I haven't written a changelog in quite a while, but figured one would be appropriate here. Note that if you intend to keep up with daily changes, you should most likely join the official Discord as updates are a lot more frequent there.

Changes I've made since the 1.14 upgrade:

Fixed countless bugs, including but not limited to:

• Players will no longer random spawn if they have a bed set
• Acid block activation ray tracing ignores non-opaque blocks
• Acid blocks return the reinforcement of the acid block when triggered
• Bastions regen no longer overheals reinforcements
• Harvesting crops from reinforced soil does not consume the soil reinforcement anymore
• Blocks adjacent to the one below an activated pressure plate can be opened by an authorized player
• Reinforcement lookup for Beds works (This is probably a work around for a spigot bug, need to keep an eye on this)
• Hitting stuff while in /cte properly reinforced
• /cte properly consumes from offhand when placing blocks
• Bastions prevent block placements as intended
• Reinforcements at negative multiples of 16 are loaded properly
• AAC was restored to full glory and now shits on fly hackers again
• Implemented custom Anti-Fastbreak which should mitigate Civbreak entirely
• Most likely fixed an issue that would randomly break all snitches on the server
• Fixed an issue that would duplicate all snitch logs in the database on restart
• Fixed an issue where people in the end could trigger snitches in the overworld and vice versa
• Maturing City Bastions will now be physically destroyed when broken by placements to prevent replacing them at no cost
• Fixed a bug that prevented the printing press from running
• Fixed a bug that messed up lore on printing plates
• Added new factory recipes to replace the lost wildcarding of durability for recipes like saplings
• Fixed a bug that caused prementioned recipes to not get added to factories properly
• Removed improper color tags in CivChat messages
• Fixed /ignoregroup not working
• Properly prevent members of a group from joining again via password
• VanishNoPacket wasn't updated, so we are now using SuperVanish
• CivDuties was upgraded to 1.14
• Superfriends no longer get teleported to 0,0,0 upon existing Superfriend mode
• Snitch logs now properly show time/date of entry
• As a bypass to 1.14 client side lagg, 1.15 clients can connect thanks to switching to a Bungee setup with ViaVersion
• /nl Permission GUI properly switches pages now
• Kira Relays can receive snitch messages again
• Mana commands work again
• /gc with an immediate message for the group works

Features added since and random other stuff:

• Reworked the /fm GUI, it should be a lot more intuitive and easier to read now. As part of that I also added modular inventory components, history tracking and radix style tab completion lookup Tries into CivModCore, which let us do stuff like that a lot quicker in the future
• Reorganized all issues into a github project tracker. This will be actively maintained and serve both as insight into what's being worked on and resource for wannabe devs to pick targets from. Feel free to comment on an issue if you intend to resolve it and require more information or have questions. Also if you are aware of a bug and it's not on there, I am not aware of it and it won't be fixed until I'm aware of it.
• Skynet is now provided server side, you can disable join/leave messages individually in /config
• Potion/Armor durability HUD are now provided server side in your score board, you can disable them individually via /config
• /jalist works now, but its a GUI and I kinda realized that doesn't really make sense. It'll be reworked into a session based chat approach eventually.
• Reclaimed our entries on the bigger voting pages in preparation for voting for mana. Unfortunately that required resetting the vote count on each of them, but it was a neccessary evil. Updated voting links are 1, 2 and 3.
• Added City Spawns according to the config here (Thanks Gjum)

Internal stuff that's note worthy but probably barely anyone cares about:

• Cleaned up all github branches, pruning old ones, merging all civ14 branches into master and then deleting them
• Ori made a reference repository for how Civ plugins should be structured here
• Did some general work on our style-guide and intend to reformat all plugins based on it
• Dan said we can use the Devoted jenkins to host binaries of our forks, which I'll set up some time soon (Thanks Dad Dan)
• Further advanced our AnsibleSetup, which is very cool. The live server does git pull on this before its daily restart and then automatically deploys any changes
• Added Crimsonblod as subreddit janitor

Gameplay changes:

