2019 New Year Update

Hello everyone! Happy New Year!

ShadowXCraft is still in development. We acknowledge that 2018's goals were not met. However, we are still working hard to get them done. Everything noted here is not guaranteed. These are our plans.

In 2019, ShadowXCraft will become a less PVP-centered server. We may release a PVP gamemode far into the future, but the Minecraft community has moved away from highly competitive PVP. In 2016 we moved towards a more structured, competitive PVP setup. Unfortunately, that is when PVP went out of style and some players moved to other games. Even servers like Badlion died due to this. We're still running!



Prison 2.0 is still advancing. It's still the most advanced gamemode we have ever worked on. That, along with the fact that there are currently two active team members, with two less active team members, result in it taking this long to complete. We want to get it done faster, but we cannot because that would result in a quality hit. Prison 2.0 will be a new type of server for ShadowXCraft in that it is a story mode server and that the plan is to continuously advance it. ShadowXCraft has lost many players due to our aging gamemodes. Once our servers have reached the age point, we did not have any updates lined up to advance it, and when we did release an update, it tended to remove past progress (think: factions). Prison 2.0 will have several parts, allowing long gameplay, and we will try our best to create new sections to release before the majority of players reach that point. The story of Prison 2.0 is currently 37 pages on a document and over 11,600 words, so clearly this is in depth, but should be long lasting.

Another thing to note is that Prison 2.0 will most likely be released for 1.14. This may annoy a lot of you. However, the goal is not to appeal to a small community that many of you consider dead. It's to appeal to new players. An announcement by Hypixel showed that players that are new to Minecraft are the ones that use the current version, and that only the old players prefer 1.8. In addition, there are technical and logical reasons why 1.8 would not work. First, the particle system in 1.8 is horribly inefficient to the point of even allowing 1.8 on a 1.1x server would result in network congestion that would ruin the experience for everyone. We plan to extensively use particles for a key gameplay element in Prison 2.0. Second, 1.13's waterlogged blocks fit Prison 2.0's builds very well, and 1.14's new blocks will be great for our builds (we have said several times "when we update to 1.14, change this block to that 1.14 block"). Lastly, we will not use 1.13 because we want to be on the newest game version. By the time this server comes out, 1.14 will likely be the newest stable version. In addition, 1.13 is a little more buggy than the recent past versions of the game, so using 1.14 would make Prison more stable. If you're wondering if 1.8 is less buggy, it is in some ways, but it has critical exploits that will not get fixed (1.12 and 1.13 are the only supported server types by the people that develop them). Using 1.8 would keep ShadowXCraft stuck in the past, unable to advance as much.

In terms of the ShadowXCraft community going forward, we plan on spending real money for paid promotions. This is how seriously we take rebuilding the community with new players. If you have suggestions for YouTubers we should hire, let us know. We plan on making our own YouTube content and paying for monetization, paying a YouTuber if we find one, and other ad sources, like normal web ads.

Let us know if you have any questions or suggestions!

Sincerely, The ShadowXCraft team members.