Hey everyone! After extensively testing for the issues we encountered with Mega SMP during the short early access period, we are happy to announce that we have fixed all issues and will be holding the grand release for Mega SMP on Saturday, January 15th, at 3PM EST!

🔼 New Additions to Mega SMP Since Early Access

In addition to fixing dozens of bugs (ranging in severity), we’ve made some new additions to Mega SMP to help cater to all playstyles.

While our server is heavily oriented towards casual play, we are adding a major feature which will help give some incentive to play with rewards: competitions!

❇️ Levels

By popular demand, we are adding Player Levels to SMP. As you play the game, you will accumulate playtime, coins, and also Vote Tokens for voting for our server with /vote. Now, you can reward yourself for your playtime and spend your coins/vote tokens to level up! Leveling up will show off your status in chat, and will also improve your competition league (more on that below). You also get some nice one-time rewards for leveling up, so make sure to do so! These levels get very difficult to attain for the higher levels because Survival does not have very many *revisions (map resets), *so that is why the costs are high.

🏆 Competitions

In order to reward players for their work, we are establishing competitions! These are automated events which begin every three days. Within each competition, there is a goal which must be worked towards. This could be things like mining blocks, killing mobs, and other challenges which depend on player skill.

**You compete against other people in your league (player level). **Each league has a different gem reward at the end of each three days:

  • Level 1: 100 Gems
  • **Level 2: **250 Gems
  • **Level 3: **500 Gems
  • **Level 4: **750 Gems
  • **Level 5: **1,000 Gems

Only one person in each league can win these rewards, so make sure to get to work to win them!

đź“ť Scoreboard

By popular demand, we’ve added a scoreboard so you can see useful information about survival and your balances wherever you are! Although we always had this information on our top/bottom HUD, people have requested a scoreboard, so we have gone ahead and made a really nice one!

đź‘” Job Improvements

Also by popular demand, we have massively overhauled the jobs available for survival! There’s now more items you can harvest for each job, and the work results in more Coins now too.

đź’° Sell Shop

Finally, the last change we’ve made to the economy is added rotating sell shops for Mob Drops, Farming, and Ores. Now, each day, every person has a unique list of items they can sell for Coins directly to the server. These items and their exact prices change each day, and each person has a unique list of items, so you may have different items you can sell from other players and potentially at higher/lower prices than others.

This change is designed to make the economy more self-sustaining than just a player-to-player economy. Now, you can participate more in the economy, and even game the economy by offering sell shops which collect items in anticipation of what will be available to sell to /shop!

🏎 Vehicle Improvements

In the realm of vehicles, we’ve improved them significantly. Now, vehicle handling has been improved: turning is based on your mouse movement rather than the A/D keys. This change will make vehicle controls feel more like an arcade game and less like a racing simulator, and should also make turning feel better for people on high-latency connections.

Finally, we’ve also added **green particles to show where you should click to enter a vehicle. **This UX change should make it less confusing to find where to click to enter a vehicle.

đźź© Tile Improvements

Mega SMP is split into tiles of 256x256 in order to be able to host survival across many different servers. As you venture across the world, you may see a green world border. This means you are reaching the edge of a tile. When you walk through the border, you will switch to another server. You can still see the world and your friends on the other side of the border, so you will always know where you are.

Between early access and now, we have heavily optimized and improved the tile transit system. Tile transit times are now up to 5 times faster (without all of the issues), and this will help contribute to a gameplay experience that is enjoyable. **Thanks to a wide array of technical improvements (custom chunk loading algorithms, predictive systems, lag compensation, border compensation, and other technical improvements we could write entire posts about), the tile experience is now **good.

We received a lot of complaints about our tile system in early access, and it is not possible to remove it due to our commitment to scalability and supporting thousands of players as we advertise and grow Mega SMP in the coming weeks, which may not be understandable when we have a small soft-launch, but will make sense as the community grows. We thank you for your understanding and we know that you will understand this decision when you experience the tile system as it was meant to be played (without the tons of bugs and issues).

đź›  Fixed Issues

Of course, we’ve been hard at work fixing issues during early access, which we want to remind you of so you know what we have improved:

  • Improved chunk loading speed by 80%.
  • Fixed issues which would cause players to be unable to move between tiles.
  • Fixed transit issues which would spit out messages like “section data missing on join”, “unexpected departure error”, “target instance missing on join”, and other provisioning errors.
  • Improved tile transit speeds by 5.0x on average.
  • Improved vehicle handling significantly.
  • Fixed world saving issues.
  • Fixed player data loss issues.
  • Fixed /rtp failing with cryptic error messages.
  • Added in handling to prevent death loops.
  • Fixed unsafe nether portal teleports.
  • Entities outside tile borders are now coerced back in. This will prevent issues people have had with losing items, vehicles, etc in the border regions.
  • Fixed people being unable to claim land despite having power.
  • Fixed strange issues with losing vehicles in borders.
  • Car vehicles can now climb up blocks. This should help make cars more usable in survival.
  • Vehicle fuel can now be crafted.

There have been many other minor improvements and optimizations which together help make the gameplay experience drastically better. We hope you will come to try out our survival experience on its grand release next Saturday, January 15th at 3PM EST!