Spring 2018 Update

Hello everyone,

As you can see, ShadowXCraft doesn’t have a large player-base at the moment, and we haven’t been getting a lot of server work done recently. We have two team members finishing high school, others preparing for tests that will affect their chances of getting into college, and others training for intensive real-life jobs. However, as we have said, 2018 will be the year we revive ShadowXCraft!

Now the biggest shocker for those who don’t know: the current plan is to redo everything else ShadowXCraft has. None of what we have is drawing any attention, and some of it, like the type of KitPVP we currently have, has fallen out of style.


- Our prison-like server that has been in progress since early 2015 is still getting better and better. We have most of it planned out and all of you are going to enjoy at least one aspect of it! I don’t know anything else like it in Minecraft. It’s so good that people even made comments on how if this fails, we could create a cool standalone video-game with everything we have planned out (so really the only thing that will hold this update back is how much we can get word of this out - hopefully we can find a popular YouTuber to do it)! The planning document is about 10,000 words long with 30 pages. Compare that to our original prison server that was started by Draco, then finished by me when he lost interest. We didn’t do much planning, and we did no math to make sure progression made sense.


- The new KitPVP server will be designed along with the same person we worked with on the early versions: hello21. We have learned a lot of the dos and don’ts when it comes to this activity over the course of about 5 years, so hopefully we’ll create something really fun!


- Creative will be redone to be something more than just finding a plot and build. It may include things like voting and progression. We’re very much open to suggestions on this.


- Survival will no longer be plotted! It’s too limiting. This update will take time though, due to the fact that we need to ensure that we create a server that is sustainable in the long-run. Normal worlds need to be reset, which makes everything like new, while simultaneously annoying players due to progress loss. I’m thinking of ways to make it so when the world resets, players’ ‘camps’ is taken with them and merged in. I’m very open to suggestions on this.


- Skyblock: We may keep our current version as long as there is demand. The thing that makes it hard for us to support it is that it’s a minimalistic game that relies on the game’s primitive mechanics. It’s hard to create something unique out of that. Do any of you have any ideas other than OP SkyBlock?


- Factions: Factions has high potential, but it’s a lot of work and it has also lost a lot of its popularity. For us to do this, we need someone to join the team (or someone on the team already that has a hidden factions talent) to step up and design the update. This will not be easy to build, so we need someone that can be committed to a project for several months of intense designing, followed by several years of maintenance (the latter is hard to find).


- Hunger Games: It has fallen out of style, as evident by the death of MCSG (and Badlion’s Hunger Games). MCSG closed a few years ago due to them not making enough money to sustain their operation. At the moment maybe once a week a single player joins the HG server then leaves realizing that there are no other players. What should ShadowXCraft do? Hunger Games can have a lot of potential if customized in the right way.


- Other minigames we have right now? We’re considering automating and polishing our battlezones minigame. However, based off of ShadowXCraft’s history, scheduled events are much more successful than 24/7 access. We could make it so one weekend we have one minigame open, then it switches.


- We’re considering making a minigame that we have been thinking of for years (June 2014). It was when I didn’t know how to code. Now I do! It’s still in the theoretical stage, so we’re not releasing any details.


- Parkour was recently completed and will stay. Let us know if you have any cool ideas for us to improve it! We do have some ideas.


When ShadowXCraft was a month or two old, there were literally hundreds of YouTube videos players made of the server. I spent hours watching them. It’s not like that anymore. People don’t come here and think “Wow, this is cool, I’m going to record it!”. To help ShadowXCraft we will try to start a YouTube series on our new prison-like release. We will also create a new trailer. We have funds set aside specifically for advertising, but we will need all of the help we can get, considering Minecraft’s now undoubtedly dominated by large servers that have (no joke) over 3 MILLION dollars to spend on development! Us? We have a few people putting in as much free time as they can, without pay. We’re trying.


And just a side question, how do you all feel about the more recent versions of Minecraft? Hypixel, which is obviously the most popular server in Minecraft, is running 1.12 servers as far as I am aware. They have adjusted it, and players appear to be fine with it. We don’t have 3 million dollars to spend to make ShadowXCraft that good, but there is software we can install to make it more like how it’s done by Hypixel.


We hope to hear from you!