A.E.S. Blog

This week on AES 19

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 22:00:00 GMT

🪙 New Donations

Goal #1 "Server costs" has been reached 🥳
Thank you anonymous for the yearly donation!
Thank you Szwendacz for the 3 month donation!

🔫 Block League

Bugfix: players could swim in the shallow waters of Neden1 map

⚔️ Skywars

Bugfix: you could survive when falling off the Triels island
Triel forcibly requires 3 players

previously it launched also with 2

✏️ Quikbild

Overlapping text in leaderboard was fixed

Contributed by Shadow978 in a local workshop

🕹️ Arcade

Interlude GUI: display how many rounds have been played and the total amount of rounds

🏟️ Hub

Bugfix: players in playerlist weren't displayed as spectators after being eliminated

Contributed by k327

❓ Misc

Tell players when a new player joins (and accepts ToS)

Say hi to new players - and consider taking them on a tour

This week's drawing – theme "Heroes"

Remember you can support what we do by donating on Liberapay! 🫶

Thanks to our donators: Samuel, Fabio, David Ruffner, Szwendacz

This week on AES 18

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 22:00:00 GMT

🪙 New Donations

Thanks to an anonymous user for the yearly donation!

🔫 Block League

Inform via chat all players not inside a minigame when a player levels up

⚔️ Skywars

Avoid showing food cooldown bar when not wielding any
Added a copy of the Duel map supporting up to 3 players and changed Duel's max to 2

🕹️ Arcade

Sumo: it was possible to break out from the map Logo

🏟️ Hub

Added a punchable balloon!
A swimming pool has appeared!
Removed duplicated NPCs and generally improved the underlying mod

❓ Misc

Introduced a weekly schedule for minigames

One of the main issues of A.E.S. remains the fact that you need players to, well... play 90% of what it contains. It's not a survival server where, worst case scenario, you farm and loot for 30 minutes on your own.

The idea here is to provide fixed points in time where users know when it's more likely to find more players to play their favourite game with. This is how it looks like:

Murder Monday

Skywars Tuesday

(maintenance night)

Arcade Thursday

League Friday

Build Saturday

Brawl Sunday

Each one of these "events" take place from 14 to 17 UTC (European afternoon), which is the time that made more sense for us - being a Europe-based server. We've also added an in-game NPC, reminding people what day/event it is when they connect and explaining them how it works

Players entering water will now play a swim animation

This week's drawing – theme "Fashion"

Remember you can support what we do by donating on Liberapay! 🫶

Thanks to our donators: Samuel, Fabio, David Ruffner

This week on AES 17

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 22:00:00 GMT

⚔️ Skywars

New weapons aim assist and parry!

Missing a hit with the new weapons was unforgiving, especially against classic spammy swords. Combat also felt a bit too stiff, so holding right click now puts you in a parry stance: if someone hits you from the front, they get stunned for a duration based on both the weapon you used to parry and the weapon they attacked with. Heavier weapons create longer stuns, but whiffing a parry leaves you recovering for longer, making them riskier; lighter weapons allow more frequent attempts, but their stuns are shorter.

Added a Duels (1v1) arena to test the new weapons out quickly
Increased falchion damage
Feather falling potion now completely denies fall damage
New weapons use the default Luanti crosshair and show their cooldown through a filling bar
Food eating cooldown is now visible via a HUD bar
Put steel swords back in chests

Since now the new weapons are in the Duels arena. The falchion has also been removed from normal arenas, while the club has been kept for now as it provides a significantly different experience.

BUGFIX: items dropped during celebration could linger

Dropped items during celebration could remain in the arena and show up in later matches

BUGFIX: you can now open chests while wielding new weapons

🏟️ Hub

Say hi to Bob the Piggy Bank!

❓ Misc

Improved the website

The website has been reworked to better present A.E.S. to people who don't know what Luanti is. It is also more informative, with an expanded FAQ section and a Games page with a list of the playable minigames.

