Superstes Noctis is five years old today. For a Minecraft server, that’s a really long time! The game world was created in Minecraft 1.6 back in November 2013, starting out with just three members. It has come a long way since then, a sprawling map with tons of builds of wide varieties where many diverse adventures have taken place. But with the updates the game has received since then, the world file has gotten much bigger and more complex (SN is ending up at 822 MB now with just the world files) and it is no longer feasible to continue in this world due to the latency issues that have gotten so much worse as of late.
Every time SN has an anniversary, we discuss the possibility of creating a new world file and starting over. Unlike in past years, we’ve decided now to actually do it... so this is the end of Superstes Noctis. It’s not a sad occasion though — Superstes Noctis 2 is inbound to replace it! We are changing some things up this time around to increase the quality of life on the server, adapting it to the needs and desires of the playerbase whilst also making optimizations to reduce latency and keep the server running smoother for longer.
Today marked the final backup of the first Superstes Noctis world. The online world map has been updated one final time, and for the first time in SN history a singleplayer map of our game world is available exclusively for server members to download and do with as they please on their own. Additionally, November 18-25 is what we’ve coined Creative Week — the server is now running in Creative mode for the first time ever, and members have the freedom to spend their last week in this online world however they please [within the confines of Creative mode’s permissions without running any commands]. Will it all go up in smoke? Probably. Will TNT be involved? Definitely. Are we going to cry about it? ...maybe, we’ll see. No judgment.
One of the big changes for SN2 is going to be a limited world border. The exact starting size of the border is TBD, but it will be incredibly small — which will keep the world size down, both helping with performance and ensuring we won’t need to travel thousands of blocks to generate new terrain when future game updates add a bunch of new content to explore. (1.14 and 1.15 both have new changes like that, and those updates are coming sometime in the near future) At indeterminate points in time going forward, the world border will expand to accommodate more builds and exploration; there is no set plan for how that will unfold, so we’re just playing it by ear and doing what the group wants while still working to keep the map smaller and less laggy for longer.
In an unprecedented move for SN, we may even introduce periods of time with controlled use of Creative mode to work on the areas we don’t particularly want to work on in Survival. This is likely going to just be the spawn area, and it will be closely monitored to make sure the builds are plausible for Survival mode and don’t ruin the “Survival feel” of SN. It’s definitely not an exact science, but we’ll see how things turn out. In addition to all that, we may also implement some custom villagers or similar systems (that can run without mods or plugins, of course) for trading basic materials for building. Again, the idea is bare bones at this point... we’re unsure how it will end up [or if we’ll even do it at all] but it’s something we’re open to and actually considering.
There is more happening for SN2 than the aforementioned changes as well, but that’s a basic look at how things are changing for the next version of the server. We’re excited to see how this turns out and design a brand new world from scratch to form new adventures in... and maybe, just maybe, we’ll sleep in-game less often and actually try to survive the night.
