TL;DR

Our 1.16 update will happen when it does, we can’t give any good estimates yet. Some things will change, including: New Nethers for Survival, Nether Freebuild for creative, PureSurvival Reset and Carnival is going to be delayed until July 11th.

The Whole thing

As I’m sure you’re aware, updates often cause a bunch of headaches for servers – with many of the plugins we use to add extra features on top of vanilla requiring updates. We have started testing everything we use, and once we have an idea of how much is broken we will have a better idea of timings for updating servers.

However, with things moving slightly faster than we anticipated with 1.16, we’ve decided it’s best to push back the release of Carnival just a little bit so that we give ourselves time to prepare for 1.16 as well. The new release date for carnival will be July 11th.

In the meantime I can share what our plans are for the update in a little more detail:

General

• We will aim to allow backwards compatability with older versions of the game, so even after the update you could continue playing on 1.15.2 while waiting for optifine to update, for example.
  • Naturally, all the new features may look like other items, so things could get a bit weird, Hence we wouldn’t recommend playing on an older version – just want to let you know you’ll have the option.

Survival

• Survival will now have two Nethers
  • One for building (Building Nether)
  • One for resources (Explore Nether)
• In place of warps to each world, Nether portals will function again.
  • The Vanilla World and Building Nether will link via portals
  • The Explore world and Explore Nether will link via portals
  • The end will only be accessible through strongholds in the Explore world.
• The Explore, Nether and End worlds will all be reset with the update.
• We will add some of the new building resources to the token shop and server shop
  • Some items may not be added to the shops to encourage people to buy/sell the new items in player shops.

PureSurvival

• PureSurvival will receive a full world reset alongside the update.
• The old world will be made available for download.

Creative

• We will introduce a new Freebuild Nether world, to alongside the existing Vanilla, Flat and End freebuild worlds.

Skyblock

• If you haven’t seen our recent announcement, Skyblock will be closing on July 17th, and thus we don’t plan to update it to 1.16.1.