Updated requirements for Videomaker prefix, see the FAQ page
Added Quikbild invisible climbing nodes around the canvas to draw more easily
BUGFIX: prevented people from going AFK in an active queue
BUGFIX: canvas flickered when looked from far away

This week's drawing – theme "Magic"

Remember you can support what we do by donating on Liberapay! 🫶

Thanks to our donators: Samuel, Fabio, David Ruffner

Our masterplan to support A.E.S.

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 22:00:00 GMT

If there isn't anything that suits your needs, you better build it yourself: that's probably a good summary for A.E.S.. It was the year 2020 and we were pretty unsatisfied with how the gaming industry was proceeding. I was a pixel artist at the time (Zughy), and I was trying to understand whether pixel art and game dev was what I wanted to do for a living. Philosophical questions aside, I came to the conclusion that - work or not - creating videogames made me feel good, so no matter what the future might have held, I wanted to keep making them - one way or another. That way, in the end, was A.E.S.

The first version of A.E.S. was called FOSSa delle Papere and every content was pretty amateur level.

All that content was made by us and took a lot of time. Time was the price to pay for our utopias to rise: back then, toll was 5 months and the quality was... well, we were trying 😄. With the passing of time, A.E.S. grew bigger and bigger, with many minigames, new systems, a website, a presence on social networks, and those 5 months soon became but a far away memory. It's funny because we've always thought we were "almost there", until that almost turned into years.

In these years, with our lives going through changes, time has slowly shown us how our dreams were getting farther and farther from the expectations we entertained. For years we've spent at least one night per week planning what the next thing should have been and we've filled boards with suggestions to understand what was actually within reach. And there are so many things we'd like to add or change, from new Fantasy Brawl classes to xp systems and new minigames, that listing them here wouldn't be enough to give you an idea of the worlds we've built in our heads.

However, here is the catch: time is finite; and when you work, live with another person or... I don't know, do adult things, time becomes more and more scarce. It's something we've experienced firsthand lately. If you hadn't been under the impression we've slowed down it's only because we've become very good at planning and developing. But we can't work miracles, and we won't ever be able to convert those dreams into reality if we only rely on our free time. And we'd like not to give them up. So... How to fix this? Well, buckle up!

The power of pinky promise

Donations don't work. Better said, the donation system we've featured so far surely doesn't work. People want something in return, because it's what they'd get from all the other games out there: a skin, a weapon variant, cool effects. However, giving people something means turning a donation into a transaction. So you'd buy the new weapon, the new skin etc., super cool; but then the Italian state would buy our skin and bones: because in our country traders have to pay a yearly tax of ~€4500, no matter the income. Haha, sure 🫠

What we can give to people though, is an indicative roadmap of what we may be able to do if they decide to support our little happy sanctuary. We can't of course guarantee these items (only pinky promise!), nor will contributors receive any special rights or entitlement to specific features or timelines - A.E.S. is for everyone no matter what. However, displaying such a roadmap should give people an overall idea of what we might be able to deliver - possibly leading to more donations.

This doesn't mean of course that A.E.S. will stop seeing new updates unless money is received. We've been working on this project for 6 years and we'll likely keep working on it for another 6. The difference is that, what would have required us from 6 months to 2 years to be made, it could be delivered in a month or two. It's, well, an accelerator, that's all.

Without further ado, you can find our donation plan below and... well, we hope it'll work!

Check out our Donation plan

This week on AES 16

Tue, 16 Jun 2026 22:00:00 GMT

🧙 Fantasy Brawl

Mage: Bubble Beam works better at close range

Bubble projectiles now detect hits more reliably when a target is very close to the shooter. Before this fix, there was a tiny gap before the first projectile step where nearby targets could sometimes avoid the collision.

⚔️ Skywars

Two new experimental weapons are being tested

Iron and bronze swords have been removed from regular chests in Ruins and Celestial Palace, and two new melee weapons are being tested in their place. The basic sword tier in these arenas has been lowered to stone (Giov4 didn't know that bronze deals the same damage as steel while being more enchantable 😇), while stronger melee options now come from crafting or riskier loot.

