projects. The teleporters specifically were a major drag. They were written in a number of bad ways and desperately needed to be rewritten, and the server couldn’t update without me rewriting the whole thing. It took me a month of full-time work to write them to begin with, and while I had made okay progress rewriting them over the course of like 2 years, they weren't going to be done any time soon. It was time to stop lying to myself; they weren't going to happen. It doesn't help that they are a major feature of the server, so it's not like I could just remove them and call it good. I needed to find a decent alternative that met not only my needs as an operator but the needs of the players. So, I think I landed on a good solution. It's not perfect, and it's a little different than what we're used to, but the biggest part is I am not responsible for any of the programming, and neither is anyone else on our server's team. Which seems like not something to be happy about, but it is, and I am. Losing this responsibility will be beneficial to me and the people around me, even though that comes at the loss of using someone else's code that may come with some questionable design choices. These new teleporters aren't on the server yet but will be within a few days of me writing this. They are actually ready to go; we just need to put the work in to getting them on the server. After they are on, I can finally delete the old teleporters, and then we can update the server to a newer version. Major weight off my shoulders. Finally, I can think about the server without being haunted by my broken project. Don't get me wrong, I wish I could keep developing things to perfectly tailor fit our needs, and I think it was really cool that we were able to do that, but I just can't.

What does that mean for the graves and lost and found? I don't know. They were a smaller project overall, and the bug that broke them seems simple enough to fix. I just have to put the work in. Do I want to put the work in? Not really. I am excited to start playing the server again and actually getting new people in, so maybe once I start to miss the graves, I'll feel more compelled to fix them. Will there be an egg hunt this year? I don't know. I would like to do it, but it was written in the same broken language as the teleporters, and if I can't just get it working, I'm not sure I will want to put in the work to make it go. Really, it's all up in the air, and right now, I just want to play the game. I'm sure I'll still create smaller things for the server here and there because that's what I like to do, but I can't get caught up in trying to create the whole experience by myself, if that makes sense. Octapoo has always done a great job, but I was really pleased with all the little things he created in my absence, and I found that inspiring. I'd still like to do temporary worlds where they only last a couple of months, and we do anarchy or factions or a world with no teleporting. I think that would be fun. My heart isn't out of it, but as I said, I just want to play right now. I hope you reading this makes you want to play too.

Anyways, I think that's all I have to say. I hope I got all my points across in a decent way. It’s been a while since I've had to explain myself. I'm excited to get back to playing. Thank you for reading my Octapoo book and being supportive. Again, a special thank you to everyone who stuck around through this because I really do enjoy creating things for you, and it is a much more positive outlet than sitting on the couch and watching TV. But I'm behind on White Lotus, so I need to stop typing this so I can watch that before I have to go to bed. Thank you to everyone who continued to play on the server and be active in the Discord despite there being no good reason to. I appreciate all of you.

Love,

captain kirk 55