Exciting times await! Minecraft 1.9 has been released, so we’re all getting ready to leap into the update process.

But before we get into the details of that, I’d like to welcome our new developer, @Windy! Windy has worked with plenty of our team members before in the Spout Project. He brings with him a great deal of development experience, and we’re glad to have him on the team.

We also appreciate any donations that you’d like to contribute through our Patreon. All your donations and FLARD will help to support our goals of creating an awesome free and open source modding API.

Downloads

If you need help setting up Sponge, check out the Documentation here:

https://docs.spongepowered.org/en/server/getting-started/implementations/index.html

[spoiler=Disclaimer]

We recommend using Recommended Builds wherever possible. If you wish to use Latest Builds, please read the following:

Latest Builds are the bleeding edge of Sponge Development and can be experimental and/or unstable. If choosing to migrate existing worlds, WE HIGHLY RECOMMEND DOING A BACKUP FIRST. Additionally, we recommend performing frequent backups of the server in order to minimize any potential damage caused by bugs.

Latest builds are meant to be used to test plugins in a development environment or to try out experimental features and/or bug fixes. If you want to ensure a stable server, please use the declared Recommended builds instead. When we believe a particular build is stable enough for general use, we will promote it as a Recommended Build. We are not responsible for any permanent damage done to your server, software, and/or it’s data.

[/spoiler]

Development

While Sponge will be updating to 1.9 soon, we won’t be neglecting those of you who wish to still use Minecraft 1.8.9, as such we will be releasing API 4.0 as the final update to 1.8.9. This update contains several breaking changes, but adds in plenty of new features so that you can make the most out of your server. We may provide additional support for 1.8.9 after we transition to 1.9 with security backports, though this is unconfirmed.

Eager to use Minecraft 1.9? We have good news for you! As soon as we move to 1.9, we will be declaring API 5.0, with support for the majority of feature additions. In fact, API 5.0 already exists, we’re simply awaiting the MCP release to get our implementation out there.

SpongeVanilla will be the first of our implementations to be update to Minecraft 1.9, as we will begin work on it right after MCP updates. We have good reason to believe that SpongeVanilla for 1.9 will be ready within approximately a week of MCP’s release, though we will not be providing an exact date. We’ll be sure to let you know via Forums, IRC and Social Media once we have a release out.

SpongeForge will take a little longer to bump to 1.9, as we must first wait for Forge itself to update. However, since the hard work of updating SpongeCommon and SpongeAPI should be mostly complete by that stage, we believe that an update won’t take too long to complete once Forge is out. This means that you won’t have to wait long to be able to experience the versatility of Sponge on your 1.9 Forge servers, whether modded or not.

Forum Changes

As some of you may have noticed, we’ve made some changes to the Forums in order to make it easier for new and existing users to access all the major aspects of the project, including: Docs, Github, Chat (IRC), Downloads and About us. We hope this change improves site usability for everyone, but please let us know if you have any suggestions or criticisms, as we always appreciate feedback.

Plugin Competition

The Sponge Plugin Competition is still open, if you’d like to give plugin development a try and enter in the running for some cool games, be sure to check it out!

Documentation

Change is afoot, work continues apace, and we’re taken aback by the grand contributions that arrive. Many thanks to Windy for writing docs in parallel to the TextTemplate PRs, we hope this verbosity is repeated by other developers

When API 4.0 is officially released, the SpongeDocs will also bump to 4.0. That means a big old sack of pending PRs will get poured upon the docs, and a whole lot more things will need to be double-checked and reviewed. Help is always welcome around the #spongedocs IRC.

We plan to roll together all 3.1 changes and keep that as a static branch for legacy purposes. (This does mean there will be no 3.0 docs branch, as that API will be unsupported).

In our efforts to allow older branches to continue to have access to updated translations, @Tzk has been working with the current buildscripts. Work still remains to be done, however through @Tzk’s efforts, we have a proof of concept hosted here: http://tzky.github.io/test-repo/

State of Sponge IX

Get excited for SoS IX, the next edition of our awesome livestream is to be broadcast on the 5th of March at 21:00 UTC.

Thanks to the awesome work of the SCS team, we’ll be able to demonstrate the capabilities of both SpongeVanilla and SpongeForge in Vanilla and Modded configurations. Tune in to check out the cool new features and ask the Sponge Team any questions you might have!

Questions can be submitted on this thread, tweeted to @ SpongePowered on Twitter or asked via Twitch chat, we’ll do our best to answer whatever you’d like to know about the project.

You’ll be able to join us at: http://www.twitch.tv/SpongePowered