Note: For 1.8 and 1.12 builds, visit github releases

The Road Ahead

Hello, everyone!

I'm happy to finally deliver a new release of MobArena with some (hopefully) great new features and a bukkit of bug fixes. I'd like to talk a bit about the current direction of the project and what it means for all of you.

For those of you who don't know, MobArena is currently in the early stages of what will eventually be a massive overhaul of all of the entire plugin to bring it into a state where extensibility and customization are king. The overhaul takes the form of a series of reworks of core functionality, the first of which is the Sessions Rework.

The focus of the Sessions Rework is to shatter the current "waves" paradigm and reassemble it into a more flexible paradigm comprised of what I call "encounters". The goal is not to remove the waves, but rather to make them a smaller building block in a much more dynamic context. One of the ultimate goals is to make it possible to create World of Warcraft-style dungeons and boss fights with MobArena.

If you think this is interesting and want to join in on the discussion, I highly encourage you to join Discord and/or chime in on the github meta issue!

The Trodden Path

Since the last bStats evaluation, Minecraft 1.13 and 1.14 have become much more prominent, which ultimately is a good sign: to keep things fresh, we need to push forward.

One of the reasons releases are far and few between nowadays is the crippling desire to maintain support for Minecraft versions prior to 1.13. Many changes to the code base require special variations in 1.8, and some may be even irrelevant or impossible. Old versions of Minecraft become a significant hamstring and reduce the amount of work that can be done in a given time frame.

There is a good chance that v0.104 or v0.105 will be the last versions of MobArena with support for 1.8 and 1.12. If you or someone you know would be interested in maintaining a fork of the project for either version, please hit me up on Discord!

v0.104:

• Extended and upgraded potions are now supported in the item syntax by prepending long_ or strong_ to the data portion of a potion item (e.g. potion:strong_instant_heal:1 will yield a Potion of Healing II). Check the wiki for details.
• MobArena now has basic tab completion support for most of the commands that take arguments.
• The pet-items node in global-settings now supports any living entity as a pet - even zombies! Pets will aggro hostile mobs that damage their owner, but only tameable pets (wolves, cats, etc.) will properly follow their owners around. This should also allow 1.14 servers to replace ocelot with cat in their pet-items node to get cat pets working again.
• Pets now have custom names that denote who their owner is, e.g. "garbagemule's pet".
• Pet items can now be used in Upgrade Waves. When an Upgrade Wave spawns, all pet items are transformed to pets just like when the arena session starts. Note that while only Upgrade Waves trigger this behavior, pet items obtained elsewhere (e.g. from Supply Wave drops) will also be transformed on subsequent Upgrade Waves.
• Potion effects can now be used as upgrades in Upgrade Waves. Check the wiki for details.
• Tridents and crossbows are now considered weapons with regards to the unbreakable-weapons flag. All class items that have durability now have their unbreakable flag set to true unless the unbreakable-weapons and/or unbreakable-armor flags are set to false.
• Leaderboards now work again on servers running Minecraft 1.14+.
• Class chests (non-linked) now work again on servers running Minecraft 1.14+.
• MobArena no longer crashes when players try to join with items that lower their max health below the default of 20. Players with lower max health will notice missing health in the lobby, but it will quickly regenerate to full.
• Food levels no longer deplete for players in the lobby and spectator area.
• Wither skeletons now correctly spawn with stone swords.
• Mobs now correctly take damage from player-made iron golems.
• Cat and parrot pets now also sit when their owner joins an arena (although parrots perching on players' shoulders will still follow them into the arena).
• Pig zombies are now angry immediately after they spawn as they should be.
• Vexes summoned by evokers are now kept track of, so they count towards clear-wave-before-next, and they are properly removed at arena end.
• Support for denoting potion effects by magic number IDs has been dropped. This means that if your config-file has any such magic numbers in it, MobArena will no longer successfully parse them and will throw an error on startup.
• Support for auto-respawning has been dropped. The hacky way it was implemented is not officially supported by the Bukkit API and is highly discouraged because it is very buggy.