CubeKrowd

Community: Powered by Velocity

Sun, 05 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

CubeKrowd now uses Velocity as it’s backend proxy. We did this migration primarily because Waterfall (our previous backend server type) has been deprecated by the folks at Paper in favour of their newer, home-grown proxy Velocity.

We also hope this change will allow us to use more modern plugins that benefit everyone.

You shouldn’t notice any differences in gameplay, but if you encounter any bugs or issues, please let us know!

General

Migrated proxy server to Velocity
General tidying and clean-up
Fixed bug with CAG2 being kicked

Community: 1.21.4 is live on CubeKrowd!

Sun, 11 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

CubeKrowd was updated to 1.21.4 today - 11th May 2025. Here is a list of all the changes that came with the update. As always, please report any and all issues you encounter. Note that many bugs have already been fixed, thanks for the reports y’all!

General

Updated all servers to Minecraft 1.21.4, except Rocket Riders. You can only join with 1.21.4 and 1.21.5 clients.
Note that Rocket Riders runs on 1.20.4, but you can still join with 1.21.4 and 1.21.5 clients. Some things may not work properly though.

Skyblock

A new challenge was added at the Competent level: “Creaking Crafter”
The reward for the Novice challenge “Wild Propaganda” has been updated with some of the new 1.21.4 items

Community: 1.21.1 is live on CubeKrowd!

Wed, 23 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

CubeKrowd got updated to 1.21.1 a month ago on the 28th of September. This update took us a while due to the new item component system. Here is a list of all the changes that came with the update. As always, please report any and all issues you encounter. Note that many bugs have already been fixed, thanks for the reports y’all!

General

Updated all servers to Minecraft 1.21.1, except Rocket Riders. You can only join with 1.21 and 1.21.1 clients.
Note that Rocket Riders runs on 1.20.4, but you can still join with 1.21 and 1.21.1 clients. Some things may not work properly though.
Added new trails and tweaked many existing ones to be better looking (by e.g. offsetting particles slightly), use /trails.
Removed some trails that made sounds (why on earth do particles make sounds?!) and removed some trails that were too heavy on the client’s particle engine.
Fixed emote head flickering.
Added new 1.21 mobs as pets.

Creative & BuildComp

Completely rewrote our item filtering plugin to use the new item component system. It seems to be much more robust now as it hasn’t spit out any errors yet!
Fixes for painting scrolling:
- Disabled scrolling through paintings in spectator mode.
- Paintings won’t stay locked anymore if you log out.
- Both fixes by Yatloaf, thanks!
Updated the plots plugin:
- New fishing flag to allow fishing on your plot.
- Fixed a bug where trusted plot members couldn’t remove books from lecterns if lectern-read-book is set to true.
- Fixed plot music not spanning the whole plot.

Survival 1

No updates, because Survival 1 closed on the 23rd of September! A world download can be found on our links page (scroll down). You can also view a tribute video at https://youtu.be/THPMHF2CXcQ. A new Survival 1 will be opened SoonTM. Currently, survival projects are being planned on our Discord server.

PVP

1500 days and counting!
“i like pizza” – CAG2, 2024.
“buy our ranks store.cubekrowd.net” – JohnStar128, 2024.

Developer: Migrating to a new machine 2.0

Wed, 23 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Image from Hetzner’s website.

CubeKrowd once again moved to a new machine! The upgrade happened a bit more than a month ago on the 8th of September, and everything is still running smoothly.

As with the upgrade of 4 years ago, which we wrote about here, this is mostly a CPU upgrade with a significantly lower monthly cost. Inflation wasn’t kind to our old subscription! The new machine is located in the same datacentre as our previous machine, so everyone’s ping should be approximately the same.

New hardware

The new machine is hosted in Falkenstein, Germany by Hetzner, and has the following specifications.

CPU: Intel i5-12500 (much better single-thread performance than the AMD Ryzen 5 3600 we had before)
RAM: 64 GB DDR4 3200 MHz (we had 64 GB DDR4 before, but I believe a slightly lower frequency)
Network bandwidth: 1 Gbit/s (same)
Storage: 512 GB RAID 1 SSD (same)
External backup: 1 TB (up from 512 GB)

The migration process

Sooo… we have a confession to make, we were using an ancient operating system (Ubuntu 18 LTS from 2018) and ancient software. Of course security patches were still applied, but it wasn’t an ideal situation. With the upgrade, we decided to move to a much more recent operating system: Ubuntu 24 LTS.

