Hello fellow CubeCrafters!

Welcome to this new Behind the Cube thread, where we will be talking all about Magic & Mayhem!
After the Spring RPG, we learned a lot about what the community wanted to see and we all worked really hard to make this an even better game, with many more things to explore and try out!



Within this project, the first thing we talked about was the storyline. What did we think would look cool, how could we jump in on small ideas we had, how are we able to present this best to players and how is everything going to flow together as one storyline? It took us a lot of planning and outside of meetings, the lead writers of the story would spend a lot of time in calls together, planning everything out in detail.

The page where the Storyline for this RPG was written contains a total of 2585 words! () This page includes ideas and final ideas that were actually put into the RPG! As you can see by the way everything is written, this is written as a concept and not a final product. We would discuss these in meetings and once it was greenlit, it would be worked out on a different board in our workspace.

Dialogue-wise, there were approximately 118 NPCs across 3 worlds, and then of course The Conjurer!
The tutorial alone, dialogue-wise, contains around 1500 words (including Cubit, everyone loves Cubit)!

Hello CubeCrafters!

We've just updated our biggest game on our network, EggWars! - We've made changes to our Bedrock EggWars rank which adds new exclusive cosmetics including generator skins. We've also added so many new maps for both networks, and we've added new game features, tweaks, map balances and tweaks and general Quality of Life features. This update is massive, read below to learn more!



To build the foundation of this update, we worked with our EggWars focus group team and community suggestions to create a good balance of new features, fixes & Quality of Life.

We've made some changes to Emeralds. We've removed the radius detector on Emerald generators, so they naturally generate Emeralds without you needing to be close to the generator. We've changed it so you can upgrade Emerald generators and most maps have more than 1 Emerald generator, one will always be level 1. We've also merged the Emerald shop into the main EggWars shop, into the appropriate categories.

We've also added enchantments for armour! - You can buff up your armour even more if you have Emerald tokens.

There are new Emerald token specific items:

• Ender chest - This allows you or your team to have your own private inventory.
• Elytra - One flight usage, so use it wisely.
• High-efficiency pickaxe - This allows you to break through blocks like butter.
• Sharpness sword & axe - This will allow you to slash your enemies even faster.

Along with the Emerald tweaks. We've also added a new system into our EggWars shop which will change your EggWars experience forever! Introducing Favourite shop items! - You can now select your most used items and have them pinned at the bottom of the EggWars shop. You have 3 load-outs, one for each gamemode: Normal, Overpowered & Hardcore. Your favourite items are saved and carried over into the same gamemode. You can add, remove or tweak your favourite items whenever!

Hello CubeCrafters!

Our Winter Event 2021 has settled at CubeCraft Games. Winter is our favourite period of the year, where gifts are shared, snowfalls arrive and trees are decorated. Here at CubeCraft, we love to go big on Winter, and we've achieved that again this year! - Our Winter Games have returned, our Winter maps including new maps have been added. We have an amazing Bedrock Winter Bundle, and an epic Winter hub with an advent calendar to share. Join us today and read below to find out more!



For this Winter update, we will be bringing back our popular game, Snowman Survival! - Bedrock only!

Snowman Survival is a fun game where the objective is to survive as long as you can, without the Snowman giving you frostbite! The game starts with 8 players, then the sacred Snowman performs a ritual and the starting Snowman is chosen. The remaining players are human survivors and have a brief grace period of 7 seconds to run away before the Snowman is released. Humans need to run and hide whilst dodging the Snowballs that the Snowmen throw! The first Snowman needs to throw his Snowballs at survivors, this will convert the Survivors into more Snowmen.

We've also added 2 NEW MAPS to the already existing maps for Snowman Survival!

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!