You Are Invited!

You may have noticed a new little widget in the launcher under the official Technic packs.  We've added a new way to chat with us and join the Technic community: we've started a server on Discord.  We're huge fans of Discord- we love that you can join channels, even voice chat, just by clicking a link, we love how beautiful the UI is, and we love that you can start your own space to talk to friends, at no charge.

I used to play on a lot of Bukkit servers before I got into modded Minecraft, and one of the things I remember vividly is that people would team up to work together, and inevitably the very next thing someone would ask for after you joined them was your Skype information.  I hate leaving minecraft, starting up Skype, going through the process of adding someone, and getting a voice call started.  I think that Discord, where you can give someone a link and be chatting with them through your browser, without installing anything, without signing up for anything, is a great piece of technology that is awesome for playing Minecraft with friends.  We want to help you use Discord to play Minecraft.

Discord on the Platform!

We've added Discord integration to the Technic platform!  Now modpack authors can add a Discord Server ID to their pack, and that Discord server will be shown on both the modpack's Platform page, and also in the launcher.  Only a little information is available right now: in the launcher, you can see how many users are online and click the widget to join the server.  On the Platform, you can also see who's online and what channels they're in.  Later, we hope to add even more functionality, but right now, this should allow you to build robust communities around your modpack.

Discord on your Server!

We've created a new mod for Minecraft 1.7.10!  It's called MC Discord and it's a great tool for server owners to build in Discord integration on their servers.  You can use a console command to set your Discord Server ID, and after that, the current online Discord users will show up in the chat interface, and clicking on the user count will take you to your Discord server.  We hope to add far, far more features than these very soon, including chat integration, in-game calling, and more.  For now, though, this mod makes Discord a much better option than Teamspeak for server communities: you don't have to link users to the server or cajole them to join.  Just include MC Discord in your server's modpack, and configure the server correctly.  Users will see the server on their own and join.  Starting with Tekkit Legends, we'll be including MC Discord in all of our official modpacks, so that server owners can build their own communities around our packs more easily.  We encourage other pack authors to do the same, both on and off the Technic Platform!

Discord With Technic!

We've added our own Discord server, which you can get to here!  If you want to hang out and chat with other Technic users, or even get ahold of Technic staff, it's a great place to do that.  We've also taken advantage of the Platform integration we discussed above: official Technic packs will be integrated with our Discord server both on the Platform and in the launcher!  In-game, we won't link to our own server.  We want Tekkit server admins to build their own communities using MC Discord!

How to Get Started

First, head over to http://discordapp.com/ and click "Open Discord".  Then, click the + button on the left side to create your own server.  

Once you're done, open the server settings

and go to the "Widget" tab

Click "Enable Widget" and copy the "Server ID"

Change the "Instant Invite" channel to the text or voice channel you want people to be directed to

To add Discord to your Platform page and in the launcher, edit your pack and paste your Server ID into the field and then hit "Update Modpack"

To add Discord to your Minecraft server, make sure both the server and client have MC Discord and then type /discord-server as the server Op to link it

A Final Note

These days, it's hard to take endorsements seriously- it seems like every time one group is talking up another on the internet, some money exchanged hands or there's some kind of business deal in the works.  For that reason, I want to draw attention to something: we're not in any sort of partnership with Discord.  No money has changed hands, we're not getting anything in return for adding this integration or talking them up.  We just really, really, really like Discord.  We think it's going to make Minecraft more fun to play.  And as a result, we think that if we add integration, you'll like Technic better and play us more.  That's all there is to it.  We hope you enjoy playing with Discord and we hope that we can add a lot more integration over the weeks and months to come, so that you can get the most out of your Discord Server!  

Hey, everyone, I just wanted to take a second to let you know that Heroku's services have been restored, so our services have been restored.  Things seem to be working once again, so have fun!