To transition to more up-to-date software, we essentially set up all the software on the new machine from scratch. However, due to changes in newer software, some stuff broke: our backup scripts, Docker scripts, etc. Especially CubeBot (our Discord bot) proved to be a real pain. A great battle emerged to get CubeBot up and running: was it faster to set it up with Docker or with pyenv? If you thought Docker, you lost! We eventually managed to use pyenv to run CubeBot on an old Python version. I guess some of the ancient software still remains…

Luckily all the databases and Minecraft worlds could be copied over easily using rsync, without any fuss.

Community: 1.20.1 is live on CubeKrowd!

Sat, 15 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

CubeKrowd just got updated to 1.20.1! The update comes with a whole host of features, but there’s a few new changes we’ve done on our end too.

As always, please report any bugs or issues you encounter after this update.

General

Updated all servers to Minecraft 1.20.1. You need a 1.20.1 client to join.
Emerald rank brackets have been updated. Instead of changing your normal brackets to green, they will stay the same color but will instead be accented by green bars surrounding it.
Emerald rank now has two new commands:
- /spyglass - Gives a spyglass
- /lift - Allows other players to ride you by right clicking on you
New pets on our store: The Camel and The Sniffer.

Creative

Enabled the jump pads plugin we use in Lobby in the Creative server.
- Jump pads are placed by putting a diamond, redstone, lapis or emerald block two blocks below a pressure plate. Each block has a different vertical and horizontal launch strength.

BuildComp

We are hosting a BuildComp on July 21st at 16:00 UTC! Check our Discord announcement for more info

Skyblock

New challenges/Greenhouses are to come at a later date.

Survival

Despite the update adding a handful of features, we are not expanding the world border.
- All newly added items will be available at spawn in a few weeks.
The suspicious blocks to be available at spawn will contain all possible loot you can get from various types of suspicious blocks with relatively similar chances.

Community: 1.19.3 is live on CubeKrowd!

Fri, 13 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

CubeKrowd just got updated to 1.19.3. Here is a list of all the changes that came with the update. As usual please report any and all issues you encounter. Minecraft 1.19.3 may seem like a small update, but Mojang made a lot of changes under the hood.

General

Updated all servers to Minecraft 1.19.3. You need a 1.19.3 client to join.
Note that Mojang chat reporting does not work on CubeKrowd, as we’re not sure how easy it is to abuse their system. It would also require quite some technical work to adopt it. Beware that our own chat rules still apply: tha rulez.
Chat signing is not required on CubeKrowd, so you can join with mods such as No Chat Reports.
Maybe fixed an issue where players would spuriously un-AFK upon joining the server.

Creative & BuildComp

More heads in the HeadDatabase /hdb.
The OP items tab in the Creative mode inventory is available if you enable it under Options > Controls > Operator Items Tab.

PVP

O PVP, PVP, wherefore art thou PVP?

Community: 1.19 is live on CubeKrowd!

Sat, 09 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

CubeKrowd got updated to 1.19. Here is a list all the changes that came with the update. Recent changes made before the update are also included below. As usual please report any and all issues you encounter.

General

Updated all servers to Minecraft 1.19. You can only join with a 1.19 client.
Note that signed chat messages were added to 1.19: if others receive a signed chat message they can be sure you wrote it and not someone else. This feature is currently disabled on CubeKrowd. Mojang is planning to use this feature for player chat reporting in 1.19.1 (see here). We’ll decide how to deal with Mojang chat reporting after Mojang releases 1.19.1.
Added a couple new trails, do /trails.
Made the trails GUI update properly when you click on items.
Note that the new 1.19 mobs aren’t available as pets yet.

Lobby

Fixed some issues with our dropper maps:
- You could get teleported when falling into water sometimes. This should now be fixed.
- Sometimes falling on a block didn’t teleport you back to the start. This should now be fixed.

