Wonder no more: yes, we've made plans for this upcoming Halloween night!

We've got two events scheduled for you, one after the other. Make your way to Central right as Events Night starts, this upcoming Saturday at 9pm Eastern time so you can participate in the first game. After this, you will be directed toward the second challenge of the night. Put yourself in the mood and bring a pumpkin!

But what actually are these events? You will have to come in this Saturday to see! If you can't make it, don't worry, as they will remain available for some time afterwards. See you then!

First things first, I'd like to thank everyone who showed an interest for helping with staff duties. It can be thankless work sometimes, but it's important to keep a healthy community going! As these things go, I didn't pick everyone who applied, but I appreciate your interest all the same.

With that said, I'm now happy to announce that joining us as Helper are BioZombieActive, BroitsTAG, Kimonellos and Rebbica007. Congrats, all! As I indicated in my previous news post, if all goes well, you will make the transition to Op once you're settled in.

Additionally, I'm announcing today the addition on the new rank of Aide. Much like the existing Media rank, this will be used to identify people who are helping with the servers and the community outside the usual in-game support. Inheriting this new status today are Exodio and StTheo! Theo has been helping to smooth out some of the previous server upgrades and is now working alongside Exodio, myself and other staff to establish a still-unannounced feature to the Creeper's Lab.

This new rank needs some tuning on the chat system to be active and should be visible tomorrow.

Once again, my thanks go to everyone who was interested enough to get involved further, this wouldn't be possible without your enthusiasm!

It's that time of the year where everything gets pumpkin spice flavored we re-evalute the current activity on the server and what our needs are.

In order to better support the players who need help during the day (or night!), we're looking to add a few staff members to the crew. Interested? Your primary tasks would be:

• Greeting the new players and answering any questions they might have.
• Checking on these players to make sure they understand and follow the rules.
• Getting players unstuck due to server bugs or protections (it happens!).
• Tracking down and reverting sources of griefing.
• Supervising events and contests by providing assistance when needed.
• As a last resort, kicking and/or banning troublesome people.

Only players that are registered and active at the time of this posting will be considered, and not everyone may be chosen. This doesn't give you any gameplay advantage, as the staff plays by the same rules as any other player. To apply, please send me a private message on the forums. Nominations will be done in about a week.

I'm also implementing a change to staff ranks: the Helper status will now be transient, where new staff members get first nominated to. Once they get comfortable with the tools, and if they remain active, they will automatically access the Op rank. If not, they will return to the regular trusted.

A direct result is that, effective today, BiGsTiVo, Raegal, SorathePumpking and Twixxi are accessing the Op rank. Welcome to the land of orange!

Thank you for reading!

It's time for a new event, this time hosted by Mikey_el16!

Where: Central, in front of the Creeper Bazaar
When: By 10pm Eastern time this Saturday

The website receives today a bit of a facelift to modernize part of its appearance and help you find that you might be looking for, faster.

A lot of that focus went into the sidebar present on all pages: the information now presented has a more unified look and clear separation between the sections. A new "Support" block shows the current progression of the Patreon campaign, and a different merch item is shown on each page load to give you an idea of the range of products available on our online store. The link to our Discord server gains a big, bright button to help it stand out, and the rolling achievements get a bit of an upgrade.

In the main navigation menu, the first item under the "Basics" section is the newer "Getting Started" page, which has all the information that newcomers need to get started. If you see someone asking how to register, that's where you should tell them to look!

Among other things, the "How to help" page received the most changes. The entire presentation has been redone to better show the various ways that you can support us! More details about where the money given to us goes are now included, with a clearer description of the perks you get in return. Additionally, the current progression on the various goals are listed clearly. As of this writing, we're almost a third of the way through to fully fund the monthly advertising for the Creeper's Lab, with the long-term goal of me being able to work on this full time. Anyone interested in finding out more should check out my page on Patreon with the full details!

Thanks for reading!

Dear journal,

That's it, I've messed up.

I've been banished from my home, sent to a faraway land with nothing but the clothes I was wearing. I'm alone, isolated in this new land. I haven't seen anyone else yet, but I have a bad feeling about this. I better gather supplies fast if I'm to survive here. I can never know what could happen next.

Even from them.

Are they after me? Of course they're after me. Everyone is after me. Well, I'll show them. I'll show them all what I'm made off!! THIS PLACE IS MINE!!!

As some of you already know, Mojang is doing their roughly yearly Minecraft event this Saturday, with Minecraft Live streaming at noon (Eastern time). How about we turn this into a Minecraft Day with a dash of Spider Dome in the evening?

You're invited to join us for some mad players-vs-monsters at the Spider Dome arena! See how long you can last against the madness that gets unleashed there! And get some fun mob drops in the process!

We'll start at 10pm, Eastern time, this Saturday. No science-based equipment allowed: bring your best, purely vanilla gear and see how you will do!