Server on hold until further notice

I won't be able to work on anything for at least the next week or two, consider all launch plans cancelled until further notice.

Rest assured the server will still be launched publicly as soon as I am able to get it done, but at the moment family issues have to take priority over it for the next couple of weeks, apologies for the unforeseen delay and thanks for your understanding.

Alright, I've failed to properly update anyone on this, so lets walk through why the server isn't up.

I originally had to stop working on the server after a very unexpected family emergency that took a few weeks to be resolved.

Since then, as you have probably heard, Microsoft bought Mojang and with them Minecraft. As you may not know, as of early September, the bukkit project has effectively been shut down, making it extremely difficult to run modded servers (still possible with bukkit if you have an old version saved somewhere but you can't download new versions and its unlikely it will ever be updated again given that the conditions for it to be updated are that they remove all ties to net.minecraft.server code, which is fairly impossible to do if we want any real capability to mod.. Also note that mojang and therefore microsoft own bukkit... so yeah, also most mod developers have since left bukkit because it is now a dead platform).

So in summary, bukkit is dead, the minecraft modding community has fractured, it is impossible to download bukkit legally anymore and pointless to develop new mods for it before we know what Microsoft's plans for minecraft and bukkit are (which they still haven't told us 2 months after the fact).

In essence, I've stepped back from minecraft again and am watching to see what happens, it is pretty much impossible for me to run the server unless we run it on an old version of minecraft/bukkit (I still have all the server files from before it went down, but we're unlikely to get new players on an old minecraft version and mod support is gone) or run a vanilla server (which I honestly don't plan to do because moderating a public vanilla server is nearly impossible in the current setup).

So there you have it, poorly timed life events + no bukkit = no server, if anyone has anything to add, feel free to do so, otherwise we might consider alternatives for the community, Factorio for instance is just starting to get multiplayer if anyone has that (though its very early and currently limited to 4 players it will supposedly eventually support minecraft-like servers), likewise space engineers looks like it could be fun (though I hear it has some lag issues with large object destruction), outside of that we can hope the minecraft situation stabilizes and the server can get going again but it seems unlikely.