Creative & BuildComp

Allow elytra rocket boosting on roads and on other people’s plots.
Updated the plots plugin:
- More fixes for /p h teleporting you to the wrong position.
- Fix the plot wall not resetting when you clear a plot.
- Fix issues with plot heal and feed flags.
- The plot flag remove command now displays the removed value properly.
Installed a new custom armour stands plugin with live armour stand editing. Grab a flint (not a flint and steel) and right click with it to open up the main GUI. In the bottom right corner there’s a help book with more information. Feedback is welcome!
Put a limit on instant health/damage potions as they could be used to kill players in creative mode.
Some time ago the plots plugin switched to a new formatting system for plot greeting/farewell messages. This broke the colours of all existing greeting/farewell messages in the Creative plots world. We’ve now updated all old plot greeting/farewell messages to use the new system. If you want to use it yourself, use e.g. /p flag set greeting <red>hi. For more information on the new formatting system, see here.

Survival 1

Skipping the night behaves more like vanilla now:
- The rain timout won’t reset if you skip the night. So it will eventually start raining even if you skip all nights.
- The hotbar messages now display the correct values.
Increased the Overworld world border from 15,000 by 15,000 blocks to 20,000 by 20,000 blocks. That’s close to double the surface area! The new chunks are freshly generated in 1.19.

Survival 2

The current Survival 2 ended! We’ll provide a download link for the world soon in the Links section.

FishSlap & IceRunner

It seems that 1.19 fixes the knockback bug on ledges properly.

SnowySkirmish

Updated the announcements to match those in other games.
Added /spectate command.

PVP

Hmmmm…

Community: Changelog May 2022

Wed, 01 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

A fair amount of things changed during May, especially on the Creative server. Some of these changes were posted on our Discord server in various channels, but ya’ll might have missed those posts. Here’s an overview of the changes!

General

Totally didn’t change the moderator rank colour.
Fancy /mspt and /tps commands are available on all servers instead of a limited few.

Creative & BuildComp

Everyone can use the debug stick (it works properly with plot protection).
Fixed an issue with /back teleporting you to the wrong spot.
Fixed /p setbiome lag.
There’s a new plot flag “projectiles” that allows others to shoot projectiles on your plot.
Allow the use of splash/lingering potions, ender eyes, chicken eggs, experience bottles and TNT minecarts. Note that chicken eggs don’t spawn chickens and TNT minecarts don’t do block damage.
Gave everyone access to the following plot flags: misc-interact, vine-grow, heal, block-burn, copper-oxide, coral-dry, device-interact, drop-protection, grass-grow, ice-form, invincible, kelp-grow, mycel-grow, player-interact, snow-form and soil-dry.
In BuildComp you can use some additional plot flags that you could already use in Creative.
Increased a bunch of potion effect amplifier limits.
Increased a bunch of enchantment level limits.
Support f3+n and f3+f4 gamemode switching.
Give players a welcome book when they join Creative for the first time. You can get a copy at the Creative spawn.
More heads in the head database /hdb.

Survival 1 & Survival 2

In Survival 1 you used to get teleported to spawn when you fell into the Overworld void. This was removed some time ago. I’m not sure if this was documented before, but it doesn’t hurt to repeat it.
Enabled treasure maps, because it looks like they don’t cause significant lag anymore.

MissileWars

Increased the TNT render distance to make sure you can see TNT everywhere while playing.
Teleport spectators back inside the world border if they spectate an entity that leaves the world border (such as fireballs).
Delete flying fireballs in more circumstances, so they don’t secretly pile up outside the arena.

RocketRiders

Updated the datapack from v1.2.1 to v1.2.3. Check out the changes for v1.2.2 here and the changes for v1.2.3 here. Among others:
- Reduced the number of rendered particles.
- Hopefully fixed player name colours not applying in chat.
Increased some entity render distances to match those in MissileWars.
Made knockback behaviour more like MissileWars (shouldn’t really be noticeable in normal gameplay).

FishSlap & IceRunner

Fixed knockback not applying when you hit someone who’s shifting on a ledge. Knockback is still a bit glitchy, but much better than before.

SnowySkirmish

SnowySkirmish can now be played on Minecraft Realms! To celebrate this, you can also play the game on CubeKrowd again. Join via the game lobby or with /ss1. A perfect way to cool down in the summer.

PVP

You know the drill.

Community: 1.18.2 is live on CubeKrowd!

Sun, 01 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Most of CubeKrowd has been running on 1.18.2 for a couple of weeks. But now we’ve fully updated! Here is a list of changes that came with this update. As usual please report any and all issues you encounter.

