Posted on by joehills

Newsletter #4, for April 25th, 2022

Howdy!

I hope everyone had a great weekend! We took last week off from publishing the newsletter because of the holidays, but we are back at full speed today!

Ten Years of HermitCraft!

Thanks so much to everyone who helped us celebrate 10 years of HermitCraft this weekend! We spent Saturday looking backward at our old season, and Sunday looking forward to the post-1.19 world border expansion during our UHC!

Here’s the VODs from each!

Total Nuclear Annihilation with Musicians!

The next two Fridays at 8:30pm central I’m going to have talented musicians I know join me on stream to chat about creativity and play pinball!

Here’s the VOD for the April 22nd session with Sean Hills:

Patreon Untitled Season 8 Vanilla SMP World Download

Having concluded our final parade float build contest of Season 8, I’ve tarballed up the world download at https://joehills.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/2022-04-25a-s8.tgz

Enjoy!

Everstorm Mark II

The first Everstorm server was a huge success, and we just launched our second attempt, with a few rules changes and a slightly-shorter three-week play period.

Rules

  • Hardcore: true
  • Weather Cycle: False
  • Firetick: True Server
  • jar: 1.18.2 Jar only updates when world resets.
  • Next reset scheduled for Friday, May 13th.
  • Four mystery changes:
    • KeepInventory true (discovered by ThatTommyBoii)
    • Pvp: false (discovered by Madeline and Michael Socks)
    • Firedamage: false (discovered by ThatTommyBoii)
    • FallDamage: false (discovered by 5uperStone)

Obituaries

  • MisterLantz creeper-ed before his time.
  • Tommy buried himself alive in the name of science!
  • EsdeeAr was blinded by lightning and never saw the creeper coming up from behind.
  • PinkDistortion was impaled by a drowned trying to swim home because a zombie villager stole her boat!
  • Tegzi, after braving the depths of the nether and opening the gateway to the end, was surrounded by cruel creepers in a dark, forgotten forest.
  • CurtisDoesADig did a dig and a zombie tagged along.
  • ItsThePitts In a little cave / Water Bub came to say hi / His hug was my doom.
  • Qwarkeh could not build her protective cocoon fast enough to prevent a spider from falling on her face—she built her own tomb.

Patreon Discord Changes

Based on valuable community feedback from our meetings on Sunday, I’ve made the following changes to the Patreon Discord.

Accessibility

Moving forward, I’m requiring staff members to use alt-tags on all images to ensure that our messaging doesn’t exclude any community members.

The entire community is encouraged to do the same, but we aren’t formally requiring that from everyone at this time.

I’ve also created a new text channel, Joe-Hills-Meta > #feedback-accessibility to ensure important conversations about accessibility aren’t buried in the middle of unrelated discussions elsewhere.

Community Gaming

Several community members requested changes to help everyone self-organize games on the fly.

As an experiment, I’ve created the following channels to help y’all out toward that end:

  • Gaming > #open-gaming-voice-activated
  • Gaming > #players-wanted
  • Joe-Hills-Meta > #feedback-players-wanted

We’ll revisit this formally in the fall, but feedback is welcome any time.

Server Administration and Operations

The experimental #ds9-ops channel has been very productive for ensuring that operations needs are brought to my attention efficiently. To address comparable concerns that arise on the other servers, I’ve created a new channel: Realms-And-Servers > #admin-operations.

Like #ds9-ops, this channel is only for requesting operator or admin assistance. Please be courteous and avoid idle chatter there.

We’re continuing to grow!

I’ve sent out a lot of Discord invites to new Patreon patrons the last few months, and expect we’ll see a surge as summer begins. To that end, I’m currently in the process of onboarding two additional discord moderators, who I hope to have fully trained and ready to work by the end of May.

If you’re not a member of the Patreon Discord, you can join for $5/mo via https://patreon.com/joehills

Community Meetings and Server Petitions

Yesterday we held several community meetings, which our Community Liaison Tommy recorded and posted here:

Since we had so many meetings yesterday, we haven’t had time to fully write up and format the minutes yet. You can expect those in next week’s newsletter!

From a practical standpoint, I think that’ll work out better anyhow, as a lot of the petitions require implementation this week and I’d like to include the final details with that.

Upcoming Travel & Conventions

Here’s a few events I’ll definitely be attending. I’ll be printing POGs with cool art to hand out. I hope some of y’all can make it!

So long and thanks!

Thanks to our Community Liaison ThatTommyBoii for help with this newsletter!

Until next time y’all, this is Joe Hills from Nashville, TN.

Keep adventuring!