Currently, Heroku, our upstream provider, is in the midst of an outage causing intermittent errors and slowdowns.  This issue is with their upstream provider.  This issue is currently affecting the launcher API and may be affecting the official Technic Solder intermittently.  We will keep you up to date as the situation unfolds.

It's coming...

A Quick Note About Blightfall Servers

In 2.1.3, we pushed a change to the Blightfall server.properties file.  Since server owners don't usually update server.properties, we figured we'd tell you about it.  We changed allow-nether to true.  This doesn't mean that the nether now works in Blightfall: it (intentionally) still doesn't.  However, using allow-nether=false to shut off the nether was also breaking other dimensions, like The Outlands.  That's been fixed, and you should also modify server.properties to fix it.

Speaking of Blightfall...

Blightfall 2.1.4 was released, which included an improved victory village, a lot of bug fixes, and a big buff to the Dawn Machine!  Check out the 2.1.3 and 2.1.4 changelogs!

We Released A New Launcher Version!

That's right, a brand new launcher version with some key fixes we hope you'll enjoy:

• Technic now allocates 512Mb of PermGen space when at least 6GB of RAM is allocated in the options.
• The pack icon is now set as the dock icon for Minecraft on OSX.
• A new tab has been added to Launcher Options: Video Settings!  You can now control whether Minecraft launches into fullscreen, as well as launch with custom windowed dimensions, from this new settings tab.
• You can also now disable the stencil buffer from this settings screen.  Some players on older graphics cards may need to do this to play some packs, including Blightfall.
• There was a little-known set of command line options for the Technic Launcher that would previously control Minecraft's window dimensions, etc.  Those command line options have been removed.
• The Blightfall teaser splash has been removed.
• Fixed a case in which solder-based packs with no java or memory requirements could sometimes fail to load.
• PermGen GC parameters will no longer be passed for Java 1.8+.  This will remove a warning message during startup.
• Technic will now select the G1 garbage collector on startup in Java 1.7+, and the Concurrent Mark Sweep garbage collector in Java 1.6 if at least 4GB is allocated.

Well, that's all for this week's update!  It's not much, but you'll be hearing from us again very soon.  Hit us up on our forums, IRC, or Discord to ask what's taking us so long!

This past week has been a blur for us, what with the Blightfall teaser, Blightfall release, and now the Blightfall post-launch patch!  But, that hasn't stopped us from working on the very next pack to come out!  We hope you're ready because it's going to be out in the next few weeks!

Blightfall 2.1.1

Blightfall 2.1.1 is out, and it fixes a ton of questing bugs, typos, and adds some really great improvements to the game!  The Spice of Life diminishing returns formula has been made more forgiving, the Spice of Life food buffer has been reduced from 250 haunches to 200, you get hungry slower than before, and we've changed the food requisition quest to give you a new type of food that is immune to diminishing returns!  We've also added a new POI to the map that you will receive even on existing maps!  Lastly, we've added a pair of cheats you can activate if you're uninterested in either the food game or Thaumcraft research.  You can find these cheats on the top floor of The Jaded, but you'll need Op (or need to know an Op) and you will have to break some glass to get to it.

This is probably going to be our last update for a few weeks unless something goes wrong.  We really hope you enjoy this post-launch pack update and if you haven't tried Blightfall yet, we hope you'll give it a shot.  It's absolutely our favorite pack that we've made.  You can check out the changelog here.

Some Launcher Hotfixes

Shortly after the Blightfall release, we updated the launcher to v4.313.  Here are the changes:

• The launcher will no longer fail to relaunch on Macs due to the PATH being unavailable.
• Fixed various crashes and issues with Twitch auth.

We also need to drive home the point that the Minecraft Twitch auth will not actually be fixed for you unless you uncheck "remember me" at the Technic login screen, and log in using your username and password once again.

Well, that's all that we're up to this week!  Keep an eye out for upcoming news about Tekkit coming out very, very soon!  Drop by and see us on IRC, the forums, or Reddit.  Let us know if you're playing Blightfall!