The Lunar Logs

The other day, a few members of the MinecraftOnline discord were enjoying a few rounds of Freedonia finder. Among searching the live map for hidden locations and continuing our quest to region map the entirety of Freedonia (courtesy of BillionPenny), discussions about the server’s future began to spring up. I asked Anna_28, an admin and dev for the server, a few burning questions. The answer I got was not what I expected.

For a fair while I’ve been peddling the belief that MCO was targeting the 1.16 version for its next update. One of the reasons I was told for the devs deciding upon 1.12 for the last update was a desire to not jump too many versions at once. While I am certain of other reasons including it being one of the more stable releases of Minecraft and its larger community support, I anticipated this reason might have continued into the future. Following 1.12, Minecraft doubled down on its themed updates and each one became bigger in scope. 1.16 seemed like a natural progression as it’d include the ocean overhaul from 1.13, the village and pillage updates from 1.14, the bees (Anna would love) from 1.15, and the nether reset and major upgrade from 1.16.

Before we even get into why 1.19 is, according to Anna, the new target updated, let’s examine what else will be finding its way into Freedonia. 1.17 will include goats, axolotls, and a few new building blocks. 1.18 will likely be one of the most dramatic updates in Freedonia’s history, forever changing the landscapes with a presumed land expansion. The deep dark, taller mountains, increased build height, and that only scratches the surface. 1.19 will finally add ancient cities, new mobs, the Deep Dark, and the infamous new boss The Warden.

1.12 from 1.7 was easily the biggest jump in content for the server in its history, but this would even surpass that. The land grab will likely shape up to be a monstrous conquest, comparable to the initial looting runs of the End Dimension after its reset. But what exactly spurred the change from 1.16 to 1.19? What does such a seemingly major shift actually seem as crazy to the development team?

To begin with, it’s important to understand why 1.12.2 was such a monumental paradigm shift. During the 1.7 days, MinecraftOnline was still operating on software known as Canary. I personally am not qualified to try and dissect the inner workings, but the simple version is it was a custom piece of software that everything was designed to run on. Although Minecraft has its own vanilla server hosting software, it is rarely used by most servers, instead opting for custom platforms. The most famous of these is likely Spigot or Paper, powering many of the big servers that populate Java today.

The “modern” version of Canary was first implemented in 2014 when the server updated to 1.6, but in the years that followed support for it would wane. MCO slowly coached along with Canary until it more or less died, and the inevitable decision was made to migrate to a different and active platform. Sponge API caught the eye of the developers, and so the long and slow process began of converting and/or completely rewriting the entire server to work with Sponge. This total conversion is what resulted in such a long wait for 1.12.2.

What makes this special is that updating alongside the software is comparably much easier than jumping to a new one. Plugins require less adjustment to work with future versions, thus resulting in an easier time updating versions. Sponge is currently developing a stable 1.19.3 version (API version 10), and once they do, 1.16 (API version 8) will reach its EOL and no longer receive any updates. It will receive patches with long term support, but it won’t be updated with new features that newer versions will receive.

Ultimately, moving to 1.19.3 isn’t much more difficult that moving to 1.16 would be. It just means more features in a shorter span of time, and brings MinecraftOnline into the modern age for the first time in many years. Chat reporting may worry some but fear not, the chances of it being implemented into the server are nonexistent. The goal post has shifted, and it brings an even more exciting future for the server.

This leaves the development team to play the waiting game while Sponge finalizes its 1.19 versions into a stable release. For anyone interested in following the pace for the server’s next update, I would recommend keeping an eye on the development on Sponge API. Of course, all of the developers working on this are doing it as a volunteer job. Give them some patience, the respect they deserve, and soon Freedonia will find itself in the biggest update ever.

Until next time Freedonians, make sure to thank your local developer for all of their hard work keeping this server and community alive 🙂