General

Updated all servers to Minecraft 1.18.2. Players must connect with a 1.18.2 client.
Removed the light particle trail as vanilla no longer has it.
Updated our chat filter in minigames:
- One full caps word of up to 16 characters is now allowed.
- Instead of blocking messages with too many caps, they are converted to lower case.
- Mark more than 16 of the same character in a row as spam.
Extended all worlds by 64 blocks at both the top and bottom (except for Nether and The End worlds).

Creative & BuildComp

In BuildComp and Creative’s plot world and flat world we filled in new terrain below Y = 0. If you have holes in the bedrock of your plot/flat world area, this new terrain may have generated weirdly. You might want to make sure it looks alright.
More heads in the HeadDatabase.
Allow everyone to break the bedrock at the bottom of their plots.
Gave permission for /anvil to Donator 2.
Amethyst clusters drop amethyst shards when broken by a piston.

Skyblock

Added a way to obtain deepslate ores through greenhouses. Check the greenhouses documentation here for more information.
There are some issues with Nether portals, such as: they don’t work above Y = 256 and below Y = 0, they don’t link up properly, and they may teleport you to unsafe places. We’re not sure when this will get fixed by the plugin maintainers.

Survival 1

No more daily restarts, because the memory leak that was plaguing us, got fixed.
Fixed the lag spikes that occurred whenever someone died.
As some may know, Paper (the Minecraft server software we use) disables vanilla gravity block duping. We used a custom version of Paper called Sandpaper to enable gravity block duping. We switched from Sandpaper to a (public) plugin called GravityControl.
Added damage statistics to Ender Dragon fights.

Survival 2

A new survival world is online! The theme of this Survival 2 is the 1.18 update: caves and cliffs. This Survival 2 will end whenever CubeKrowd updates to 1.19.
There are several vanilla tweaks installed: armour statues, player/mob head drops, dragon drops, silence mobs, coordinate HUD, redstone/terracotta rotation wrench, fast leaf decay and timber. Click here for more information.
Some crafting tweaks are also installed: dropper to dispenser, rotten flesh to leather, charcoal to black dye, universal dyeing, craftable 2x2 coral blocks, craftable bundles (leather & rabbit hide), unpack ice, unpack nether wart, unpack wool. Click here for more information.
Fixed the lag spikes that occurred whenever someone died.
Added damage statistics to Ender Dragon fights.

MissileWars

Moved the arena and lobby down by 64 blocks and moved the bedrock ceiling up by 64 blocks.
Added more barriers around the lobby.
Don’t allow spectators to move too far outside the world border. This prevents some server crashes.
The view distance was 16 (unintentionally?), it’s 12 now.

SnowySkirmish

Went offline because all the snow melted.

UHC

Allow the use of composters again as they can no longer be used to X-ray in 1.18.
Added an experimental height world border to make the final playing area even smaller.

PVP

Still offline :(.

Community: Log4j2 security vulnerability and workaround

Thu, 09 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Edit: Mojang has posted an official announcement regarding this issue, be sure to check it out! You can find the announcement here. In case you’re interested in the technical details, the exploit is officially known as CVE-2021-44228, which you can use as a search term.

We’ve become aware of a security vulnerability affecting both minecraft clients and servers. This is a serious vulnerability. In essence, the exploit works by sending special messages in chat. These messages force your computer to connect to a malicious computer. Please follow the instructions in this blog post to work around the issue for your Minecraft client.

We’ve figured out the following:

If you’re running Minecraft on Java 8, we believe the exploit allows anyone to run arbitrary code on your computer.
If you’re running Minecraft on Java 16 and above (which is the case if you’re on Minecraft 1.16 and above), this exploit allows anyone to crash your client, or log your IP address (we actually reproduced these).

We’ve worked around this on CK, so the CK machine isn’t affected by the exploit. However, it is still important that you fix it on your end, so the exploit doesn’t happen on your computer. Fortunately it’s not that hard. Some of y’all have probably heard of this already, and here is how to work around it.

Working around the vulnerability

Please note that this fix only works for Minecraft 1.17 and above. The basic idea is to add the following “Java argument” to your client:

-Dlog4j2.formatMsgNoLookups=true

Here is how to do that on various launchers:

Vanilla launcher

Go to your “Installations”, click on the profile you’re using, click on “More options”, then add

-Dlog4j2.formatMsgNoLookups=true

to the JVM arguments.

(click to view larger version)

MultiMC

Click “Settings” and then go to the “Java” tab, and write

-Dlog4j2.formatMsgNoLookups=true

in the Java arguments.

(click to view larger version)