Some of you have said recently that we were overdue for another building contest. As luck would have it, I've been gearing up for one, and it's now time to get started!

This time, we're building BRIDGES! I've reserved a large area over water, where everyone will be free to show their skills in allowing people to cross from one side to the other!


Rules

The contest area has several pillars and platforms already in place. Your goal is to link two platforms, in a North-South direction, with a bridge that can be traversed. How said bridge can be crossed is up to you: pedestrian, road, rail bridges are all allowed. The path can go up and down (and sideways!) if you want, as long as both ends of the path proper are level with the platforms at each end. You can't add anything to or on the platform, or build above or below then. Your bridge's main span can be wider than the platforms and you won't be penalized.

Multiple lots are available, with two different lengths: 100 and 200 blocks. You can choose either size, based on your ideas and building materials available - both will be judged the same. When looking at the middle of a building platform, you can extend to the left or right up to 20 blocks, giving you a maximum of 20 + 20 + 1 = 41 blocks wide to work with. You can build as high or low as you want.

To confirm your building location, you can look at the map of the area.

To claim a space and mark your entry, you must place a sign on the Southern end of your bridge.

The contest begins NOW and ends at the end of the month, 30 June, at 23:59 Eastern time. This gives you three weeks to design and build something that'll impress others!


Location

Easy: from Central, take the North Nether line toward Sanctum. Disembark at the second substation, String Theory, and go through that station's Nether portal. Cross the small bridge, and you're there! All building spots are located over water. If more spots are required, I'll add them as needed.

If you fall down into the water, all of the pillars marking the ends of each lot have ladders built inside them for a quick trip back up. Remember, the waters aren't as tame as they used to be!


Prizes

The top three winners will each earn the following amount of Merit Points:
First place: 50 points
Second place: 30 points
Third place: 15 points
Everyone else who participates will get 1 as well.

This, along with this month's UHC challenge, is your last chance to gather Merit Points in this cycle. Gather them for perks like limited flight and XP bonuses, or win the chance to score prizes like Lego kits, Minecraft plushes and more!


Additionally, I'd like to have two extra judges to help me rate the multiple entries. Please get in touch with me if you're interested!

Have fun!

I've got a few minor updates for you tonight, not all of them being related to each other but all worth a mention!


9-9 Events Nights
Considering that many of the current event areas (Lost Woods and Horsemen domains) are more easily handled when you can keep your inventory after death, we'll handle Events Nights a bit differently. These will now run from 9pm Saturday to 9pm Sunday, Eastern time, giving you a full 24 hours to play in the areas and access the teleporters network!

This is something that we're doing on a trial basis and might be revisited in the future.


Carnival Island
A new location has been made available for all - Carnival Island! Filled with multiple attractions (including a llamas carousel), you're sure to find something to your liking. Be sure to bring in coal and emeralds to afford to pay your way through the skill games, and hopefully win some cool prizes! This was built and designed primarily by MediaKlepto.

You'll find the carnival through the teleportation network at this location:
End of Time -> Additional Attractions -> Up a floor -> Carnival Island


North territories locked away
Laurasia is a large world, with some challenges on how to manage it over time. To keep things short, it's easier when the players are closer to each other rather than spread out over huge areas. To help with this, I've blocked off two large areas to the North-East and North-West of the world. Entry is outright denied: if you try to access them, you'll bounce back outside.

Remember that many areas on Laurasia, even if they were visited maybe once, are pristine and untouched. If you're looking for a good building location, don't hesitate to ask the chat, many of us will be able to help you!

These areas will be visible on the map once our plugin that shows map regions is back in working order. For now, here's an approximation of the blocked areas.




Status of 1.14
The last I officially commented on this, 1.14 required us to have us a fully rewritten stats system to move forward. Work on that has been progressing well and should be done soon.

An additional, important complication is that 1.14, at least the first releases, performs extremely poorly on servers. This reached a point where it was outright unplayable by many. 1.14.2 made some major improvements toward that, and 1.14.3 is expected to be released soon with further fixes. I'll revisit the situation once that's available to see if things can be worked out. Thank you for your patience!

At MediaKlepto's suggestion, your new challenge this month is a UHC map based on 1.13's rich oceans, but with an added twist. That's all yours to navigate and find how to make the best of it!

A slow hunger regen effect is in place to give you a chance of keeping your health up in this unique setting... although this won't do much for some of you!

