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Introduction

Hello everyone! We’ve been working hard to get everything ready for First Light, but I’m sure many of you are wondering about the specifics. We’ve posted our to-do lists in the past, but we haven’t gone into very great detail as to what needs to be accomplished in each segment. This post is meant to roughly cover what needs to be done before First Light as of this post, in more detail than we have previously delved into. We would also like to mention specifically what you all can do to help with the various tasks to hopefully get this project online before summer. It’s not a complete list mind, but it should give you all a much better idea of our current position in development.

There are many areas people can help out in, even without experience programming (though that would indeed be the most helpful!).

What’s Left and How You Can Help

The vast majority of the work still to do revolves around the backend. This means that it’s implementing features, map work, and some testing. By the nature of this work it is fairly sensitive information-wise, but it is possible to help without us giving access to important information, and we’re more than willing to do our part to make that happen.

MythicMobs

Right now, our MythicMobs setup is pretty bare bones. Well, OK, that’s a gross exaggeration, we have a lot compared to what other servers have done in the past, but fleshing out our setup will make a huge difference in gameplay quality. There about a dozen custom mobs implemented and another dozen mostly complete, but that is far below the number we were aiming for. In the original team we had someone who was going to dedicate themselves to making new mobs, but now we’re really hoping we can lean on the community for this one. /u/RedMag3 made some fantastic posts explaining how people could help by making MythicMob configs in these two posts. This would be the easiest thing for people to help with and can be done by anyone with the time to try figuring it out. If you’re interested I’d be happy to walk you through setting up an environment to testing MythicMobs on your machine, and Sharp can talk you through some examples using mobs we’ve previously showcased.

Setups

As of right now, we have yet to set up ExilePearl, RandomSpawn/World Borders, Player Essence, and FactoryMod. If anyone has experience with any of these programs we would greatly appreciate it if you could contact either I or /u/Sharpcastle33 (actually, probably just contact him). If we can get each of these plugins to a point where we can quickly configure them to our needs and preferences that would be fantastic. For ExilePearl, we’re not entirely sure how restrictive being exiled should be, so if you guys have suggestions on that front it would be appreciated, otherwise Sharp will just go with what he feels best and we’ll work from there.

As for FactoryMod, if someone wants to outline a config with most of what we need and leave us to change the recipes, it would save a lot of time. We’re looking to have the following factories: Delirium Refinery, Adamantine Refinery, Alloying Machine, Vessel Manufactory, Reinforcement Manufactory, Bastion Manufactory. (The latter two are only for the highest tier bastions and reinforcements)

If we could get a few comments on what you guys are looking to see out of RealisticBiomes that could really help speed things up. Right now, Sharp says he’s looking for RB to be on the more lenient side, especially with clay. There’s no sense in having players still struggle to feed themselves weeks after launch. We’re interested in having rare drops from crops from in some regions be what players are working for instead. In addition, there’s one or two new food mobs to hunt during the early game, and we’re quite interested in having more. These should help smooth out the play experience in the first week as well as make it easier for brand new players to acclimate to the server.

As for Brewery, it takes some time to set up and I’m not sure if it's worth spending that time before First Light. If any of you have a Brewery config lying around that we could use for the beta, send Sharp a PM.

Additionally, and for those interested, people can help out with some RecipeManager things, specifically we’re looking at putting together custom armor sets and the like. Any help with this would have to be very specific to ensure people are not exposed to info that could be sensitive.

Programming

There’s a good chunk of programming work that we could use help with. You do not need to be a part of the team, nor do you need to restrict yourself from playing to be able to help program. /u/Sharpcastle33 will happily set anyone willing to help up with some job that needs done. Most of our work is available on either the CivEx GitHub or Sharp’s personal GitHub, and open for players to contribute to via pull requests.

The programming jobs that need to be done now, in no particular order, are:

Alchemy:

• YAML storage of aspect values
• YAML storage of recipes
• YAML persistence of Alembics in progress
• Recipe functionality
• Potion functionality

Enchanting:

• Discord Orbs do not work as intended.
• Repair system needs to be implemented.
• Several enchants are untested and we could really use a full-scale test of the plugin before First Light.
• Enchanting needs to be merged with CustomDurability and our ArcheryEffects.

We’ll be testing all of our plugins for obvious mistakes to ensure at least basic functionality before First Light. We’ve done most of this as we’ve gone along, but there are still some areas of Enchanting that we haven’t gotten around to yet.

There are a few smaller problems, for example, Citadel does not accept reinforcements with custom names, and only allows custom items via lore. We’ll probably just work around this.

There’s quite a lot more content in the pipeline if you’re more interested in creating something new than fixing our current work. While it’s not needed for First Light’s launch, we’d absolutely appreciate some help here as well. It’s likely that you’ll be seeing some of this during First Light, but it’s not something we can promise yet. When we get around to them, they’ll be introduced through lore events, even if they are released during First Light.

Sensitive Stuff

These are the things that really need people who will not be playing on the map to attend to, thus only the CivEx staff team can really help with these. We are always open to people who want to apply for a position on the team, but bear in mind you will absolutely not be able to play on CivEx if you are. For some of us masochists that’s perfectly alright, and so shoot us a modmail if you’re interested.

• Placing the portals in the planned areas
• A few of the maps need to be cleanroom’d
• HiddenOre configuration is nearly complete, but it still needs to be done for the Jungle fracture
• All RealisticBiomes planning and configuration
• MythicMobs spawning configuration
• Info fragments
• Enchanting infusion costs
• RecipeManager Planning and Implementation
• MythicMob Drops and linking that to Alchemy Aspects (Mainly Planning)
• CropControl Planning & Setup