It’s so easy to take gaming and games for granted. I hadn’t given this much thought until Minecraft updated to version 1.8 and all kinds of heck broke loose through out its community. Wesley Wolfe DMCA’ed CraftBukkit and its forks.

Spigot has finally come around with a work around, albeit deep in gray area on that, but at least it’s a place for the server admins to move forward and offer the game’s newest features.

Sponge is still in the works and I don’t expect a running server platform before February 2015.

Just updating to Spigot 1.8 has been bumpy for our little server as plugin authors decide whether or not to update to Spigot or to sit tight until Sponge is released. I’m grateful to see that CreeperHost supports Spigot now – not that I’ve had any trouble getting assistance before. Just nice to see that it’s official.

For now we are up and running vanilla Minecraft 1.8 on Spigot 1.8 with a small handful of plugins. The biggest one added being PlotMe. This one generates the maps into plots and manages the ownership and permissions of those plots. This should prevent bumping into each other underground with all our digging and building projects. We have two maps generated this way: the home estate map and the creative map.

The other new maps we have so far is the exploration “world” one and the RPG “Agaricus” one. Agaricus is the map that I hope to be able to develop so story via quests for those that want to pursue that. I’m thinking about adding back in a PvP map, but I will need some time to build a nice one worthy of battles. I think due to the overall lack of interest in PvP in my family, I will focus on a 1vs1 PvP map. I just want a PvP map since we do have some players that enjoy it once in awhile. I also would like to run building contests again if there is enough interest.

This is the third world map our server has had. I’m hoping this time around we can build a good community atmosphere with our projects. I’m trying to get things set up in such a way that when Sponge does launch we can smoothly transition to adding mods if the family is still interested in using the furniture mods without making all new maps just to enjoy new features. It’s just a question of which plugins that we are currently using that will be converted to the Sponge platform.

I never expected it to be so challenging to play a simple game as it has been with Minecraft. Maybe it’s because the game is so customizable and community driven? In a way, Minecraft is more than just a game. It’s a collection of people without borders and dealing with people can be, and often is, complicated. What would life be without its complications? Pretty boring I would imagine.