Devlog - EliteMobs 9.0 release, updated Patreon tiers, feature poll!

Hello everyone,

As you might've noticed, EliteMobs 9.0 is now out, supporting Minecraft 1.21 (and Minecraft 1.21 alone). I am quite happy with how many things we managed to get done in such a short amount of time, and the changelog is absolutely massive so I recommend you take a quick look at it when you download it.

EliteMobs 9.0

I feel like I already spoke at length about what I was going to add in 9.0, so I won't spend time here restating the features already added, I will just mention that custom item models are the next big feature coming to EliteMobs and that custom models for treasure chests (and portals) will also be coming in the future, but I need to work some more on FreeMinecraftModels first.

Updated Patreon tiers

For a while I have realized that I have not structured tiers in a way that makes all that much sense, and today I am fixing that.

Some of you got a notification earlier warning you that the $10/mo tier is changing price, going down to $7/mo. Furthermore, I have unpublished the $5/mo tier - if you were in it, you can stay if you want. The $7/mo will now also be getting access to sanctums on top of lairs, making it even more interesting than before.

Finally, I have been having a hard time figuring out how to attribute early access rights to supporters, but I think I found a way that seems fair to me. If the release is for early access to free a lair, sanctum or EliteMobs events, it will be in early access at the $7/mo tier, and if it is anything else it will go to the $15/mo tier, mirroring the premium access those tiers get.

Oh, yeah, and I've started clearing up the absolutely ancient benefits that I was giving, written before BetterStructures was ever made so that it is clear that benefits for non-EliteMobs contents do exist.

Updated Partner pricing

I'm going to be changing how I do the partner pricing. You may notice it is now down to $30/mo. In a perfect world, there would be a bidding process for the slots, starting at $15/mo, but that's not a feature that Patreon has. Instead, I've lowered the price to something I think may interest people. If we hit the cap of 4 partner servers, I'll increase the price a bit. This is in preparation for my upcoming Youtuber arc where I will be making a ton of videos showing plugins features, making trailers, creating guides on installation and creating content for all my plugins and then some (obviously I will continue developing the plugins as I do this, it's just going to be another thing on top of everything else).

As a reminder, partners get a shout out at the end of videos, and an ad slot on my spigot page and on the partner servers on discord.

Facelift

As a heads up, as we head towards properly documenting 9.0 with high effort videos and so on, I am already working on generally improving the aesthetics and user experience of the various pages we maintain. A part of my website will be dedicated to both presenting, documenting and offering an easy centralized download repository for all my content, and I'm in talks with artists and web designers to do a big restructuring of all my spigot pages and of my website, among other things.

We put years of effort into creating the existing content, it would be a shame to make it so hard to browse and comprehend that people get turned away from it.

Poll - direct content downloads

So, I have a question for everyone. As you are aware, if you've downloaded my content, we have so much content out right now just downloading all of it is becoming a bit of a problem.

So, I've been thinking of potential solutions. A centralized website for downloads will help, in my opinion, but it will still just be a way to go to all the various pages the content is hosted in, which isn't great.

One "obvious" solution, that though obvious was up until recently outside of my zone of comfort as a programmer, would be to allow you to basically register your Patreon account on your server, thereby letting you download all the content you normally have access to from in-game.

Now, there's a lot of considerations I have to make here, since I'd be the one hosting the files, plus there's a number of security things I'd have to handle, but those are problems for me to resolve.

Also important to note, this would also mean you'd have the ability to autoupdate dungeons (it would be done via command, not fully automatically).

What I would like to ask today is, would the ability to basically sign into Patreon to download content from in-game be something worth spending time doing? Is it a feature you would use, or do you prefer the current way of manually downloading things?

 I could use your feedback on this, since I can't fully imagine how it feels to install my content from scratch as a new user.

Anyhow, that it for now, I am still in the midst of improving other aspects of the installation and update process so I'd better get back to it.

Happy installing,

• MagmaGuy