The availability of a viable update to PaperMC v1.21.6 took forever. We have to be honest — we’re not really feeling this whole “hard fork” thing, or at least we’re not feeling too good about it. That feeling didn’t get any better with v1.21.7, which came with numerous console errors (specific to PaperMC and not SpigotMC) involving very recent/active plugins. We’re talking the big names, too — like LuckPerms, EssentialsX, WorldGuard, WorldEdit, Geyser, etc. PaperMC is now reporting that all of these need to change the way these big-name, widely used plugins use the API. Pretty audacious stuff, considering that SpigotMC doesn’t seem to have this same concern. In other words, if PaperMC doesn’t knock it off with the arrogance, we might be switching back to SpigotMC. Another reason would be that both v1.21.6 and v1.21.7 of SpigotMC were available weeks prior to PaperMC. I mean, seriously, if you’re going to be arrogant at least be timely.
Throughout (or because of) the last four updates, we’ve been streamlining the Amplified Moosh adventure server. We’ve been specifically focusing on plugin reduction, primarily trying to eliminate the reliance on older, outdated, and even abandoned plugins. It hasn’t been easy because, honestly, we’ve been running some semblance of Amplified Moosh since MineCon 2013. Some of the plugins we’ve been using from the very beginning haven’t been updated, and nothing has replaced them. And then along comes the arrogant behavior of the PaperMC devs basically having zero interest in even single version backward compatibility. The struggle has been real! Now that the whining and cursing is over, we can finally report that it’s done! We are now down to just 8 plugins with all 8 currently being actively developed/updated, and at least 6/8 would be considered mainstream plugins. It required changing a lot of things on Amplified Moosh with the requirement of it still looking the same to the return visitors. We had to big-brain a lot of things! Thankfully, the modern, popular plugins can do a lot of what we were using the one-off, abandoned plugins to do. It just…it wasn’t easy. We’re glad we did it, but we’re even more glad that it’s now done. Incidentally, our server boot times are now RIDICULOUSLY fast. We always wondered why every claimed PaperMC was so much faster than SpigotMC. Well, it actually is when it’s not running a bunch of legacy plugins.
Because of the ongoing saga with PaperMC being so uptight, and after other careful considerations, we have decided to remove Bedrock compatibility from Amplified Moosh. Our primary reasons for doing this was compatibility. The block colors were horrible, the Pets plugin didn’t work well, the mobs in the Mooseum and Zoo didn’t crossover well, and especially the Challenges basically didn’t work at all for Bedrock players. Our hats go off with mad respect to the Geyser development team! It’s an incredible plugin and providing cross-platform Minecrafting was a spectacular achievement. Amplified Moosh was just too complicated for it. We will likely be revisiting Geyser for our survival server(s) in the near future.