Build Week 93: Cruise Control, Rebirths, and Minecraft Moving Out 🚢⛏️

This Build Week is arriving fashionably late because I’m currently on vacation aboard a cruise ship. Apparently the ocean does not recognize my Friday publishing schedule. Rude. 🚢😂

I may be on vacation, but the projects apparently did not get the memo. Looking back at Saturday, August 15 through Friday, August 21, most of the action happened in the Minecraft corner of the workshop.

And by “action,” I mean servers moved into their own apartments, Hardcore was reborn for real, several gremlins were evicted, and I somehow managed to investigate server lag while preparing to stare peacefully at the ocean.

Normal vacation stuff.

CalvinEllis.Dev 👨🏽‍💻

CalvinEllis.Dev had a nice, quiet week.

• No new site features went out during this window.
• The portfolio kept doing its job without demanding attention.
• Frankly, it demonstrated a healthier understanding of vacation than I did. 😎

Sometimes the best deployment is the one where nothing catches fire.

CEPLS 📚

CEPLS spent the week doing what Kep does best: following behind all of us with a clipboard and making sure we remember what actually happened.

• The new Build Week Weeknote system got its first real workout.
• CEPLS recorded the completed split between Hardcore and SMP and their new independent server setups.
• Old temporary compatibility pieces were retired once the new setup proved itself.
• Several Minecraft decisions, fixes, and production results were reconciled so future-me does not have to reconstruct August from archaeological fragments.
• The operating rules also received some cleanup so the AI helpers have clearer lanes and better receipts.

The Weeknote experiment already proved useful while writing this update. I remembered this as a Quietly Sober-heavy week.

CEPLS politely opened the filing cabinet and replied, essentially, “No, sir. You spent most of the week arguing with Minecraft.” 📋😂

Point taken.

Gabby Road Trip 🚗

Gabby stayed parked at the rest stop this week.

• No new GitHub changes landed between Saturday and Friday.
• No imaginary accomplishments have been added merely to make this section look busier.

Gabby has snacks, a full tank, and plenty waiting on the roadmap. She’ll get moving again when it is her turn. 🚗💨

Bible Breeze 📖

Bible Breeze also had a quiet development week.

• No new code changes were published during this period.
• Existing work remained in place without needing a rescue mission.

Not every week needs construction noise. Sometimes leaving a project steady and undisturbed is exactly the right thing to do. 🙏

Quietly Sober 🐻

Despite what I initially remembered, Quietly Sober was actually quiet during this particular Saturday-to-Friday window.

Yes, the project finally lived up to its name. 😂

• No new Quietly Sober commits landed between August 15 and August 21.
• The large round of work I’ve been doing on accounts, privacy, data handling, settings, and deployment begins Saturday, August 22.
• I’m saving all of that for the next Build Week instead of borrowing next week’s homework.

So Tucker gets a short section this time.

Enjoy it, buddy. Your next newsletter section is not going to be this peaceful. 🐻☕️

Minecraft ⛏️

And then there was Minecraft.

Minecraft apparently saw every other project resting and said, “Fine. I’ll provide the entire newsletter myself.”

Hardcore and SMP finally got their own homes 🏠🏠

The big structural project finished this week.

• Hardcore and SMP became independent projects, each with its own source repository and production setup.
• Each server now has its own proper server and console-friend connection services.
• The temporary compatibility pieces used during the move were successfully retired.
• The existing worlds, player information, and normal connection experience were preserved.

In less technical terms: the two Minecraft servers used to share one very crowded toolbox.

Now they each have their own garage, their own keys, and considerably fewer opportunities to borrow the other one’s lawn mower without asking. 🔧😂

Rebirth finally rebirthed 🎉

The Hardcore Rebirth saga had been putting the “hard” in Hardcore.

There were failed attempts, guarded stops, missing pieces, misleading evidence, and enough detective work to qualify the server for its own crime procedural.

But this week:

• Several real causes behind earlier failed Rebirth attempts were found and corrected.
• The missing Hardcore add-on was restored where it belonged.
• Rebirth activity data was repaired so the right participation information could make the trip through the system.
• Restart verification was made more reliable instead of checking the server before it had actually finished waking up.
• And finally, Generation 5 completed the first fully successful Rebirth from beginning to end. 🎉

The new world became Gumdum Hardcore V, the database committed the new generation, and Herald successfully announced it.

After all the troubleshooting, Hardcore finally did what the feature name had been promising all along:

it came back from the dead.

Very on-brand. ☠️➡️🌱

We discovered “Hardcore” wasn’t actually Hardcore 😳

Then Minecraft delivered one of the week’s better plot twists.

The new world was called Hardcore.

The server was configured as Hardcore.

The add-on thought we were doing Hardcore things.

Minecraft Bedrock itself had another opinion.

Investigation confirmed the world was not carrying Bedrock’s actual internal Hardcore flag. The setting we had expected the server to honor simply was not how Bedrock creates a genuine Hardcore world.

So:

• The Rebirth process was corrected so future worlds explicitly receive the real Hardcore setting.
• The live Generation 5 world was repaired in place.
• The running world was then verified as genuine Bedrock Hardcore.

So Hardcore is now Hardcore.

This sentence should never have required this much engineering. 😂

The Chronicle countdown found its alarm clock ⏰

The in-game Chronicle countdown was reporting that its information was unavailable.

The Chronicle data itself was fine. Nobody had told the server to deliver it regularly.

A new scheduled relay was added and verified live.

The countdown now receives its updates automatically instead of sitting by the mailbox wondering whether anyone still remembers it exists.

The server went on a diet 📉

I also chased Hardcore performance.

One real inefficiency was found in the way saved Hardcore information was being processed. The server was doing the same heavy cleanup work twice when once would do.

That was fixed and deployed.

The measured result at idle was roughly:

• Before: about 760 MB
• After: about 260 MB
• Reduction: roughly 66%

Not bad for deleting the computerized equivalent of, “Okay, but let me check that entire thing again.” 😂

We also added actual lag measurements instead of relying on guesses and discovered a repeating slowdown tied to the Spawn Sanctuary maintenance cycle.

That investigation narrowed things considerably. One suspected cleanup routine was ruled out entirely, while the Sanctuary Bell remained in an “unsafe” condition that needs a future decision before we teach the server to automatically repair it.

The remaining slowdown has not been shown to hurt real players, so I stopped digging rather than turning one interesting measurement into a three-volume encyclopedia.

Sometimes engineering also means knowing when to put the shovel down. 🪏

The old application gate is really gone 🚪

One more important player-facing cleanup finished this week.

We had already decided that the old membership application/pre-approval system should no longer determine whether someone can enter the Minecraft servers.

Unfortunately, parts of the old enforcement were still hanging around behind the curtain.

That was traced down, corrected, deployed, and verified against the live system.

The result:

• Hardcore and SMP no longer reject a player simply because they do not have the retired membership application.
• The actual server behavior now matches the public admission policy.

One less invisible bouncer at the door. 👍

Bedrock Control Center 🎛️

BCC had a quiet GitHub week after its rather energetic debut the week before.

• No new BCC source changes landed during this reporting window.
• Existing dashboard work remained in place while most of my Minecraft attention moved to the Hardcore/SMP split and Rebirth work.

BCC basically sat in the control room drinking coffee while Hardcore repeatedly shouted, “I FOUND ANOTHER THING!”

Reasonable division of labor. ☕️😂

And that wraps the very late Build Week 93.

The code may have ignored my vacation, but I am currently on a cruise, so I intend to make a serious professional effort to spend at least a little time looking at water instead of server logs. 🚢🌊

No promises.

See you next Build Week.