Hello CubeCrafters,

In this Behind the Cube, we will be exploring how our regions work behind the scenes, and the struggles that there are to actually be able to incorporate regions into our servers.



One of the goals we have with CubeCraft is to ensure the best experience for all players, no matter where you are in the world. This means that we need to ensure we have multiple countries with our servers in them, due to how the internet works - like a road network, the further away you are from your destination, the longer it takes to get there. This is called latency (or, more commonly, ping) and is easily measurable. You will have seen it in-game via the "green bars" you see on the server lists or tab list. Lower latency means the gameplay is smoother, less jittery and overall more satisfying for players.

On the surface, it seems simple to take servers and just put them in new regions. However, when you grow to the size of CubeCraft, you start relying on dozens of systems, some of which can easily be taken and moved, others which cannot You can imagine that it becomes tricky and cumbersome to do it whilst maintaining all features on the network, and more often than not requires a re-write of several core systems.

As a company, we have managed to overcome these challenges and we now have three regions around the world: our European region in Northern France, our North American region near Montreal in Canada, and our Asia region in Singapore.

Each region is connected to the other two regions with private transatlantic and transpacific cables from our datacenter provider - these provide a stable connection between the region which we extensively use to make cross-region gameplay possible as well as for data replication and many other tasks that require connecting between regions.

Here's a simple map that shows the way our locations are interconnected around the world:





As you may know, whenever you connect to CubeCraft, we try to send you to the best region for when you are connecting from, without you having to use a region-specific IP. We do this through something called DNS - the Domain Name System, which is responsible for making sure when you type “google.com” into your browser, you get sent to Google.

You might have noticed that our solution sometimes got things wrong, and you’re right. We originally were maintaining a list of countries and continents, then mapping them to what region they should be sent to manually. This wasn’t always the best as it required us to keep the list up to date and regularly issue changes when we noticed players weren’t being sent to the right places.


We’ve since changed to doing it via something called geoproximity - we use software to generate a map of all our regions and the countries that should connect to it, and then send you to the region you match up with on that map. Since we’ve moved to this system, we’ve noticed that significantly more players have ended up in the right place, and so we’ve decided to stick with this methodology of routing players for now.

Hello CubeCrafters

This is an update to this thread regarding our removal of pre-1.16.200 versions. For the past year, we've supported all the way down to 1.16.100, and since then you have been able to join the network from that version onward. However given current circumstances, it's no longer viable for us to continue supporting 1.16 versions.

With this being said, we will be removing support for all 1.16 versions on November 30.



We understand that some people may be upset with this change, however, it is no longer sustainable for us to continue supporting this version any further. We've held onto 1.16 a lot longer than we typically do any version, and initially reversed our removal of 1.16.100 & 1.16.200 due to feedback from the community. But since then, 2 new Bedrock versions have been released with 1.18 coming on the 30th, and the number of people playing on 1.16 versions has dropped dramatically. The more versions we attempt to support back, the worse the playing experience and the more difficult it becomes to maintain them.

Some of you may have noticed some obscure issues popping up on these older versions, such as the inability to break blocks at times or the lobby items being invisible. This is purely due to the nature of these versions becoming more of a technical burden and it not supporting newer systems created on our network due to its age or lack of features. The game itself is rapidly advancing, and we want to move on with it too.



1.16 versions actually make up a very tiny number of people on our network.
On Friday, November 19 where we peaked at 23,000 players, only 266 of those were using a 1.16 version. This makes up roughly 1% of our total online players. Looking at 1.16.100 specifically which tends to have a much more vocal demand, our statistics show that within the span of a week, the highest it peaked at is around 25 out of 30,000 overall players. To put it into perspective, this makes up 0.08% of our Bedrock network.

Here is a visualization of the player count on 1.16.100:
Given these numbers, it doesn't make much sense for us to continue holding back this far considering how few people actually play on this version.

We are aware that some people encounter worse performance on newer versions due to the introduction of Render Dragon, or issues such as the "pink glitch". We do, however, have a solution for that!

Following the instructions mentioned in our HelpDesk article here, you can get an x86 build of Minecraft Bedrock which does not use the Render Dragon engine. Keep in mind that you will need to be signed into an Xbox account that owns the game in order for this to work. Using this build should make the game run at a comparable rate as it did on 1.16.100.

If anyone has any questions or concerns, we're happy to answer them! Thanks for reading!

Hello everyone!

We are excited to share with you all that the Quality Assurance team has been revamped! This has taken a few months in the works and we're super excited to share this with you all! Read on to see what the revamp entails!


One of the reasons for us revamping the Quality Assurance team was to combine responsibilities and add new responsibilities to the team! Before the revamp, the Quality Assurance team had to test Marketplace maps and games. With the revamp, we're adding the extra responsibilities:

• Bugs - I'm sure you agree that finding bugs on the server is always a pain. They're always ruining your experience and it sucks! Now, the QA team will all be trained to report bugs internally as well as to our development team to ensure that these bugs are being made known to everyone.
• Server QA - One of our major goals in 2022 is to provide our wonderful players with the best experience possible - and this can only be achieved if our updates take a bit longer to develop, and are QA'd a lot! This will be done by our new Quality Assurance team.

What this means is that the Quality Assurance team makes sure you, the player, are having the best experience possible on every platform. The Quality Assurance team will test out Marketplace maps and games, but they will also test out new games and updates on our networks, and they will forward reported bugs to our developers.

Our current Market QA team has done wonderfully with reporting bugs and forwarding them to our Behaviour and Redstone team for Marketplace, and their knowledge will be extremely useful for us as a server to utilise too!


To divide workload and knowledge, @Joëlle and @Marieke2001 have both been assigned to lead the Quality Assurance team. Joëlle will be responsible for the Marketplace side of Quality Assurance, while Marieke will lead the Bugs team together with Server Quality Assurance. If you have any questions about the role and what it entails, feel free to send either of them a conversation here on the forums!


Due to these rather big changes to the Quality Assurance team, the application process had to be reviewed and adjusted where needed. Application threads have been updated to fit better into the new team. We have listed the changes that happened in the Quality Assurance application thread.


While the Quality Assurance revamp was being discussed, the decision was made to create a rank for the team! Previously there was no way to recognize a Quality Assurance team member in-game, so the rank should give more clarity and visibility about this important role!


Has this thread made you excited about the Quality Assurance team? Do you want to help out by testing and giving feedback on games and updates before they're released, before everyone else? Would you like to help out with bug reports and testing? Go ahead and apply HERE!

Hello CubeCrafters!

After months of testing & perfecting our regions system, we're ready to take things a whole step further and bring a smoother CubeCraft experience to even more players! - On Java & Bedrock



We've left a few hints to this over the past week - some of you may have noticed reduced ping to our servers, a different MOTD and a totally intentional region appearing on the region selector, cough cough.

We've been running tests on Asia games all week, and we're now happy to officially launch the region! This wouldn't have been possible without our new Production Operations team's hard work.



Just like we said when we released our North American regions - when you connect to CubeCraft, you automatically join the region closest to you with the best ping! For example, if you're in Germany, you'd go to our EU region, but if you're in Malaysia, you will go to our Asia region - basically, what has a better connection to you. When joining a game, we also try our best to put you on a server that's in your region.

Remember, at quiet times for some regions, we might start sending you to games in regions where there are more players, so don't be surprised if you're sometimes sent to European or North American games!



We've made some slight changes to the lobby selector to make it more clear what the regions are:

Thanks for reading; we hope you have an awesome time on our brand new AS region! Stay safe.