This should make mid-game combat clearer and less spammy: default Minetest Game swords can be swung again before their full punch interval is over, but the damage depends on timing, which is not easy to read. The new weapons use a stricter rhythm: after each hit, they briefly go on cooldown, the Falchion being faster and lighter, while the Nailed Club being slower but hitting harder – with both having equivalent DPS.

Item progression and descriptions are clearer

Weapon descriptions now show damage per hit and cooldown, making it easier to compare what you find during a match. We also cleaned up item tiers so they better match actual combat value: bows no longer receive misleading weapon stars, and Mese weapons are now ranked below Diamond because their base damage is lower (it used to be the contrary since mese is more enchantable, but we opted for a simpler tiering mechanism).

🕹️ Arcade

TNT Tag, bugfix: don't show the "The last tagger has left! Wave over" message if the tagger left after exploding

❓ Misc

Swapped dark brown with a lighter shade in the canvas
TOS: it's now always possiblle to answer in English other than your language

This was necessary because UI isn't translated when joining with very old versions of the engine (such as Multicraft, which still runs on 5.4.0 🫠)

Canvas draft zone

You can now draw on the back of the canvas. This is an area to experiment before drawing on the front, it won't be posted on the blog

📅 Coming next

June 19: Skywars Duo tournament!

If you haven't applied yet, you're still in time: join the night of the tournament (a bit earlier than 19:30 UTC) and apply with your team before the event starts.

How the tournament works: every team is going to face every other team at least once. Winning grants you 3 points, 2nd place 2 points and 3rd place 1 point. The team with the most points wins the tournament

Important announcement coming next week!

This week's drawing – theme "Lilac"

Remember you can support what we do by donating on Liberapay! 🫶

Thanks to our donators: Samuel, Fabio, David Ruffner

This week on AES 15

Tue, 09 Jun 2026 22:00:00 GMT

🔫 Block League

Several improvements to the new upcoming weapon

🏟️ Hub

A canvas has appeared!

With this, we inaugurate the first cooperative area of the server. Just join, click a button to get the graffiti kit, and work on the big canvas between Murder and Skywars. This week's theme has been "Summer" and... the idea was to feature monthly themes but people adored it, so it's time for a new one!

Compass: see both duo and solo mode when teleporting to Skywars
Chair and cushion textures matching the server's art style

📅 Coming next

Sun June 14, starting 18.00 CEST (16.00 UTC): Skywars Duo training

Feeling prepared for the tournament? Use your chance to train with your teammates, get a peek at how the other teams are performing and improve your skills in case they have become rusty!

This week's drawing – theme "Summer"

Remember you can support what we do by donating on Liberapay! 🫶

Thanks to our donators: Samuel, Fabio, David Ruffner

This week on AES 14

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 22:00:00 GMT

🔫 Block League

Staff is using a new weapon 👁
Fixed a couple of edge-case crashes
Bugfix: show "Critical!" text to spectators as well

🧙 Fantasy Brawl

Improved physics handling

This doesn't change anything on the surface, but it paves the way for more sophisticated physical interactions and it's the very first step towards a server-wide technical stack modernization

⚔️ Skywars

Solo players now get a boost when playing alone in Duo mode

A few months ago, we introduced Duo mode, but there was a problem: when there's an odd number of players, one person ends up playing alone, which makes the experience frustrating. Starting today, when that happens, you'll get a boost to your health, speed, and attack power!

📅 Coming next

June 19: Skywars Duo tournament!

More info and applications on our Matrix space: https://matrix.to/#/#arcadeemulationserver:matrix.org

Remember you can support what we do by donating on Liberapay! 🫶

Thanks to our donators: Samuel, Fabio, David Ruffner

This week on AES 13

Wed, 27 May 2026 22:00:00 GMT

🧙 Fantasy Brawl

Bugfix: Mage's Punch of Gaia was dealing double the damage since soul crystals were added 😇

Hi people, Zughy here, are we ready to doxx Giov4? Yeeey! His address is...

