The Nighttime Update

Here is an update on the changes that have been applied the past few days!

💤 Smooth sleep system

If you've been active this past few days you've probably already seen it: we've got a new Smooth Sleep system that replaces the Vanilla sleep mechanics. It is based on an older PaperMC plugin we used to use back in Season 3. Here's how it works:

  • We no longer skip the night, but we fast-forward it
  • During fast-forwarding, random ticks are also fast-forwarded. This means crops will appear to grow faster, and turtle eggs might hatch too.
  • At least 5% of the players need to be sleep for the system to kick in
  • 25% of the players need to be in a bed for the system to achieve maximum fast-forwarding speed
  • The max speed is 50x the normal speed, so this is about 10 seconds of lying in a bed in real time
  • AFK players, or players not in the overworld dimension, are ignored

🌛 Claim the night

If you really need nighttime, you no longer have to ask nicely and hope nobody accidentally sleeps. From now on you can just issue these commands:

  • /night claim: Claim the night and prevent anyone from sleeping
  • /night release: Claims release as soon as the sun comes up, but you can also release it sooner using this command

Players can claim the night a maximum of 2 nights in a row.

📊 No sleep bossbar?

When you sleep you get to see the new sleep progress bossbar:

Until now this bossbar was visible for everyone, but some players found it quite annoying. So it has become opt-in. If you want to see the bossbar at all times, you can enable it using our custom tweak command: /tweaks sleep always_show_bossbar set true

(We also have a tweak for rendering the custom world border using particles, or not at all)

🏆 Advancements

There were some Advancement fixes & additions:

  • The Blackblock advancement page now no longer has a missing texture as a background.
  • Advancements were grouped a bit more logical
  • New sleep-, land- and shop-based advancements were added

🎖️ New Leaderboard Categories

A few new leaderboard categories have been added:

  • Custom Connoisseur: Placing custom Blackblock blocks
  • Botanist: Flowers added to the world (not potted)
  • Hear Break: Creaking heards broken
  • Armadillo Annihilator: Armadillos killed

All of your existing statistics for these new categories have been added to the total of this week

The Total time active and Total time AFK categories have also been fixed. These 2 categories do have the correct values for the past few weeks.

🗺️ Live map update

  • Base marker chunk claims are now visible on the Season 8 Live Map
  • Many missing chunks have been re-rendered. Gray chunks indicate the chunk was not fully generated
  • The map should update much faster now, though you will need to reload it to see changes

🗞 Some small updates

  • Bark, bark mulch, coffee beans & coffee grounds can now be composted
  • Coffee plants can be harvested automatically with shears in a dispenser
  • The creative server is also on 1.21.7 now!

🐛 Fixed bugs

  • Shift-clicking items into a cardboard box (or other custom GUIs) is now working again
  • The sleep-progress bossbar is removed as soon as the morning is reached (it used to linger for a while)
  • Sometimes items "stuck" to your cursor when moving them from a custom GUI. This has been fixed
  • Pale oak bark is now part of the bark tag, so it can be used for all the other bark related recipes
  • Mugs can be filled with water again

⁉️ What's next?

While I've been able to finish quite a few issues/requests that have been open for a long time, there's still a lot to do. We still have the issue that chunk generation seems to be causing server crashes. Until I find the root cause of this issue, I prefer to not hand out Chunk Snipers yet. At certain times we also have some performance issues, so I'm taking a look at the performance mods too (which are now mostly inactive), though I will deploy these changes to staging first.

🫵 Recruitment

Now that you're here, I made a new recruitment post on Reddit. You know what to do! https://www.reddit.com/r/mcservers/comments/1m7aow5/blackblock_semivanilla_smp_season_8_whitelist/