Today marks the update to Minecraft 1.21.3! I held out until Paper marked the new releases as stable. There are still some issues, namely: Tickets, Holograms, Silk Touching Spawners, Terraform World Generation (new chunks only), and the Incendium Nether Datapack have some issues. There is nothing Game breaking. In fact, this was a pretty smooth update so far in comparison with the last one. If you have any issues, reach out on Discord.

MoreLore will probably receive one more update for version 2 before I start pushing out builds of the new pack. You may have noticed that we created a new icon for the pack to help it stand out. As of this article, MoreLore is over two years old and has over 1,300 downloads! However, I think we can do better! I hope the new icon will help the pack standout in the list of Vanilla+ packs on Curseforge. We're also trying to stick to a common sense numbering system. Version 2 is a 1.20.1 pack, whereas version 3 will be 1.21.1. We've put a lot of effort into getting the pack stable and feature-rich with Mods that add to the vanilla game in a vanilla way, without turning into “All of Fabric.”

Obviously, since this is our first pack, we made some mistakes a long the way. For one, I didn't expect to add a new terrain generation mod (Regions Unexplored) or remove Better End, but we did, and that caused us to prematurely update our server's map due to incompatibilities. The only hold up to getting early builds of version 3 out there is the Create mod. It dropped an update today for 1.20.1, which will be in the next MoreLore 2 build. Unfortunately, the MoreLore 3 pack will be based on 1.21.1, so I'm in limbo, moving forward, until the next Create release comes out. I don't want to push anything out until it does, since Create is a core component of our pack.

As you may know, we run each of our instances on dedicated servers. Unfortunately, the one we were running the modded server on bit the dust back in July. Since then, it has been on a pretty old, multi-core heavy machine, albeit with a lower clock speed. Good news! The i9 beast is back! I'll be migrating the modded server back over to it's proper home this month! This might seem like a nerdy detail drop, but the performance on the i9 was just too amazing to not move it back over there. I'm glad we were able to salvage it and get it back up and running. Chunk loading and player count will see vastly improved performance!

I've watched our player count dwindle to nothing over the last year. As I said above, we put a lot of effort into the servers, the website, and the content in game - not to mention the hosting costs. I've already mentioned to our staff about shutting down. I know … all these plans for new mod pack releases - then talk of shutting down. Well, that's how it goes unfortunately. I'll continue to maintain the MoreLore modpack for fun, but the future of our public servers is still up in the air. I plan on making a final decision by February of next year. If we keep it open, we have thrown around the idea of branching out into other games. Currently, we run a closed, invite-only Project Zomboid modded server, which has been a lot of fun. Once build 42 drops (hopefully this month), I plan on setting up another closed beta run, to see how we can make it interesting to the community. It's a different animal altogether, but it has been fun getting all the plumbing setup to make it work.