A recap of last month's additions with some new, never before seen plans for the future.

Hi, a lot has been changed since the last blog post, most covered in the Discord so I'll just blow through them really quick.

- Teleporters removed, warps added. /tpa /back /spawn enabled

- Server updated to 1.21.4

- Resource overworld added for trial chambers and fresh caves and whatever

- Distant Horizon support added to the server

Also announced in the Discord was the first Build Showcase. This is a non-competitive build battle style event just to inspire people who may be bored to get a little creative. The Build Showcase will be running for the duration of May and the theme is *flower*. I will also ideally be using people's builds as promotional material for the server, as I plan to start making short form videos to try and intrigue some new people to play. I'm not sure I'll stay consistent with this plan, but I feel like the days of finding servers on Planet Minecraft are going away so I'd like to try to get in on the new format. All players who participate will receive a collectible 'participation trophy' that will serve no purpose in the actual game, similar to the participation trophies of past events. Completed submissions are to be submitted to the Discord or let a staff member know if you aren't on the Discord.

With that means the server needs better branding. The server basically has no branding and it's been a goal of mine since it started to make it have better branding but I've never been able to come up with anything. A few years ago now I decided I liked the tagline 'Your Second Home' but wasn't ready to fully commit to it. Well, fast forward to now and I'm done streaming regularly and ready to move the community away from my identity and there were still no ideas that had a nice name, and I'm ready to move on from finding a new name so I can move forward with my plans. So, over the course of the next few units of time (idk how long it'll take), the server will be moving fully away from Kirk55 and will now be known as Your Second Home. This is an announcement that I'll delve deeper into at a later time, but that's what's happening. Changing the name allows me to build a better brand for the server so I can actually call it something when I'm promoting it, as well as having a proper logo and everything else that comes with branding.

This concludes all of the major plans I had for the 'under construction' phase of the server that conveniently lasted the whole duration of April.

Following the rebrand I would like to put on more community events. This is a little difficult to conceptualize because we have to come up with ideas that are interesting and make people want to play, but are also friendly to players who live busy lives or are in different timezones. There are some higher stakes (compared to the build showcase) ideas floating around but we're working on finding a good middle ground to meet the needs of the player base. I think community events are good because it keeps long time players more engaged, but at the same time they take a lot of effort to organize and put together so it's just tough. We'll figure it out.

I am also working on (mostly done but not ready to publish) a staff handbook that will be made public so all players who would like can understand and hold themselves to the same values as the staff. This will help make future staff training more standardized as well as make it easier to pick players to be staff, as expanding the team is something we'd always like to do.

So anyways, I'm trying to keep this short, I'll make a proper announcement in the Discord about the staff handbook and an announcement/post combo about the full rebrand as it starts to happen more. Don't forget to participate in the Flower Build Showcase, I'm really excited to see how everyone creatively interprets the single word prompt and hopefully get some good videos out of them.

Thanks,

captainkirk55