🕹️ Arcade

Bugfix, Arcade Party: prevent the final leaderboard from being stuck on screen if players died before closing it
Sumo: some camping spots in the BurningBridge map have caught fire 🔥

📅 Coming next

June 19: Skywars Duo tournament!

More info and applications on our Matrix space: https://matrix.to/#/#arcadeemulationserver:matrix.org

Remember you can support what we do by donating on Liberapay! 🫶

Thanks to our donators: Samuel, Fabio, David Ruffner

This week on AES 12

Wed, 20 May 2026 22:00:00 GMT

🔫 Block League

Bomb: ammo changed from 1+1 to 2+0
Invisibility, regression: stamina bar didn't update when invisibility was enabled

✏️ Quikbild

Hyphenated words are now accepted properly

Previously, words such as the French "cerf-volant" or "basket-ball" could not be guessed literally. Only the version without hyphen ("cerfvolant" or "basketball") was accepted in such cases.

📅 Coming next

June 19: Skywars Duo tournament!

More info and applications on our Matrix space: https://matrix.to/#/#arcadeemulationserver:matrix.org

Remember you can support what we do by donating on Liberapay! 🫶

Thanks to our donators: Samuel, Fabio, David Ruffner

This week on AES 11

Tue, 12 May 2026 22:00:00 GMT

🔫 Block League

Possibility to carry less than 3 weapons

🧙 Fantasy Brawl

Fixed a rare Hero’s Fury bug that could leave hit players floating after the caster left the match

🏟️ Hub

Better nametags size and scaling

Luanti 5.16.0+ is needed

❓ Misc

Server updated to Luanti 5.16.1

📅 Coming next

June 19: Skywars Duo tournament!

More info and applications on our Matrix space: https://matrix.to/#/#arcadeemulationserver:matrix.org

Remember you can support what we do by donating on Liberapay! 🫶

Thanks to our donators: Samuel, Fabio, David Ruffner

This week on AES 10

Tue, 05 May 2026 22:00:00 GMT

🔫 Block League

Sword: revisited dash damage system

Before, dashing dealt damage only to players (and entities) in front of the player who dashed at the time of clicking. Meaning, if someone crossed your path only after you had started dashing, they didn't receive any damage. In nerd terms: it was a single raycast (well, a grid) generated when clicking.

Now, on the contrary, dashing deals damage every 0.1s for a total of 0.5s, to every player and entity close enough to the caster - fixing the aforementioned issue. Moreover, it can now deal multiple damage: with a single hit of 15 HP, if an enemy follows your exact dashing path you can deal up to 75 HP (3/4 of their life!)

🧙 Fantasy Brawl

Added some rocks to Moonbound Grove behind which to take shelter
Added thumbnail to Pyrosanctum map

🏟️ Hub

A second window was opened ... 🪟

Remember you can support what we do by donating on Liberapay! 🫶

Thanks to our donators: Samuel, Fabio, David Ruffner

This week on AES 9

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 22:00:00 GMT

🔫 Block League

Stamina: play a deny sound and flash the bar red when there's not enough stamina to perform the requested action

I.e. propulsor jump, dash and toggling invisibility

🧙 Fantasy Brawl

New map: Pyrosanctum, by Quelquun

After featuring Pyrosanctum temporarily and receiving really positive feedback from players, we've decided to make it an official map.

Being quite small compared to the other maps we've got, Pyrosanctum is a great choice for people who want to focus more on strategy. It supports up to 4 players and... well, a lot of lava!

Pyrosanctum was built by our lovely mod Quelquun during the building contest we had in January.

✏️ Quikbild

Wordlist: next to translations, a few ambiguous words have been split into their different meanings

🏟️ Hub

A window has been revealed ... 👀

❓ Misc

fnetX was busy cleaning up some translation chaos, delaying some of the planned changes on QuikBild

The idea was to make translating the server news possible. We learned that players might dismiss them too easily if they are not localized.

However, this turned out to be much more challenging than we expected. The attempt to set this up caused some issues with other translations, and we have to clean up the mess first.

