Salutations!

As we near the "Holiday Season" we're often bombarded by one in particular... You may already be seeing the merchandise out already, conveniently skipping two other holidays!

Here over in Miranda, the Super C decided to fight the major corporate greed by celebrating HALLOWEEN instead! That's right, we're giving October a bit of love.

Okay? What exactly is involved? Well, for the entire month of October, Contractor's Evening will be enabled. That's October 1st through Halloween, October 31st. Allowing you plenty of time to get any major builds (hopefully some awesome Halloween themed builds) accomplished in Miranda.

Maybe the community can get together and add a new town? Something creeeepy? :)

For those who are new, or need a refresher: Miranda is an affiliate server made for larger scale builds or those who bemoan gathering resources. There's a store at spawn, that you can gain access with a single iron ingot to give you stacks of all major building blocks, as much as you can carry. So you don't have to spend hours gathering materials for your build. Plus, Keep Inventory is on full time, so you don't have to worry about losing it all if you happen to fall off your build.

Contractor's Evening (Not to be confused with Events Night on the sLab)is usually on Wednesdays at 6PM EST. During it, a shrine at spawn is active. One push of the button at said shrine will grant you the power of flight until you tap the button again, or disconnect.

Quick reminder of the rules, Creeper's Lab rules apply with a few addendums.
1: Trusted rank required to join.
2: No mob, iron, gold, or other auto-farms.
3: Build awesome things.

tl;dr
Contractor's Evening will be active October 1st through October 31s to celebrate Halloween and kick Christmas in the head.

Apocalypse Event Release: 5.5
For the previous five event releases of this series, please click the following links:
Wychwood | Snowhead | Shattered Sands | Shoals of the Departed | New Game+ Releases
This event release is a bit.. strange. Born from the mass of updates needed due to the 1.14 update, we've had to comb through all the existing science areas, items, and mobs; and decided to use this opportunity to rebalance and fix some of the earlier things while we were at it!

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First and foremost, the Science forum thread has had some major updates across all of it's areas, including an armor-rating scale of each area, unified directions for all areas, and the best of what can be obtained at each.
The Moosemart section has also been updated with all the new/improved villagers and updated layout.

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Secondly, everyone who'se obtained any sort of science items pre-1.14 (Everyone remember that raffle event from 2018~?) should direct their eyes to this link here. This is a changelog of all the items that have been edited during this entire debacle. What's this Post Office it mentions, you ask? WELL...

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Creeper Citadel: Post Office
First, a history lesson. Back when Laurasia's Nether Central station was in major usage, there was a handy dandy Post Office built into it, for player to setup mailboxes, and other players could leave them things without them actually being around! With the advent of Gates and the new Grand Central Station, Nether Central's usage died out, and the Post Office was moved to Rodinia; which didn't garner as much use as it had, due to most people not moving around on Rodinia.
Why's all this matter, you ask? Because the Post Office has officially been moved to the Creeper Citadel! That place everyone goes to! Anyone that had a box either in the Rodinia or Nether Central version has had it moved to the new location- if you haven't set a mailbox up yet, go do so!
Ontop of thise, the basement of the Post Office has been designated as a gathering location for Science items from the changelog that need to be updated. Have some stuff you need updated or repaired? Go have a visit!

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Lost Woods: Hard Mode Shrines
Next on our list of updates, the Hard Mode Shrines within the Lost Woods are now live and kicking. Our recomendation is to run these -after- having run the Shoals of the Departed, and on an Events Night, but you do you!

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New Regenerating Areas: Pandora and Camirus
Following this trend of new stuff, we have two new regenerating areas: Pandora, a Flower Forest, and Camirus, a re-runable village raid!
Details for both can be found on the Science forum post, as well as how to reach them. Need flowers enmasse or want to fight a Village Raid? Head on over!

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The End: Laurasia Dragon Priests
Next up in the new-content category, four new Dragon Priests have been hidden around the overworld of Laurasia. Find them all, collect their heads, and bring them to the Happy Mask Salesman to obtain the key to the mother of all Ender Dragon fights. Be warned, you'll never have KeepInventory out here!

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Science Updates
Last but definitley not least, on the topic of the 1.14 Science updates, we are happy to announce that all Challenge Areas are fully operational once again, and open for business!

Since the last set of areas to be released didn't get too much attention before 1.14 shut everything down, take a gander over at the Last Event Release if you missed it!

As many of you already noticed, a big challenge coming from Minecraft 1.14 is a lack of performance: slowdowns are fairly common. This isn't tied to our hardware, as the game itself is known for running slow in multiple situations.

I've done some setting tuning on Laurasia in the past 10 days to try to improve the situation, and the results so far have been positive. I've now extended this to the other servers, hopefully giving us a smoother gameplay experience!

The September challenge is now live! This month, we're doing something a bit different: a special map is available, where your mission is to destroy as much of it as you can! You've read that right - grab your best griefing tools and go nuts on an established place. We want this done properly, though, and not recklessly, because we care. If you accidentally die, you'll be kicked off the world for a full week, following the UHC rules. Workers safety first! To ensure that the spawn point remains usable, a 50x50 area around it is protected.

If you hang around a bit, you might even get a surprise... or two... or three... or...

Since tracking exactly who deals the most damage is difficult, we won't even try: anyone registered who enters Kenorland this month will get 5 Merit Points.

Have fun!

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In Hunter's Lodge updates, a new raid boss has risen: you'll be fighting none other than a Rancor! Your prize, if you manage to defeat it, will consist of Swamp Shards. These can be exchanged to obtain the Woodsman's Axe, which is enchanted with an unbreakable status.