• Mana is now called essence
• Essence claims automatically after 30 minutes of playing and logging out will no longer reset this timer, it is continuous
• Streak mechanics work the same way they did in MemeMana and preexisting streaks were ported over, but streaks are now capped at 8. Note that due to this your streak may actually go down slightly upon first claiming essence, because the 9th and 10th day are cut off
• After claiming your daily essence, you can not claim again for another 18 hours
• After these 18 hours you have 24 hours to claim again, if you miss that window it'll count as missed day with each successive 24 hours adding another day
• You can vote on three selected MC server listing pages to gain 1 essence per page per vote (I chose the top 3 based on SEO ranking. CivRealms also has planet-minecraft, but I personally think we should value google higher and planet-minecraft isn't up there)
• You can only gain essence from voting for the same server every 20 hours
• The amount of damage dealt to a pearl when decaying scales linearly with the login streak of the imprisoned player
• The health pearls gain from repairing is reduced if a player has been imprisoned for more than 270 days. If x is the amount of days the player has been imprisoned, then the cost to repair a pearl by the same amount is multiplied by max(1.0, x/270)
• Note that MemeMana is still running and you can repair pearls with any preexisting Mana. You will not gain any new daily mana though.
• /vote will display voting links and their relative cooldowns
• /streak will display your current login streak and when you can receive essence again
• Damaging a bastion will deal 0.5 times the damage dealt to the Bastion to all other Bastions within a 5 radius (center block 5) square around the bastion that were not already damaged by the initial damaging
• Damaging a city bastion will deal 0.5 times the damage dealt to the City Bastion to all other City Bastions within a 25 radius (center block 25) square around the bastion that were not already damaged by the initial damaging
• Slightly increased the damage dealt to a mature bastion from 1.0 to 1.1111111 (This means a player should need exactly an hour to break a bastion alone)

Noteworthy people that have been good over the past weeks (please appreciate):

• Crimsonbld
• Orinnari
• Diet_Cola
• shtim

Right now my mental road map looks like this:

• Cleanup github and codebase with style guide, setup Jenkins, CI, etc. while simultaneously fixing up coming bugs to not get too bored
• Do heavy feature dev and plugin enhancement for a while and burn throgh as many github cards/QoL improvements as possible, probably rewrite most of NameLayer in the process. Maybe merge Bastion into JukeAlert
• 1.15 or 1.16. Depending on how stable 1.16 is, how long it takes to come out, when I get bored of feature dev and how many detoxification breaks I have to take inbetween we may skip 1.15 entirely. These updates should be in line with the previous (non 1.13/1.14) ones regarding difficulty, meaning with enough coffee they can probably be grinded out in a weekend or two.

I want to stress again that at the current point suggestions for features or QoL improvements are very much welcome.

Finally I also want to lay out my thoughts here regarding why I don't think resetting Civclassic a desireable goal at the moment. I've had to explain the same at least five times in PMs and random Discords and would like to not further increment that count.

I feel like so far civ servers seem to have had a natural life time imposed by the plugins, the longer the server goes on the more stale everything becomes. Aside from XP/Bastion production (which mostly comes down to finetuning in your favorite scripting language), building a pretty city and building a vault, there is no lategame content, nothing to do really for people who have been around for years. This is especially true given that a lot of the lategame automation fancy stuff possible in vanilla are disabled on here due to performance reasons.

Further a lot of the people whom I'll call 'interesting' for the lack of a better word end up (perma-)pearled in unbreakable vaults. As a player I pearled Papa_Pound when he was a naked random and I'd do so again, but being able to do so is not healthy for the server, I should not be able to do that and just keep him forever without it even being an inconvenience.

Pearls in their current cost implementation are fundamentally broken. The changes announced above are an attempt at solving this problem, but we'll have to see whether it works out.

Further Bastions in their current implementation are fundamentally unbalanced and the above is the best bandaid fix I could come up with. A proper solution would in my opinion require restarting at the drawing board and coming up with something that'll definitely be entirely incompatible with a server that's been running for three years. Either way, educated thoughts on these topics are welcome.

The listed issues and multiple others not listed here are fundamental to the way we are doing things now and I think if we were to just reset the Civclassic map and continue with the same configs/plugins, we'd be running into these same issues eventually. It'd doom the map to be reset again in 2-3 years, at which point we might as well make an official schedule for that to not bait players into false assumptions of a permanent server (or one as long running as possible). Before the problems above are solved or at least significantly improved upon, I don't think resetting makes much sense.

The second big reason why I'm not in favor of a reset is that if I were to initiate it, its responsibility would be on me and I don't want to run a civ server de facto alone. Bagi and clouse are kind of active when something happens and you ping them, but they're not proactively fixing things (which I'm absolutely not blaming them for). I'd want at least one other person at my level of activity, dedication and competence and all of the people I could think of who could qualify for that are either running their own project/server or long gone/burned out.

When people are saying "Oh, Civclassic should just make new configs, some new plugins and a new map", they are de facto saying "Maxopoly should make new configs, some new plugins and a new map" and I'm not really feeling that.

The third reason is that I don't consider Civclassic unsalvageable and we shouldn't be throwing away civ maps on a whim. If Civclassic is entirely inactive in a year then this point becomes moot, but for now we can just wait a bit.