After over 4 years of work, and jumping 8 Minecraft versions, we are extremely excited to open the doors to 1.18 and 1.21. We are grateful for a relatively smooth maintenance period which has allowed us to ensure that players can rejoin the server as soon as possible!
At this present point in time we have re-opened our worlds, complete with the new levelling experience that will be detailed below. Our regular class schedule will also resume, beginning with Magical Cuisine at 1:00PM PST (in 12 hours)!
We are currently working with the Build team to finalise our minigame builds, before we can re-enable minigames. We hope to have these both back up by the end of the week, assuming all goes well. Unfortunately Housing is still not available as we are still backing all the plots up. We want to ensure that we have a backup of all Housing plots before we begin migrating their world files to 1.18 as we know how much history and how important these are!
How to Connect
You can now join Potterworld on our same IP, play.potterworldmc.com, on any of the following four versions: 1.18.2, 1.21.8, 1.21.9, or 1.21.10.
The base version of our server is currently 1.18.2, so only features available on this version are accessible to players. However this does include an increased build height, the ability to swim, longer chat message lengths, and many many many new blocks for players and staff to build with, in addition to the numerous features added both in Minecraft and our external plugins.
It is our aim to continue to allow support to join on the latest version, so far as it is reasonably achievable.
New Levelling Experience & Progression Rework
The new leveling experience, first unveiled in September, is now live to all players!
This progressions rework replaces the previous level system (1-80) with a year based system (years 1-7 and graduate). In order to graduate between years, you will need to earn spell points through all forms of Potterworld content - classes, events, challenges, expeditions, quests, minigames, and more. These spell points will be used to learn new spells from your spellbook.
Each year will have a set number of spells to purchase in order to graduate to the next year, which may remind you of our old academics credits system. Once you have purchased all spells for a certain year, you will need to complete the “Year End Spell Test” - a magical trial to test your ability with your newly learned spells!
In order to balance each year to have 10 spells, unfortunately we have also had to remove several spells from the levelling experience. We aim to make these spells re-obtainable in future content that is added to the world. For now however the following spells are now unobtainable: Impervio, Directium, Colorovio, Meloformus, Engorgimus, Revelum, Tempus Recantum, Atmospherus.
You can view your spell progress in /spellbook and view your new character stats in /me -> Character Stats. Players can also complete one off task lists tailored to the year they are currently on. These tasks can be found in your Quest Book.
We are also currently working on a prestige system for graduates, we aim to have this ready towards the end of the year!
The rest of this post will turn its attention to the 1.18 update more specifically, and the work that took us here alongside reflections on the maintenance period.
What is New
Our philosophy behind this upgrade was to focus on moving our 1.10 codebase to support 1.18 compatibility. This means that at the present time we have not delved into the new 1.18 features yet, however now that we are on 1.18, it means that we can.
In order to get to this stage though, we have been forced to make a few changes along the way due to Minecraft mechanics changing over the years. These include the following:
- The way that brooms fly has changed, as a result all players now fly at a higher height than they did in 1.10. Brooms are also now forced to have hitboxes, meaning that they appear bigger to Minecraft and can no longer fit through tight spaces. We worked closely with NathanWolf in order to ensure the best possible outcome from these changes.
- Unfortunately this also means that a few of our other racing modes also now operate differently. For rafting players will now appear higher above the water, however at the present time we have been unable to fix sledding, and it will remain unavailable for the foreseeable future.
- Minecraft has also changed the way it processes click mechanics, one of which being the drop click. As a such certain functionalities that utilised the drop click have been removed, especially in the Magic plugin. Unfortunately support for drop clicking to quick cast has been removed, and players must now right click to swap their hotbars when the spell inventory is open, as opposed to drop clicking on it.
- Minecraft has redone the way the Resource Pack works a few times! Most noticeably is that a lot of items will now appear a lot brighter when in GUIs. We have also changed the way our overlays (the big backgrounds in GUIs) work, so that they are no longer physical items jammed into the top corners of the GUI, and instead form part of the title using new practices.
- These Resource Pack changes also included Minecraft completely changing the way that banner textures work, as a result we had to redesign our banners. We hope everyone likes the fresh coat of paint that they have received! We were also required to remake our chest and villager textures, but thankfully they still appear the same.
- We were also required to change the way that skins display on NPCs due to changes in the Citizens plugin. As a result we had to make our own manual migrator to prevent skins turning into Steve and Alex, as well as configure all our skins to hook up to our internal skin library.
- Our Pets system also had to be slightly reworked due to a change in Minecraft’s internal API. As a rather undocumented and obscure area of the code, we were forced to look up what 1.10 methods which were named things alongside “a”, “b”, “c”, “d” were equivalent to in 1.18. This code is similarly used for Quabbleball, however due to the vast amount of changes, we have been unable to bring Quabbleball back for now.
- As discussed in an earlier blog, Minecraft also changed the syntax of numerous commands. This required us to make scripts to run through the database to rewrite any of these changed commands.
- The way we apply Housing Sceneries has also changed significantly due to moving away from WorldEdit and towards FAWE. This took a bit of time for us to relearn how to correctly place the scenery schematics and get it working. But they are working, and will be ready upon the return of Housing.
- Finally, for good practice we wanted to go around the world and remove all our ancient command blocks magic in favour of swapping them to use updated tech standards and magic animations. This required a bit of time editing them, as although we were able to generate a list, there were thousands of them hidden throughout the world.
We appreciate player’s efforts in assisting us catch the last remaining bugs of this version, as we are fully aware that numerous bugs will come out of the cracks once the server is stress-tested and returns to full operation. We ask that you submit these bugs either on the forums here if you have detailed reports with video or photographic evidence, or in-game via
/t create, if it is a smaller issue.Maintenance Reflections
On the whole, we are impressed with how the maintenance period went. Initially setting ourselves a three day minimum for significant disruptions, we are relieved that we were able to get systems back up and running after four days.
For the most part, things went as smoothly as could be expected. A lot of the work just took quite some time because it involved copying or processing a lot of data and many files. Throughout the maintenance, there were little surprises that needed some additional work to resolve, which is to be expected with a change this major.
We’re quite happy with the amount of preparation done: all the really hard work was thoroughly prepared and tested beforehand, while if we had tried to have everything fully prepared and tested, we would have needed another year to get ready. We believe we’ve found the right balance here.
We’ve identified further improvements to be made during the execution of this maintenance, however those are mostly internal, improving performance at best but otherwise not player-impacting. We’ll be working on some of those over the coming months.
We would like to thank everyone who has contributed to this update, whether it was writing some of the initial upgrade code back in 2021, assisting with testing, fixing the resource pack, repairing the broken builds, and the countless other contributions that helped get this update to where it is today.
Extended Credits
Development: Teheeo, yraaneq, DenizTM, Dannyy94
Resource Pack Edits: Droobledore, Teheeo, yraaneq, AbstractMagi, Soniikz_, Lord_Telion
Testing: AMidnight, ASentientGoose, Aurora, autumnngrace, Buttery_Flapjack, Danieliis, gospojken, Invisibilia, iris304, jacquas, jake_ft, JustMaxHell, leighh, Lord_Telion, LucyGoosey313, M_Engel, MelonFoxy, morrgannn, panpanaras, SLGTara, Soniikz_, SynonymsForSky, Wildsam, xNiels_, 0ceqn, 20zuzka04, _ForeverNox_, _xNadine
Build Edits: Lord_Telion, JustMaxHell, _xNadine, jake_ft, xNiels_
Progression Rework: JustMaxHell, Droobledore, AbstractMagi, Teheeo, SynonymsForSky, LeoTheLynx