To help new players get used to how we do things on the Creeper's Lab, I'm launching tonight a new tutorial for them! This is a new in-game area consisting of a few rooms, each giving basic information and helping players understand what sets us apart from other Minecraft servers. As an incentive, players going through the tutorial get basic supplies to start up, making it easier to survive that first night or two!

While this targets new players, everyone is free to try it out. It can only be completed once, so people can't continously go back to it for new supplies.

To try it, go to Cimmeria and enter /tutorial. That's it! If you see someone new asking questions like "What do we do here?" or "How do I play?", feel free to point them to the tutorial to answer their questions!

To battle!

Everyone interested in PvP is invited to join us this Saturday to try out our new PvP minigame! Introduced last week, this location gives you five fighting classes to chose from. You don't need to (nor can!) bring in any items, everything that you need is provided to you!

This will be in a free-for-all format, with no extra rules set in place. Simple, straight fun! All you need to do is drop in starting at 9pm Eastern time, this Saturday, to see who's the best at fighting! See you then!

Quite a few of our new visitors have been asking "pvp?" the moment they join the network. At the same time, many of our current players like to play PvP, but don't want to deal with the inconveniences of travel and item drops. As a solution to all this, we're introducing our newest minigame: PvP!

Sora and I have prepared a new play mode, accessible within the lobby under the "Games" category. In there, MountainB0y's giant arena is accessible at all times, to registered players and visitors alike. To keep things balanced, no inventory carries over from the main survival servers. Instead, five fighting classes are available to select from, each with its own set of equipment and effects:

Knight: Defensive powerhouse, but slow
Warrior: Quick damage and medial armor
Archer: Expert in ranged damage, but light on armor
Mage: Magical damage and support, but limited uses
Monk: No armor or weapons, but all physical attributes are empowered

You can switch between classes or reload your equipment at any time from the arena'a starting point. These have been balanced to all be viable, depending on each player's preferences. It's a free-for-all, as in you jump in and start playing. You can play a few quick rounds or stay as long as you like, so don't hesitate to check it out!

With a new month comes a new challenge! Due to the large amount of new players this month, I'm keeping things to the basics with a fairly straightforward UHC map. This time, a lovely oceanic island in a warm climate is your setting.

For those of you not familiar with our local flavor of UHC, the challenge comes in a special world with its own inventory, accessible straight from the lobby. The difficulty is set to hard and PvP is enabled, so you need to stay on your toes! You can explore as you want, aim to survive, or reach out to complete the four targets listed below:

- Crafting a bookshelf
- Crafting an enchantment table
- Access the Nether
- Pick up a blaze rod

Completing each task before the end of the month will earn you 5 Merit Points; more on points here. The access is opened to everyone, including visitors, but only players that register before the end of the month will be awarded points. It's important to note that dying knocks you off the world for an entire week, and you'll only be able to rejoin once that's over, so survival should be your top priority at all times.

Good luck!

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On the science front, more work has been done by Sora to gradually bring things back online in this post-1.14 universe. At this point, the Dragon Priests, the Hunters Lodge, Requiem, Nyx and the Overlook hotel are all back in working order, and the first two have received new additions making them worth revisiting. The monthly raid boss at the Lodge is the Ancient Pharaoh still, to make up for lost time last month.

The Lost Woods are next on the list and should be back soon!

I've updated tonight all game servers to the latest Minecraft version, 1.14.4. This includes several performance improvements, and the game will hopefully run smoother for all. It's incompatible with the previous one, so be sure to change the game version in your launcher before you resume playing!


Region markers are back

The region markers had been gone from Laurasia's map for a while due to incompatibilities, but they're now back in place. Large player-claimed areas, along with permanent event locations, are all marked to warn anyone looking for new building locations that these are not available. Additionally, the two large North-West and North-East quadrants that have been previously blocked away from being opened to players are now easily visible in red.


Render view back up

The render view had been temporarily lowered on Laurasia to keep the server running smoothly. As a test, I've set the value back up, so you'll be able to see further out. We'll scale it back down if it still causes performance issues, but for now, everything is looking good.


Creeper Citadel / Moosemart are back!

Sora has been working diligently to convert commands to the new format. While all science areas had to be closed for a while, the Creeper Citadel along with the Moosemart are now back in business for visitors and trades! The traders specific to each play area will be re-added after their own areas are converted.

All game servers have been updated to Minecraft 1.14.3! Update the version in your launcher, and you're set to join us! If you need a reminder on how to change game versions in the newest edition of the launcher, here's a quick visual guide.

There are a few things to note related to this update, please be sure to read on.

- As announced before, all science areas are now offline. They'll be brought back one by one, after extensive work is done to adapts commands to the new syntax. This is expected to take about a month.

- Tasmantis will be retired a week from now. Its inventory is now linked to the rest of the survival servers; if you wanted to move items back and forth, now's your chance!

- I wrote a new stats tracking plugin to take over the ever-failing methods I was trying to rely on. The code on the forums needs to be adapted to the new data structures, I'm hoping for that to be done within a day or so. In the meanwhile, the player profiles and achievements features are disabled, but whatever you do still counts and will register later.
UPDATE: Done!

- The new ravager beasts roam the land as part of the patrols and will quickly give you a bad time. As with creepers and endermen, they've been set not to grief the land they traverse, but the protection isn't perfect yet. This is expected to improve over time.

- The world border on Laurasia had to be changed from a circle to a square. This is temporary and done to avoid a bug with Nether portals. The border will go back to a circle as soon as possible, so please don't venture in the extra areas in the meantime.

- The TNT tag minigame had to be pulled due to multiple issues, it might not be back for a while.

- 1.14.4 is expected to come out any day. It's going to be incompatible with what we're now running, but it should be installed on the Creeper's Lab within a few days. Among other things, it'll fix a bug with the trade interface of villagers not staying opened.