Here I am, sitting and trying to figure out what epic speech to write about how far we have come and about how excited we all are about season 8. And then my limited knowledge about the english language kicks in and I don't even know where and how to start. Bear with me as I try a thing or two:

If back then, when I joined spaceribs and we two developed the map you all know now (with a little help of a few other awesome people as p1lle and Pernidote), somebody told me that we are going to grow into a team consisting of 13 awesome people ... damn thats some cheesy and overused start into a speech ... alright ... lets try again:

What I am trying to say is: THANK YOU to the whole staff for all their hard work and believe in what it could be without actually beeing able to play it a lot. Because truth is, there was barely a playable version through the whole 13 months of development. We also had a lot of setbacks which had an impact on the motivation of the team. But we always managed to win it back. Also a big thank you to the community & donators for beeing one hell of a patient crowd. We know we did quite a few things wrong and definetly could be more interactive with you guys. But the chaos kinda denied doing that very efficiently. But in all that time we maybe lost like 100 survivors to the horde out of 1500. And I am sure they will come back in greater numbers. So yeah....you are a cool crowd :)

Yeah...I think thats enough, nobody wants to read a ton of sentimental shit....lets see some facts:

When and where does closed beta start?

Sometime today. More infos & server IP will be shown in the donators only subreddit.

What is the difference between the closed and open beta?

The closed beta will be for staff & donators only. Staff is also allowed to bring in a few friends into it. It will most likely last about 5-7 days. It will have limited features so we can focus on the right things to test and fix.

The open beta will be launched directly after the closed one with all the fixes we did during closed beta & more features. The length on this one is unknown. It highly depends on Minecraft 1.8 and all the plugins for that. Depending on how long that takes we either decide to wait until we can launch with 1.8 or if that takes too long we launch with 1.7.2(playable with a 1.7.4 client) and update to 1.8 while the season is running. Time will tell.

Closed Beta Changelog

Below are all the changes&features that will be avaliable during closed beta.

World

• Map size will be 4000x4000 blocks.
• Generator now does cityplaning instead of randomly placing buildings everywhere. (industrial, residential, highrise, etc. zones are a thing now.)
• 200 new schematics from our badass architect team. Massive variety, skyscrapers down to city parks and everything in-between. Huge amount of unique interiors to explore. (And we don't plan to stop building yet.)
• Nether and End worlds are disabled for closed beta because they aren't done yet.
• Improved sewers below the streets.
• Basic subway system below highways.
• About 80% of wooden doors in buildings are initially open now. A lot less door banging.
• Massively improved building decay.
• Due to the nature and state of the new Generator, there will be NO oceans on the whole world.

Difficulty

• Increased mob difficulty beyond the vanilla "hard" setting.
• A completely new & complex hostile mob spawning system to ensure better performance. We don't rely on spawners anymore.
• Added a lot of mob variations. (such as slow zombies that explode and poison everything in a certain radius upon death)
• Reworked the infection feature. Now less annoying but still deadly in certain situations. Also harder to cure.
• Food is harder to get. Overall aim is to make food the most valueable goods in the game.
• Agriculture nerfed. Farming needs good conditions to yield a good amount of food.
• You can now run out of seeds. Even with good conditions.
• XP Grinders nerfed. A lot less mob spawners and not as clustered.
• Mobs give less XP.
• Opening loot chests reward you with XP.
• Oredestribution nerfed. A lot less ores now.
• Difficulty/reward scaling. The harder the build/area the better are your chances for good loot.

Loot

• Completely reworked loot chests. There is a complex system behind the loot tables now.
• Nearly everything can be found in loot chests now. Even "god gear".
• Added special items in four categories: Uncommon, Rare, Legendary, Narcotics. All with uniqe stats/functions.
• Certain types of buildings have better chances for certain kinds of loot. (IE: A factory building has better chances to provide redstone related items, hospitals have better chances for narcotics etc.)
• Weapons, Tools and Armor can spawn in any condition.

Misc

• Withers can't be made by players anymore.
• Withers will be part of events or special locations.
• Fire Spread disabled. Still possible to burn items or single blocks, but fire won't spread over to other blocks.
• TNT & Gunpowder will be a lot harder to obtain.

Playerhider

Players are automatically shown as sneaking after a certain distance or when they are behind something, so now you'll never see a nametag through stuff anymore. No more going around finding underground bases but no more sneaking in your own base, too.

Realistic Chat and Cellphones

Chat is limited by range, you can whisper by adding parantheses, yell by adding these !!!! (try different amounts) or just talk normally. If you are lucky you might even find a phone. Using a phone is easy, just say the name of the person you want to talk to (while holding the phone) and if they have a phone it will ring. You can even have conference calls with up to 10 people (only the caller can add additional people). Also the issue with interrupting calls is fixed.

Radios

Another item you will encounter are radios. Radios can pick up on radio broadcasts sent out by radio towers. If they're strong enough you can even hone in on them.

Radio Towers

You're probably wondering how to build a radio tower so you can spam the aether. Well, just put a redstone torch on the side an obsidian block, slap a sign with a message on another side and pile iron bars on top of it until you reach your desired signal strength (there is a minimum of 5 ironbars above the obsidian block). Turning off the torch turns off the signal(as example with a lever).

Documentation/Help

Since the server dynamics get more and more complex we decided that we need some kind of way to introduce new players to the server. We decided that a lobby, how most servers do it, doesn't fit ours. So we came up with something we think will work great and not overload new players with informations. Most features will be explained as you play on. lets say you are new to the server and find a cellphone in a building. The lore of the item itself will contain informations about what exactly it is and how to use it (EXAMPLE). Of course we will still maintain the /help function for further information.

However there is still no proper documentation and the /help menu is still not updated. So some things can still be confusing.