We're coming back, and we have a new website under development at: http://beta.skelril.com/! :)

As some of you may have heard, I've recently quit modding, and MineCraft in general. As such, there is no one with the skill, or the time, to maintain the systems, keep everything work, and continue to implement new features, as well as fix bugs. Due to this unfortunately, this marks the end of Skelril's MineCraft servers -- maybe we'll be back someday, darkkrai13 has expressed some interest, however, his coding skills are not yet adequate.

It is unkown when the servers themselves will be taken down, in the interest of allowing people to have fun until they are taken offline, all existing players have been granted infinite Skrin. This means you can buy anything from the Market, and go play with any cool toy you would like! :)

If you would like to read my official goodbye to the MineCraft community, you can read it here on the Sponge Powered forums:
http://forums.spongepowered.org/t/goodbye-and-good-luck/2794

It's been fun guys, it really has,

Dark

Skelril will be moving to a feature freeze until further notice. Unfortunately, some drama in the MineCraft community has lead to the shutdown of Bukkit. This has put us in quite an awkward spot. Development will resume, however this may take some time, as I will likely be working with several others on a "next-gen" minecraft server software, and porting several projects to said next-gen server software. Additionally, our content will be ported, though this may take some time. As such, until the new server software is developed, and everything is ported to the new system, Skelril will stay on MC 1.7.10.

It is possible that Bukkit will come back due to counter suites from Mojang & Spigot, however, these things appear unprobably at the current time.

For more information on this, please read sk89q's post here.

It's no secret that the server is not the booming metropolis that we envisioned we were constructing our current system two years ago. In fact, in many ways it's fallen short... We've tried to do too much, arguably, what we have done, we've done well, improving as we go. However, as shown by our player count, this is not good enough.

As you might have inferred already, I'm making the decision to end the current 7.x series of Skelril. It's been quite a long time since people just got on Skelril and... had fun. Admittedly, even I have grown tired of the server, it's just not fun anymore.

This server was created with the intent of some friends getting together, and having fun, really just building in a world. However, we've since drifted from that initial vision. Truthfully, it's been in talks for some time now that we should restart, I've pushed it back delaying things in hopes of the modding API, but at this point I just don't care. When the admins can't even stand behind their server anymore, what does that really say?

To answer my own question, I don't know what it exactly says, but, it's nothing I'm proud of. So, now we get down to how we're going to rise from the ashes. Our current bi-world model will be dropped, there will no longer be a City, or a Wilderness world. This often lead to confusion since you could build in both to some extent, but neither actually just let you build... In the City you were faced with the frustration of seeking out plots, and despite my best efforts, there really is no helping that system, it's not something that can be handled by an algorithm in a fashion that makes sense for what we were doing.

To replace this system we will have five worlds. The first world will be a world which is more or less a giant dungeon. The dungeon will feature the Market, various bosses both old and new, and some minigames. Essentially, this will be the hub of our server. The dungeon will also feature portals to three other worlds. These worlds will consist of one mining world, and two building worlds, with the inaccessible world being used for instanced bosses, and minigames.

You may be wondering, why two bulding worlds...? The answer to that is actually simpler than you might think. Most people don't like losing all their progress on the server to a MineCraft update. So, one world will be for the current game version, and one will be for the last version. The exception to this will be at initial release of this update, but, generally, the old world would be kept to make sure that you had time to migrate your stuff to the new world. Essentially, the old world will be kept as a buffer.

Both of these building worlds will be very different from anything we currently offer. They will not have hostile mobs, they will be PvP on a per player basis thanks to an adaptation of Skelril's Global PvP system. This PvP is intended to be used primarily for friendly fights, although "unfriendly" fights will be permitted between those whom have in enabled. Additionally, griefing will not be permitted in these worlds unlike the current Wilderness world. They're intended to be used to bring us back to that initial concept of building with friends, and just enjoying the game.

In contrast, the mining world will be very similar to what we current have for our Wilderness, with some minor tweaks.

It is anticipated that even though there will be a drastic reduction in the quantity of hostilities which one is forced to fight on the server, players who wish to seek out such fights will find more than adequate, and fun challenges in the dungeon world. It is my intent to provide instanced fights, and minigames in this world.

In this way, we will be able to provide our builders with equal treatment to our PvPers and PvMers. There are not currently any plans for areas like the Cursed Mine to be adapted to this new system. However, that may change.

