You may have noticed that a lot of crazy things have been going on with the server since the release of Minecraft 1.0. For one, we've not had the server online most of the time in the past week. When you could get on the server, you were greeted with an entirely different world than the one where your precious creations lived. Chat has been all messed up, plugins haven't been working and there is an unsettling number of players with Creative Mode access. Not to mention the fact that there is a shiny new forum where everyone is congregating.

Why all of the changes? You ask.

With the release of Minecraft 1.0 came a ton of changes to the core game itself, and thus a lot of changes to the way our Challenge will work. Besides the fact that some aspects of the game are changed is that whole problem with code and having a third-party development community. And, if you were a member of the previous world, you will have noticed that our infrastructure (the markets, public paths, rail systems, etc..) were janky and confusing at best. We had to make a decision, and making this major transition is what we came up with.

Right now, if you log into the server (which is only put online when an admin is available), you will find yourself in a brand new world that has no plugins but a ton of crazy looking structures. This new world is where we invite all of our friends and players to try out Minecraft 1.0 while we work out any bugs - which include getting all of our Bukkit plugins upgraded to work in the latest version of MC (a daunting task for our team). We aren't just going to upgrade everything to the dev version and call it a day - we want stable gameplay that won't interrupt anyone's experience... so we are waiting.

While we wait, we thought it would be a great idea to start working on the new infrastructure that will replace the old public areas on the server. We have an army of creatives under strict surveillance from administrators building a brand new Spawn (with a tutorial section for noobs), an amazing Market, arenas, gambling centers and public paths. With these new structures in place before our plugins/mods are upgraded we will be ready for a quick transition back to a live 24/7 1.0-powered Tree Spirit Challenge server built to satisfy. These are the preparation days.

Here's a shot of the new Market in its early stages:

So, what can you do with all of these changes?

You have two choices of how you want to enjoy the server during this transition period. You can either log in when admins are available to try your hand at the Tree Spirit Challenge now, or you can join us in creating these new structures that will live on once we go "Official". If you do decide to start again with the Tree Spirit Challenge you will want to take a screenshot and give us the coordinates of your project here in these forums so that we can try to port it over (if you want) when we are out of this limbo stage - no promises, though.

For people wanting to help us build stuff, just let an admin know on the inside and we will give you creative access and bring you to where everything is going down. Be sure to let an admin revert you back to Survival Mode before you (or they) leave, though. If you forget to do so, you will be temporarily banned from the server until we remember to unban you (don't want random creatives logging on and griefing us when we thought everyone was Survival). If you're in a rush and forget to tell us before you leave, just drop us a line in these forums and we'll take care of it the next time you log on.

Hopefully this quick post tells you everything you need to know about the insanity going on with the server over this past week (and into next week), but if you still have more questions just leave a comment below. I guess as a last point you probably want to know when we'll be finished. The answer: we don't know, but we're all working really hard to make it happen as soon as possible.