Server Updates: Fall 2025 Edition

Long time no see, it is about time I provide an update on the happenings of the server. As well as some upcoming changes and improvements to look forward to!

Changes since the last update

Let me check when the last update was, I cannot remember what has changed since then. Please hold.

Ah yes, here we go.

• I bought a new server computer
  • This server is not replacing the current machine, stay tuned for the 2025 year in review for more details on that.
• Improved backups, there was an issue where backups were not deleted even though they were supposed to be deleted in accordance with the retention policy. However they were not and I had over 2TB of backups for the servers. Clearing that out helped me a lot, and made room for future backups.
• We are migrating our wiki to a new service called BookStack. Check it ou here!
  • We are looking for help to do this migration, if you are interested reach out to David on Discord.
  • If you want to contribute but don't want to help with the migration, totally understand, reach out to David on Discord to set up an account.
  • This is no longer happening. Please disregard.

Upcoming Changes

There are a few changes and improvements I will be working on in the next couple months. The timeline is a little long and fuzzy because it depends on how much free time I have, and all the other changes I need to make before to prepare for these improvements.

• Live server map rendering, hoping to also get player positions on maps (only when logged in of course).
  • This will result in a full re-render of the server map when I do make the change, but after that updates should be near instant when chunks are changed.
  • This will also save me about $0.50 per month in map hosting costs as I am bringing it onto my server and not hosting it in the cloud.
• Website overhaul (I know I know, I say this nearly every update) - more details to follow later.
• New game hosting back end called Pelican Panel

Pelican Panel

I am switching is from Pterodactyl Panel to Pelican Panel, this mainly means nothing for the average player except for some downtime while I migrate everything over. Less than a day. For those interested in learning why I am glad you asked.

Pterodactyl Panel is an open source project, but the developers spent less and less time on the project, and other contributors wanted to add features but were rejected due to the direction the owner wanted to take the project. So they split off and created Pelican Panel. This split appears to be amicable as the lead developer did not have enough time to dedicate it seems. I could be wrong about all this. Anyways, Pelican Panel is now the more active version with a larger library of game support. Pterodactyl was getting outdated and I would have to use workarounds to get things to work in the last year or two. I will be posting updates in Discord about downtime and when the full migration is complete.

Live Server Map

I am taking advantage of the switch to Pelican Panel to also improve the server map render. I really don't need to wait for this, I simply plan to add the BlueMap plugin to the server and adjust where my web server points to, but I am making a bunch of changes already so I will just add it on. The way the map currently renders is every 2 days a separate virtual machine downloads the map from Pterodactyl Panel, then runs BlueMap which checks for changes in the files and renders that. This has a few disadvantages, mainly that it could take up to 2 days for builds to appear. The other change is that it causes a small spike in server usage that could otherwise be avoided, and resources are allocated to a virtual machine that only really needs them for 10 minutes every 2 days. Running BlueMap as a plugin should enable nearly instant updates, as well as player locations. To help with performance I will also be storing the map in a database instead of as plain files.

Anyways, with this I leave you know until the 2025 year in review in the first half of 2026!