The server is anticipated to come back online for all players August 10th, 2014. Thanks for your continued support!

EDIT: Due to delays the server will not be available for all players until August 13th, 2014.

We're back, BeastNode has given us completely new hardware which should be more stable, and should end this crashing once and for all!

In addition to that, I've got some really exciting news! Sky Wars beta is under development, and it's progressing well. The new minigame while currently available to admins only should be available to the rest of you very soon. This is a 100% unique minigame that no one else has made before. Get ready for awesome battles of the sky!

Due to the occurrence of yet another crash on BeastNode's side, we're being moved by BeastNode to a brand new physical server. Due to this, we're currently keeping the server offline to prevent damage to our data, and to prevent more unreliable game play. Once we are on this new server, we should no longer experience these crashes.

We apologize for any problems that this may have caused!

A lot has happened recently in regards to the server. While there certainly hasn't been an abundant burst of content updates, there has been quite a bit going on behind the scenes. As many of you are aware, we've recently been having substantial issues with our long time hosting provided BeastNode. These issues have somewhat diminished our reputation of being a lag free, and reliable MineCraft server.

After working with BeastNode to resolve these issues, I am happy to announce that the issues have been resolved, and our MineCraft server is far more powerful than it ever has been. In fact, BeastNode, in light of our recent troubles with server instability, cut us a deal which allowed us to double the amount of RAM that the server has to work with. For those of you whom may not know what RAM is, I will explain what this means for us.

This new RAM allows our server to generally run even smoother than it ever has. The reason for this is, while the server cannot think any faster than it could before, it now has more places to put information that it is working with. This means that calculations which we previously didn't have enough RAM to complete efficiently, such as rapidly generating portions of the world, can now be done without putting a large amount of strain on the server, thus increasing our stability.

As a side effect of the instability we faced over the past month or so, I've also been doing a lot of work on the backend of Skelril's mods. Our mods are now more efficient, and better written than they have ever been. Several scripts have been optimized, and the code quality in general has significantly improved.

You're probably wondering why you should care about the code quality improvements. The obvious reason, of course, is the optimization, and speed. However, this is far from the full story. One such example of how these code quality improvements will show benefit is in the new special attack system. The improvements to code quality have opened new doors in the types of things special attacks can do, and how they can interact with other code. This means that there can be some really new cool stuff made, which is what I imagine you really want to hear!

Additionally, we've been working on getting the guilds up and running as best we can. Both the Ninja & Rogue guilds have had a vast improvement to their feature set. Improvements, and new additions include, Ninja's "Smoke Bomb" ability, and Rogue's "Blip." Features like these, among many other improvements to the guilds mean that there is no better time to seek out membership with one of these two fantastic guilds.

On top of this, I've initiated a project to create much needed and missing documentation for existing areas, minigames, and just generally whatever needs it. While still in it's infancy, several features previously undocumented can now be read about on the Server Documentation page.

Here's to 2014, and everything it may bring! I look forward to another fantastic year, and the potential release of... THE OFFICIAL MODDING API! That's right, 2014 is the year Mojang is targeting to bring us the modding API that they've been talking about for so long! Rest assured, when it is released, we will take full advantage, and our Custom Items will become true MineCraft items, not to mention the addition of some fun blocks -- which we currently cannot make!

Also, don't forget to wish co-owner RichRick18 a happy 19th birthday!

EDIT: BeastNode has resolved yet another issue, apparently the SSDs which power the server had degraded, and thus were causing a severe performance hit.
EDIT: The host (BeastNode) has replied and cited the issue as being caused by faulty RAM. The server crashes should be resolved.

Due to the high number of recent server crashes that have occured, I decided it would be best to inform everyone exactly what is going on.

The problem does not actually lie in our software/mods or general demand on a computer. Our code is heavily optimized to be as efficient as possible, and we currently use Spigot which is perhaps the lightest weight implementation of Bukkit. Unfortunately, our host, BeastNode has had several instability problems recently, and as such this has been creating unusual lag spikes, and unpredictable server crashes. These crashes would occur regardless of our server's load, and as such we have a limited number of approaches we can take to solve them.

I have requested information from BeastNode about the recent instability, and I will follow up here when I get a response. I am hopeful, that these issues can be resolved, and we will no longer have to worry about the instability in the weeks, and months that follow. If that however is not the case, we will likely be seaking out other options for our hosting solution.

Appologies for the inconvience,