Still, motivated translators can now find the news at https://translate.codeberg.org/projects/zughy-friends-minetest/a-e-s-custom-mods/news/.

📅 Coming next

25-26 April: A.E.S. goes to Pordenone

This weekend A.E.S. will be featured at the largest electronics and technology fair in Italy: the Radioamatore Tech Expo, in Pordenone (Northern Italy).

People will play online using the two available stations; so if you're looking for users to play with, you'll definitely find someone on those days!

Remember you can support what we do by donating on Liberapay! 🫶

Thanks to our donators: Samuel, Fabio, David Ruffner

This week on AES 8

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 22:00:00 GMT

🔫 Block League

New weapon: H.E.A.L.

After months of betatesting, it's here: the first healing weapon of Block League!

It comes with a limited amount of bullets (6) and a magazine size of 3. Bullets are limited because, during our tests, we noticed that having 2 healers with unlimited ammo meant turning their target into an immortal being. Choose wisely when and whom you want to heal!

Bullet trajectory is another aspect we've changed compared to the first version. Initially we wanted something similar to the Rescue Gun in S4 League: a weapon shooting healing orbs that healed players stepping onto them. They had physics, their trajectory was arch-shaped. However, Block League is a bit faster than S4 League and this first version was turning the game into a camping party, because it was really hard to hit people: orbs were too slow and people were too fast. So people stood still. Now, you clearly don't want a camping game when the goal (at least in Touchdown mode) is to bring the ball into the enemy's base, so in our second attempt we tried to spice things up a little: we converted the orb into a bouncing one. More chances to hit! But.. no, still hard as hell.
Fast forward and we change the trajectory: no physics, just an orb following a straight line. The situation improved as you didn't have to calculate much where the orb would have gone, but hitting was still a nightmare; even after turning up the speed of the orb. Then the epiphany: homing orbs!
Now, you don't want instantly homing orbs, that'd be too overpowered. You could shoot randomly and still heal someone. No, what we've done is maintaining the straight trajectory and, if a player is close enough, homing mode activates. This rewards players with good aim and avoid the frustration of the first attempts. Also, did we tell you that orbs go through walls?

Last but not least, H.E.A.L. is the first weapon that slows you down when reloading but not when shooting. The motivation behind this choice is double: firstly, healers shouldn't lag behind if they're trying to heal a teammate who's running (orbs don't last forever); secondly, more important, slowing down really felt off somehow, breaking the game flow.

We hope you enjoy the new weapon! We're curious to see how it'll change the meta. Also, a big shoutout to Scarecrow01, who made the 3D model.

🧙 Fantasy Brawl

Darkening player skin during respawning invulnerability, showing their HP bar again

✏️ Quikbild

Wordlist: Many languages received a review and new synonyms

🕹️ Arcade

Arcade party: correctly show crowns in the leaderboard in case of tie
Arcade party: removed the quit button during the interlude

New players were confused by that, clicking it by instinct. We also thought of putting a button saying "Quit" but it might look like an incentive nonetheless. The interlude lasts 5 seconds, so players can still leave afterwards

🏟️ Hub

Profile: sort unlocked titles alphabetically according to the player's language

❓ Misc

CRASHFIX: spectators in parties weren't correctly handled when their party leader entered a match by joining a queue

Remember you can support what we do by donating on Liberapay! 🫶

Thanks to our donators: Samuel, Fabio, David Ruffner

This week on AES 7

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 22:00:00 GMT

🔫 Block League

Weapons HUD: show if the weapon has got limited ammo or not

⚔️ Skywars

Event item: Easter Rocket Launcher

The Easter Rocket Launcher is a very rare item only spawning in the centre. It comes with 6 bullets and, although it can be used to damage people with AoE damage, the best feature is the explosion it causes on contact. This one breaks the map, making it a great weapon to storm enemies and destroy pillars

🔪 Murder

Fixed a crash introduced by the new weapons_lib API happening when the detective's gun reloaded

✏️ Quikbild

Wordlist: A lot of improvement, both for the English and some translated word lists

Some words were removed as they were hard to build or encouraged uncreative works.
A lot of added clarifications and synonyms and otherwise fixed translations across languages.

