What's New? Week of 6/1

The great thing about this blog service is that I can change the date it says these were posted and pretend like I just didn't announce that there was a new post. For example, this post is actually being written today, the second, but I have lied and said it was written yesterday. Now there is nothing stopping me from procrastinating even more !

Anyway, I think I'm only going to do these weekly if there's actually stuff to announce/go over every week, so don't expect these to be too normal. They're also not as fun as normal posts. I mean, instead of devoting a whole shorter post or string of #announcements messages to a topic I just devote a few paragraphs to whatever the thing is that I wanted to talk about. It's a little like a newsletter. Whatever. I think I just need a more exciting name to make this more inspired. Updates:

Hosting fees are possibly going up!

Yay! Wait, no, this is bad. Aww.
​The Minecraft server has actually been pretty populated recently! In fact, last Friday there were 8 whole people on at once. That's almost record numbers! Which is good! But also it was lagging a little. And that was bad. There's also been some weird outage activity recently but I think that might be a temporary issue with MCProHosting (which I'll talk about in a second) and not my $10 a month Villager plan with 2GB of ram.
TLDR: Server traffic is going up slightly and if it continues to go up I am going to have to invest in the more expensive 4GB of ram server plan.
I guess that's alright. My point is if we do end up upgrading it would be a great time to donate but it's fine if you don't. Now that I really think about it, if it gets to a point where there are frequently 8+ people playing on the server all at once, it will totally be worth investing $10 more to keep everything online. This community has been awesome to have during quarantine and it's been really awesome checking in after being away for a few days and seeing all the new progress that's been made on everyone's bases and the railway etc.
Oh, speaking of new people, we also have friends playing from different countries now! Moonrabbit Industries is now an international corporation. We are hosted on the east coast, most of our player base is on the west coast, and now we got some chads in Australia playing without latency! That's cool. Tell me that's not cool.

​MCProHosting and the big stinky hackers

yeah mcprohosting got hacked. We're fine, though! Only their websites and social stuff (their Twitter & Discord server) were down from the 27th to the 31st, and all their servers are fine. (The Minecraft server and your personal accounts have been left untouched.)
"So what's the problem?" I hear you asking. I'll tell you what's the problem! What the problem... is. I'll tell you what the problem is. Their website is how I access the server console. This means that for the past few days I have not been able to work on fixing any bugs or adding in anything new, which sucks. It's alright now, though, so when I have a few moments this week I will do some work.

Dang! This post ended up being longer than expected! This is the point in the post where I will go over new features that have been added. This section isn't news really and all of this has been posted to the #announcements channel on Discord prior to me compiling it all in one tidy list, so if you read that feel free to skip this section.

​Changelog:

- Moonrabbit Haven has made the jump to 1.15! Finally! Some plugins are a little buggy but I'll get everything under control soon. The server updated right before the outage so we have all had to silently observe the floating corpses bug in disgust.

- Discord integration! Just typing that makes me excited all over again! It's pretty cool. All messages sent to the Minecraft server chat will be beamed over to the #main-chat on Discord, and all messages sent to the #main-chat on Discord will be beamed to the Minecraft chat. It's pretty cool, but the plugin we use has a few quirks. For example, the description of the #main-chat now contains live info about the server (how many people are on, when the last time it stopped was, how many people have ever joined, etc., which is cool, but there's also no way to hide your public in-game chat from the Discord #main-chat. Everything is now semi-permanent. (I would recommend using /msg or /mail if you want to communicate discreetly  with someone. I think you'll be fine though. Nobody really reads old chat messages and they get drowned out pretty fast by new chat messages anyway.
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- Donor perks are now real! You heard that right. If you have donated to Moonrabbit Haven, you now actually have access to all the benefits you were promised you'd have. Pretty exciting stuff. For example, you used to not have /hat, and now you do. Bam. Things are getting preeetty, preeetty, prettttty good for donors.
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- A server map has been added! You can find it in the MAP tab (under NEWS). Now you can see everything that's been built or explored so far on the server in real time, and you can even see where you and your friends are! It's a little janksy looking right now but I'll see what I can do to configure it and make it look a little more aesthetically pleasing. I used Dynmap to implement this if you want something like this on your server.

- Sitting! You can now sit on any surface that's within two blocks of you by right clicking with an empty hand! That's about all there is to it.

That's it for this week! I didn't get everything done that I wanted to do last week, but that's alright. Once summer break starts I'm gonna be a working MACHINE. Definitely. I won't just play Minecraft all day instead of working. Yeah.

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Stay safe,
Henry