Racing, digging, dying. All three happened in last month's Dig Away challenge, and we have some winners! Without further delay, the top positions of everyone who participated:

Kagato: 22168 metres - 17 points
axe_y: 18876 metres - 16 points
GingeKoda: 17088 metres - 15 points
Coneva: 17082 metres - 14 points
MineshaftBob: 4638 metres - 13 points
Connovan: 3543 metres - 12 points
Raegal: 1548 metres - 11 points
Exodio: 156 metres - 10 points
VivaLaFu: 71 metres - 9 points
AlexTheTrain: 54 metres - 7 points
Hypersomnia: 21 metres - 3 points
TasteTheDragon: 0 metres - 2 points

The missing positions in this ranking are from visitors who didn't register during the month. Everyone will have their points shortly.

Congrats everyone, and stay tuned for later in the day when our next monthly challenge goes online!

The game servers had been mostly down for the past two days as we experienced some hardware issues on our dedicated server. A technical team reviewed it and improved its cooling, which should mean the end of our troubles.

All game servers are back online and waiting for you. Sorry about the trouble!

I've been on Patreon as a creator for three years today, and I wanted to take a moment to publicly thank all my backers, no matter if they've been around for a month or since the beginning. Their contributions help to cover the monthly fees on our dedicated server, the website and more. In the past year, I've used some of the excess funds to launch our email newsletter which features news, builds, events and players alike. I'm always thinking about the next steps for us, be aware that you're playing a big part in our success!

Want to help with the Creeper's Lab's maintenance and growth? You can! Think of Patreon as a voluntary subscription: you set the amount of money that you want to contribute every month, as low as $1, and you can continue as long as you like. In exchange, you get cool rewards like in-game markers, custom titles, particle trails, and even postcards! Please check it out!

It was discovered recently that the achievements Chatter (say 2000 words in chat) and Chatty Mouth (10,000 words) weren't working properly. I've applied a correction tonight and re-imported the entire content of the chat logs to ensure that everyone's words were counted properly.

If you talked enough to earn these yet didn't score them already, they'll trigger the next time you join any of the worlds for a few minutes!

UPDATE: Make that three, I forgot about Do You Hear Me Now? (50,000 words)

A new challenge is live in the lobby, and this time, your target is to Dig Away!

A derivative of the Race Away event, your goal is still to get to the highest X coordinate possible in a month. However, this time around, the world is all underground. Giant caverns give you a chance to orient yourself and make some progress more easily, but a fair amount of digging will be expected too! The world being in perpetual darkness, mobs will roam all over constantly.

Merit Points will be given to the top diggers/runners based on their respective, top positions. For example, the last person will get 1 point, next-to-last 2, and so on up to the top runner getting an amount of points equal to the amount of participants. A minimum of 10 points will be offered to the winner.

Dying will return you to the world's spawn point, but won't kick you out entirely as it does for UHC. Due to the difficulty of locating food underground, your hunger will slowly regenerate over time. Please note that the Nether is disabled (no quick travel!), and there's a bedrock layer on top of the world. Going over that top layer (through either glitching or broken world generation) will disqualify you.

Get your best running shoes on, and good luck!

I've started the update process for 1.14 and performed a dry run to see how the new version will work with our current setup. Unfortunately, a major complication has shown up: the plugin that's currently in place to track the player statistics is not compatible with 1.14 and its author has abandoned it. While it would be possible to move forward without it, it's tied to a lot of systems: achievements, player profiles, griefing tracking, and more. Considering that the achievements and other features are staples of the Creeper's Lab, I prefer to delay the update rather to do without. Even by discarding it, we wouldn't be able to upgrade today as other key features like DynMap are awaiting their own updates.

What I'll do is to write a new stats tracking plugin from scratch, tuned for our uses, while migrating the current data to ensure that your progress is saved during the transition. This will also give me a stable base upon which I'll build new features to be revealed later. Considering the amount and complexity of the work involved, this is likely to take at least a few weeks to do properly.

I appreciate your patience in this, such steps are necessary once in a while to ensure that we can keep the same worlds going into the future!

Mojang released today the latest version of Minecraft, the Village & Pillage update. While I know that many of you are waiting to explore and discover the new elements, the servers will remain on 1.13 until we're ready to properly make the switch. Thankfully, the technical changes are minimal this time around, so this should happen relatively soon. Keep an eye on this space for more information!