Update 1.37: The Migration

OCT 12 2026

Hello all,

In today’s update, we are officially updating the GunColony server to a new Minecraft version (from 1.17.1 to 1.21.11). Builders can now use new blocks to decorate maps, and many new gameplay mechanics become possible for GunColony to access. Many bugs in the previous versions are also fixed in the update, including Reliable Full-Auto and issues in the staff building system. We have also added new features to the server including making GUIs update dynamically and adding a chat filter.

We have also continued our game migration to the Place game engine: chest GUIs, player chat, tokens, and in-game toasts have also been migrated to Place, letting us remove 3rd-party plugins and reduce legacy baggage from our older codebase. We have also migrated our resource pack entirely to the new resource pack system, making all our gun assets standalone-compatible and fixing some issues in the pack. Overall, this update was a huge technical effort built with our future GunColony Standalone game in mind, and it will likely be the last Minecraft version update before the launch of the game, still optimistically targeting the end of this year.

You can still join GunColony with any Minecraft version above and including Minecraft 1.14, but blocks and entities from newer Minecraft versions will be replaced by placeholders. We recommend you to join with Minecraft 1.21.11 or newer. Also note that due to the sheer technical scale of this update, there are likely to be undiscovered bugs. Please let us know on Discord if you encounter unexpected issues in-game.

MINECRAFT VERSION UPDATE

GunColony has now been updated to Minecraft 1.21.11 server-side.

Even by itself, the Minecraft version update is a significant technical improvement that opens up new Minecraft features now available for us to include in future updates:

New blocks types, long-requested by the staff team and community.
New items, mobs, and vanilla game mechanics to leverage in-game.
Display entities.
New attributes, including the ability to change the size of entities.
New resource pack features, including more modular item models and flexible rotations.

It also should hopefully improve server performance due to Java updates (17 -> 21) and server optimizations.

After the update, GunColony will now require Minecraft 1.14+ to join, but we recommend 1.21.1 or newer to match the server version. It will also continue to support newer Minecraft clients up to the latest 26.3 version.

PLACE GUI MIGRATION

We have migrated all of GunColony’s chest GUIs into the new Place system, first announced last update (when the PVP map vote GUI was updated). As a result, we have added new dynamic features across GunColony’s various GUIs.

The Mob-Arena difficulty vote GUI now updates vote count when other players vote for a difficulty in the match.
The game join and map selector GUIs now update the map count, players in-game and other information live while the menu is open.
If a player’s loadout is edited while any Loadout Customization GUI is open, that GUI will now immediately update based on the changes without needing a reopen.

Other improvements to the GUI system:

When switching between pages in GUIs with multiple pages, a full GUI re-render is no longer needed and the GUI will update its items in-place instead (pun not intended).
- This also applies to reward items given in the Crate Opening GUI across multiple steps.
Fixed various minor typos and issues in existing GUIs.
- Notably, fixed the Competitive stats mistakenly saying “Games Played” when it should be “Rounds Played”

RESOURCE PACK MIGRATION

A while ago, we added a new resource pack build system to simplify adding new weapons to the resource pack, but that only covered new weapons and we did not migrate existing weapons. We have now completed a migration of all existing weapons into the system as well.

The result is a new resource pack that is significantly more organized and fixes various issues from the old resource pack version, such as broken textures/models and missing sounds. The names of weapon models, textures and sounds have also been standardized.

This update will require players with custom resource packs to update their resource pack layout to match the new format. This would be a significant change, but largely mechanical and results in better organization of resource pack files going forwards. In the future, we plan to make asset systems in the game available to the community (through either open source or a web portal) so that community members can create resource packs that update to new versions of GunColony automatically and which support both the Minecraft server and standalone game with one pack.

KNOCKBACK CHANGES

As a consequence of code improvements made in this update, we have added vanilla Minecraft knockback in GunColony gamemodes for vanilla damage sources.

Previously, mobs in Mob-Arena and players in PVP had vanilla Minecraft knockback turned off because we wanted to only apply our custom knockback on a gun hit. Now, due to code improvements, gun hits to mobs now no longer apply vanilla Minecraft knockback, so we can restore the vanilla knockback mechanic in these modes. This means that vanilla damage sources will now knock back the player or mob similar to in regular Minecraft.

Mob-Arena: mobs can now be knocked back by vanilla damage sources, such as custom items in kits, punching with a weapon, or Creeper and Bomber explosions
- Bosses and mini-bosses are excluded from taking vanilla knockback, because they are meant to only be knocked back by the boss’s target
PVP: players can now be knocked back by vanilla damage sources, such as… punching the enemy?

IMPROVED CHAT SYSTEM

In this update, we have migrated GunColony’s chat system to a custom one, entirely powered by Place Engine. This is another migration that prepares us directly for the standalone game.

