Announcing Superstes Noctis 2!

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.

Wrapping up Year Three

It's hard to believe the third year of Superstes Noctis is coming to a close already, with the start of the fourth year in just a couple days! The server hasn't been all that active the past few months, but we're making some changes which should hopefully renew interest for the members of the server.

Double memory. We've doubled the memory on our server, which should allow us all to play simultaneously without generating lag in most situations and allow the server's render distance to be increased for better immersion and sightseeing. Since some of the server members are geographically somewhat far from the server -- which is hosted in Phoenix, Arizona by MCPro Hosting -- they create more strain on the server and more memory is needed to keep things smooth for them. (Especially when multiple people are online simultaneously, not always in the same chunks) The new plan should power up to 18 players, and since we only have 5 at the moment it should handle itself just fine.

Discussions on map changes. In the entirety of the running time of Superstes Noctis, we've been using the same map. This is awesome because it feels familiar and homely around spawn, as well as allowing extensive building with plenty of supplies to pull things off; however, it also means we have to explore quite far to see new terrain or the features of new world generation in updated versions of the game. Some players are content staying around spawn and building there, while others would rather explore and discover new things... which has prompted the discussion of whether or not we should make a new map. The trouble is that in order to keep our spawn area, we'd have to use MCEdit to plop it down in a new map with a different seed; this would leave choppy borders around spawn that would be difficult to clean up as well as some possible issues with copied entities and such.

We have yet to make final decisions on anything but the memory increase, but we don't need to rush to any decisions. One thing is for certain: the extra memory on the server will certainly make it more enjoyable as we continue to survive the night!

Wrapping up Year Two

I realize that only two posts ago I told you all we were "Wrapping up Year One" on the server, and yet another year has come and gone since then. This goes along with the lack of content available on my YouTube channel as well from the server (I still upload videos every weekday whenever possible, but most of that content this past year has been Destiny) and the overall decline of interest in Minecraft lately due to lack of updates this past year... but more on that in a future post.

What's the plan for Superstes Noctis in Year Three? That's a good question... one that we are not able to answer at this time. The server is successfully renewed until November 2016, and we wouldn't have paid for that if we didn't plan to use it. Minecraft 1.9 is coming soon, and that should hopefully boost interest in the Minecraft community for playing the game... as well as in the Superstes Noctis community, leading to more videos of the server and information here regarding it.

When I get the chance to, I plan to update the Noctis MC blog as well, although not much has happened there in 2015. We still plan to finish and launch the server, but interest in it has been minimal as the interest in the game declines and we haven't been putting much work into the server apart from a few sessions of "Skype and Build" (a more productive and much less raunchy version of "Netflix and Chill" apart from some dirty jokes) that have seen spawn develop slightly further. If you are interested in that server, be sure to share that interest so we know people care!

Year Three of Superstes Noctis should hopefully be much more interesting than Year Two was. Thanks for sticking around, and as always... on behalf of the Superstes Noctis crew, I wish you all the best of luck surviving the night!

Wrapping up Year One

Superstes Noctis launched on November 18, 2013. Year two with our hosting company starts on November 17, (apparently they believe in 264-day years) but not much is changing as far as hosting is concerned.

We had discussed starting a new world, but we decided the existing world has much more to be explored and built so it would be premature to end it and start over from scratch. So rather than change a bunch of things, we're just going to make it our goal to do more in year two than we did in year one! Hopefully this year on the server will see a ton of improvement to the server world and we'll grow it quite a bit.

We hope for a great second year with our server! Hopefully fans of the server videos will enjoy it too. Got any ideas for the server? Feel free to contact us at superstesnoctis@yahoo.com and share your advice, we'd love to hear from you. Remember about the Noctis ASMP server as well, we're still working on that! Check that out at http://noctis-mc.blogspot.com for more information on that. Thank you for your continued interest in our work and good luck with year two of surviving the night!