An Update!! (We're not dead) (Patreon)

Hey everyone! Oscar Payn here. I'm so sorry that it's been so long since we've made a post here. I'd like to take this post to sort of explain what's been going on this last 2 years and what we're working on right now. As well as prepare you all for some upcoming changes/refrehses to how we handle the Patreon going forward.

So first of all I think it'd be appropriate to do a little history on where the project's been lately.

So Aether II is the project I'm sure most of our Patrons are here to support, and it's been mostly dark for this period of time. As some of you may know our team was founded by the Minecraft modder kingbdogz, who at the start of 2020 actually was hired by Mojang to go work on the vanilla game! (Wooo very exciting stuff)

While this was incredibly exciting for everyone and an insanely awesome oppertunity for kingbdogz it did leave the Gilded Games team with somewhat of a leadership and talent vacuum that, due to Covid hitting almost immediately after, we really struggled to replace in a timely manner. In the end I tried my best to fill that spot and get the project back on track but I wasn't able to due to circumstances in my personal life, and the project ended up going quite poorly for a fair few months.

Luckily our wonderful community had a few contributors to our open source codebase who we decided to reach out to for official positions on the team, and slowly since early 2020 we've been rebuilding the team and the project. Starting from early this year we are actually in a position where we have resumed proper full on active development and I'm happy to say we've been making great progress on our current projects.

But wait... projects with an S? What are we actually working on? I'm glad you (meaning me?) asked!

We are actually currently working on bringing both Aether 1 and its sequel Aether II to modern Minecraft versions!

Starting with Aether 1, we're currently remaking our entire codebase to shed a lot of the technical debt and issues from past versions and working on new updates for the latest version of Minecraft (1.19 right now) and we've made some really amazing progress and have some exciting details to share with you all today too.

Aether 1 is recieving its first proper update in 10 years! We're focusing on primarily bringing numerous quality of life updates such as skyroot beds, boss rebalancing and updated items that bring the mod more in line with modern Minecraft standards, while also presenting a full refresh of the mod's art assets! Every single texture has been reworked to fit a new art style that should both feel more consistent with Minecraft's updated art as well as bring Aether 1 and 2 closer together in aesthetics. We really hope you all enjoy this new update to Aether 1 when it's complete!

But that's not all! We'll also be using this new codebase as the new platform for developing the mod's long awaited sequel, Aether II!

Aether II is still a project we are incredibly excited to continue working on, and on this new codebase we're expecting development to be much faster and more streamlined than before. But we also understand that the indev builds we've released so far for 1.12.2 have missed the mark in many key areas. So we actually have a video presentation going through common critiques of the current Aether II builds and outlining our content development plans for the mod going forward which you can find on the Gilded Games YouTube channel 

Key areas of improvement we're looking to focus on are Art style, NPC interactions, terrain generation, as well as what content we prioritise going forward with active development (this means that yes, we will be prioritising new Dungeon content as soon as possible!)

We're also looking to start supporting our Patreon much more than we have in the past. The new Aether 1 update will feature Patron exclusive cosmetic perks and our multiplayer servers will soon have integration for special roles and features. Which we are likely to make posts and polls around in the near future to get an idea for what sort of things you all would like from your membership.

On top of that I'm looking to begin publishing new Book of Lore posts on here as early access content for you Patrons! Which I hope will give plenty of teasers and hints towards future Aether II content.

Again I would like to personally apologise to everyone for the radio silence lately. This post is the end of that silence and we're hoping to have our most productive and engaging year ever now! I hope you will all stick around for the ride and help support us through it by playing the mod, joining our Discord community, playing on our multiplayer testing servers and making your voice heard as we shape this project together!

Make sure to follow us on Twitter
Join the Aether Project Discord Server
And check out the mod on Curseforge 

Thanks everyone for your time and patience. I hope to hear from everyone soon!

~ Oscar Payn, Project Lead and Community Manager for the Aether Project