Chat now uses the PlaceText text format. Donors and staff members can now add formatting to chat including RGB colors and Markdown-style
Updated the PlaceText format to prevent it from being overeager in formatting within words (for example words containing two semicolons should no longer be turned into italic)
- Now the formatting requires leading and trailing spaces, and the rules should be consistent with Markdown.
Added cross-server staff chat to staff members
Staff chat now supports text formatting as well
Removed three previous chat-related plugins now that the functionality is powered by Place
The chat system will be cross-compatible with our future standalone game going forward

IMPROVED DAMAGE TILT

Newer versions of Minecraft have enabled direction-based damage tilt feedback when receiving damage. However, this is problematic since unless the damage direction is exactly from the left or right of the player, the player’s crosshair will be knocked off center (basically client side aim-punch).

Due to this, we have added a new mitigation. In PVP, by default, the damage tilt will be restricted to left or right screen rolls depending on the direction the damage is received. (This is an improvement compared to 1.17, which rolled your screen to the right.) You can restore the 1.17 behavior or turn on newer Minecraft version’s directional damage tilt in /settings.

Note that in Mob-Arena, the new Minecraft damage tilt is enabled by default (unmodified from vanilla) because we think the hit feedback improvement this provides is worth it compared to the client-side aim punch. If you do not like it, you can turn it off in /settings.

OTHER CHANGES

Migrated in-game toasts (for example the one shown on a new wave in Mob-Arena) to the Place Game Engine in a standalone game-compatible way, removing an external API plugin we used to use for them
Migrated tokens to the Place Game Engine similarly, removing an external API plugin

BUG FIXES

Various bugs from the past version were fixed during the update process, partly due to AI agent workflows spotting them incidentally while working on other tickets.

Fixed a bug where some Mob-Arena mobs and bosses with custom speeds were not properly applying their movement speed modifier
- Note: this only affected legacy mobs supported by Mob-Arena itself, rather than those added by Place. The Place mobs (formerly MythicMobs mobs prior to the last migration) always had the correct speeds
- This might result in a significant difference in difficulty in some Mob-Arena maps. For example the Steed mobs spawned by bosses will be slower, leading the boss to move slower when riding it
Fixed a bug where leveling up to Level 104 did not give a token reward due to a typo
Fixed a bug where the token range paid out by crates displayed slightly higher than what was actually paid (it should be accurate now)
Fixed a bug where getting enough XP to level up multiple levels would only level the player up once until some XP is gained again
Fixed a significant memory leak issue where Mob-Arena maps that ended on a boss wave were not properly removed from memory, including their map worlds
- Fixed several smaller memory leak issues as well

We have also separately fixed other bugs in GunColony in the lead-up to this update.

Fixed a very long-running bug where staff members could not join Mob-Arena arenas in progress, but both admins and normal players could join it normally
- This was caused by Essentials teleporting players to spawn upon joining the Mob-Arena server. For regular players Mob-Arena would block the teleport, and for admins the teleport. Fixed by removing auto spawn teleport on join
Fixed new players falling into the void in spawn since the spawn height was raised (thanks Quinci)
- Previously only the spawn location for non-newbie players was updated

DEVELOPMENT PROGRESS UPDATE

During the last three months, we have been very hard at work on GunColony migrations and especially on our novel LLM-assisted development tooling. We think that leveraging this new tool will allow us to bring our game to everyone for free, make it more customizable for modders, and to further optimize them for low-end devices so that GunColony can be enjoyed without expensive gaming hardware.

Specifically, we are taking a very leverage-focused development approach that frontloads effort in our development tooling in order to speed up our future development. Specifically, we are developing Kotkit, an agentic management environment that makes human oversight of AI more efficient. This tooling-centric approach requires specific assumptions to be worth it (namely, that we are sufficiently competent at turning AI into a trustworthy assistant for real work and that our future game is sufficiently ambitious), but we believe that we have made the right bet which is now starting to visibly pay off.

The completion of our most recent update is a promising indicator: it spanned over 70 tickets (coding tasks) and touched over 1 million lines of code, configs, and resource pack files at a high standard of quality that I have tried to ensure through diligent management and custom tooling. If in the following days the in-game reliability holds up, that will be evidence that we will be able to use the same tooling to successfully build a reliable, performant standalone game in the near future.

At the same time, we are less comfortable with AI use when game design and art are directly involved, so our bandwidth in these areas will continue to be limited. We believe that the best way forward is to use AI to speed up the mechanical parts such as building a game engine, in order to provide the technical groundwork that the community can build on top of to create the best version of GunColony we can envision together.

As for the status of our custom tooling, Kotkit is nearing launch with over 1,340 tickets created and over 1,150 completed so far. Besides Kotkit, which will be soon launched in open source to aid people developing other projects and give back to the developer community, we are now also starting to build more advanced internal tools, including a particularly ambitious general-purpose AI system called EY-AI, which you might hopefully be seeing more of in the near future. We hope to use these new tools to accelerate our development and build a high-quality game that the community deserves.