For the holiday season, brainbendjr, Frozah, Monkgyatso and I have prepared a holiday-themed spawn on the new world. It contains a spawn and drop party building, a bank that can exchange all forms of currency, a warps building, a server shop, and a rules and FAQ building. Each spawn building has a large wool label above it in the corresponding color.

We enabled the mod Vending Blocks to replace the buggy trade-o-mats. Vending Blocks display the item to be sold inside a glass case and show a tooltip indicating the owner, items to be traded, and amounts of the items. The only drawback is that they have a very limited inventory (9 spaces) so they have to be restocked often. Trade-o-mats may be re-enabled in the future if a newer tested build of IC2 is released.

All donation ranks and abilities from the Tekkit server will be carried over to the new server. Although some functions and commands may not work on the new server (/md) I will try to fix them as we move forward. I am even looking at creating a new rank above Captain. Stay tuned for updates on this!

As Minecraft updates, new modpacks are created, and the old ones are left behind. This pack will be implemented differently, with updates to it for new Minecraft versions and replacements for non-functioning mods. If we have to replace mods, I will try to warn people in advance, and if possible, keep the ID's of replacement items and blocks the same as the old ones to create a smoother update experience. That being said, I will begin putting together the 1.6.4 version of the pack after the new server is launched. Unfortunately, Thaumcraft 3 is no longer being updated, and we must switch to Thaumcraft 4, which changes a large amount of things. Until the 1.6.4 update, I advise players to avoid exploring Thaumcraft 3 too deeply, as you may lose your progress and items when we replace it with Thaumcraft 4.

We host all our pack files on Dropbox, which is pretty fast, although players with slow internet connections may experience increased download times. Since the pack is not an official pack, we cannot release small updates with only the changed files through the launcher. To help players with slower internet connections, I will try to create small downloadable patches that can be installed instead of redownloading the whole pack. I'll post a link to the first patch when it's ready.

In the Tekkit server, we felt people were too spread apart, meaning we had a strong dependency on warps and a near infinite amount of resources, and we saw each other less often. In this server, we have a very small world border (a radius 275 blocks from spawn), creating a competition for resources and space. It will also encourage civilizations and a better usage of vertical space.

Idonoghue had the great idea of making tech trees in which players or clans would unlock items and new technologies after completing certain milestones or accomplishments. We haven't had time to create the trees yet, but we should be starting to create them as I complete the other things on my to-do list.

This server will have the largest and most finely-tuned LWC protectable blocks list and GriefPrevention protection list we have ever had. Access to nearly all protected blocks can be given with /containertrust <player>. LWC protections can be created with /cprivate.

We will all be starting with 10 credits. As such, credits will be much more valuable in the beginning than they have been in the past. Voting rewards have been reduced, and they are likely to be reduced even further to make the value of IC higher. I'm still working on making mobs drop credits, so I'll let everyone know when that's finished.

We will be doing computers a bit differently than we have in the past. Instead of unrestricted crafting of computers or buying computers in a computer lab, there will be an application on the website that you will have to fill out and have approved. Due to the way the new ban plugin works, you will not be able to pick up or place computers, or have them in your inventory. This fixes the different crafting tables that bypass crafting bans. As such, all crafting tables are unbanned, unlike on the Tekkit server!

We have had problems with microblocks intersecting, which have led to problems rebuilding the Starbase in the new pack. Until I get microblocks fixed, the Starbase will be unavailable.