A new era for SentinelCraft
(https://i.postimg.cc/wjG7223M/2021-03-07-22-19-53.png)
Hello everyone! It's been a long ride with Sentinelcraft, we've been accustomed to bring forth news every april since 2017. And this year is no exception, we're beyond excited to share this news with you. SentinelCraft in the future will be switching to a Minecraft Network in order to accommodate a new and improved set up! In the past year, SentinelCraft has survived two major crashes which caused data loss. Our staff team has worked hard to reduce the data loss and tried their best to make it up to the community, thankfully we have a very strong community which was very forgiving, and we do appreciate that a lot. For that reason, a brighter future for SentinelCraft has arrived, the project that we've been planning and working on for quite some time now is finally being announced to you all!
Some of you might have noticed that our activity in-game has gone down quite a bit. Major changes and some smaller mundane fixes on Sentinel have taken a back seat due to our limited amount of time available. We can imagine there is growing discontent with that, and we apologize for the inconvenience. We very much feel sorry not being able to implement requested plugins which we are also passionate about as they may not be compatible with our new server.
A little backstory, our current server setup has been around since 2016, marking the end of Pern and the beginning of our current worlds. It has its quirks, stemming from outdated configuration files and being based upon the original 2013 setup. Updating these configurations can be tricky and extremely troublesome (could cause data loss or long downtimes), hence we've started rebuilding SentinelCraft from the ground up again. We hope that our new set up will last for a long time. We chose to take this course of action as we wanted to reduce any disturbance to your play on the server while also allowing us plenty of time to bug test and break things many times without it damaging players progress.
Towards the end of December, we purchased the new dedicated server to allow us to build and develop our "New Sentinel", in as much secrecy as possible. We've been keeping this from you as we didn't want to give false expectations. Over the holidays, we spent time getting the foundations sorted. Sentinel will become a Minecraft Network through the use of Bungeecord. This is something we are completely new to and is much more complicated than our current set up. Sentinel will essentially be moving from a singular server to a cluster of 8 servers. This will allow much more modularization of SentinelCraft, and ensure lag is not shared across all worlds/servers. We'll make sure to bore you with the details in another post, as we are still finalizing things and implementing new features!
This new era will allow us to implement some of the following changes/features:
- Increased render distance - This will be very important and improve the overall feel of sentinel. We all want to see our whole builds!
- Claimable Nether and End - Something we have promised but have not fulfilled as yet.
- New commands & Donation perks - We are changing out some old or outdated plugins for newer ones, which comes with benefits!
- Fix issues you are all noticing and getting frustrated about on Sentinel.
We're aiming to keep Sentinel as similar to the current server a possible. Not to worry! We're going to be transferring all the worlds, which means there's no need for a map reset! This work is still ongoing, and we currently do not have any timeline on when it would be completed. Many of us are busy with work, studies and/or jobs, as well as learning how to configure everything. Please refrain from asking when these things will happen and other exact details. We simply do not know yet. With a transition this big, we shall give the community plenty of notice and clear instructions of what we expect of them during any period of transition. Our current plan to ensure we keep the community updated on our progress and potential changes is to have a fortnightly development diary which will cover your concerns, the changes, the progress and being more transparent with how things work.
We felt now was the right time to inform you about our plans and ambitions for SentinelCraft, as we do not want you all to think that we have given up or happy with the status quo. We're always interested in improving Sentinel to the best of our ability and putting our best foot forward for the community. Likewise, we would like to thank everyone in the community for their patience and gratitude, without all of you we wouldn't be here right now. Welcome aboard the journey into the unknown!
- SentinelCraft Staff