ShadeCrest: A Gaming Community

Another year has come to an end, thank you guys for sharing your time with us Despite the hardships, it's been a pleasure chatting with old members and meeting new friends.
When you get into the day-to-day grind, it's easy to lose track of where we came from, so let's take this opportunity to go over some of the major changes from 2016.

Minecraft versions:
We went though what felt like a record number of versions, including one that broke survival so badly we needed to grab a backup! But new versions are the driving force for minecraft's growth, so we welcome them and the players they bring.

1.9 - Combat update with end cities, elytra, and dual-wielding
1.9.4 - Many bug fixes and Netty based server blacklist
1.10 - Polar bears, Husks, Strays, and fancy nether blocks
1.10.2 - Bug fixes and (annoyingly) made farmland shorter, with glitchy results
1.11 - Exploration update: Illagers, offhand maps, cursed enchantments, shulker boxes, and llamas
1.11.2 - Iron nuggets and...

Survival and Creative have been updated to spigot 1.11.2! The lobby will be updated later so that old clients can still connect to see they need to update.

Yay!

For quite some time now, VIP donations have been drying up at least in part thanks to the changes Mojang made to their EULA. For quite some time now, the server has been paid largely completely out of pocket by imaxorz. The cost for hosting the server isn't cheap so let's try a little experiment.

Without any commitments, if you wanted to help keep ShadeCrest alive with a small monthly donation (like via Patreon or something) how much would you contribute? I just want to get an overall ballpark so we know the overall difference in what we have to come up.

Keep in mind if we do this via Patreon, any excess dollars we raise would likely go into actually having a marketing budget and advertising the server which overtime would grow the community, grow the number of people potentially contributing, and lessen the burden of individuals who might in the short term be willing to fund a somewhat larger share of the cost.

Edit: (Max)
Here are the figures for server costs....

Until now, since we've had a very small player population, I've managed all the game updates manually. Fortunately, we're beginning to get more and more new players and this is becoming burdensome since ARK is releasing sometimes several updates a day. Plus, for a long time I've wanted regular restarts for the servers just to keep things running smoothly.

TLDR

• Automated checks for updates every 15 minutes w/ 60 minutes of warnings
• Automated restart at noon / midnight PST
• Automated backups on any restart
• Automated mod updates on any restart
• Restarts happen immediately if no one is online or if everyone logs off

So I've now (*finger's crossed I did it right*) setup automated checks for updates every 15 minutes, so when there is an update it will notify the players that an update restart is coming, save the world, back it up, apply the update, and then restart.

There should also be scheduled automated restarts every 12 hours at noon /...

If you play on our ARK servers, it is CRUCIAL that you read this.

Unfortunately as it turns out, I have learned today that our current stacking mod is now abandonware from the developer of that mod. This is of serious concern because it means as new resources are released and many resources that even exist today, they won't get their stacks modified because of course no mod changes.

So, what do we do about it? Simple and not so simple.
The simple part is shopping for a new stacking mod: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=630601751
The not so simple part is that when I swap one mod for the other, any resources of these types:

1. Crafted stuff like metal ingots, polymer, electronics, narcotic, sparkpowder, etc.
2. Gathered Resources like wood, thatch, fiber, crystal, obsidian, metal, etc
3. Berries (all 6 types)
   
4. Raw Meat, Raw Prime, Cooked Meat, Cooked Prime, Spoiled Meat

Well, all those items will go bye bye....

Patch should be rolling out anytime now and I will update the servers as soon as it's live.