If you want to join the fun, check out the wordlist and game translations on our Weblate project and help us bring the word list to your language!

Spectate mode was disabled for now

It currently lacks meaningful information. We intend to re-enable it after porting Wuzzy's implementation of it to our fork.

🕹️ Arcade

TNT Run: minimum players of map "Bells" decreased, 5->4
TNT Run: TNTs stop falling during the celebration phase
TNT Tag: taggers that quit will cause an explosion at their last position
TNT Tag, bugfix: spectators sometimes saw the wrong tagger in the "X is the new tagger" message
Colour Jump, bugfix: if more players fall at the same time, eliminate all of them instantly

Due to a bug, Colour Jump used to eliminate maximum one player per second. Now all the fallen players are eliminated at the same time, starting by the one at the lowest Y position (so for instance if everyone falls down, the player in mid air whose head is above the other players' wins)

🏟️ Hub

Suggestion box: books in German and French are now accepted

Remember you can support what we do by donating on Liberapay! 🫶

Thanks to our donators: Samuel, Fabio, David Ruffner

This week on AES 6

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 23:00:00 GMT

🪙 New Donations

Thanks to samuel-p for the yearly donation!

🔫 Block League

New bullet system

This doesn't really change anything on the surface (except for a few details in weapon descriptions), but it paves the way for the new healing weapon. Stay tuned!

🧙 Fantasy Brawl

Queue time reduced to 25s, slightly less than Skywars since matches last 2 minutes less

✏️ Quikbild

Bugfix: don't choose another artist when someone leaves the game shortly after an artist was chosen
Word list: enable some new words

feedback welcome!

Word list: use a format that allows adding synonyms and avoiding ambiguities

You can help us improving and translating the QuikBild word lists. Report any ambiguous words or missing synonyms in the Matrix chats or via the ingame suggestion books. Or, even better: Directly dive into the translations on Weblate

Building blocks are now sorted by colour

🕹️ Arcade

TNT Run: minimum players of map "Bells" increased, 3->5
Sumo: players and spectators can interact with each other in chat
Sumo + TNT Tag: queue time reduced to 20 seconds, consistent with the other Arcade minigames
Arcade party, bugfix: don't display more than 8 players in the leaderboard

Also, if a player is not among the first 8, the player will always see themselves in the lowest slot (8th place), so as to have an idea of their current score

Arcade party, leaderboard: gray out players who have left

❓ Misc

Mumble server: renamed rooms and introduced one where people can create their own temporary channels

You don't hang out in our Mumble voice chat yet? Get a client for your device at mumle.info, and join the mumble.aes.land server!

📅 Coming next

Easter event! 10 eggs are hidden in the lobby: you have time until April 8 to find them all and unlock a title!

Remember you can support what we do by donating on Liberapay! 🫶

Thanks to our donators: Samuel, Fabio, David Ruffner

This week on AES 5

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 23:00:00 GMT

🧙 Fantasy Brawl

Prevented soul crystals from spawning during the last 10s of the match
Scoreboard now keeps track of broken soul crystals
Hud now displays who broke the soul crystal
Short immunity when respawning, like on Block League

✏️ Quikbild

Bugfix: Language switcher and help items are given when joining the game and not only after rounds started
Wordlist: Some words that almost no one had an idea to build or that would rely heavily on sexist clichees were removed

🕹️ Arcade

TNT Run: columns in "Bells" map extended into the void

❓ Misc

Bugfix: translations of ToS, lecterns, skins and compass locations are back

After migrating translations to the industry standard .po and thinking everything was working smoothly... we found an issue 🎉 (technical dive: ->1 ->2)

Zughy worked on a fix and translations are back

Website: make light theme the default

📅 Coming next

Friday, Mar 20, 20.00 UTC (21.00 CET) - Skywars time: Enjoy playing SW together and use the opportunity to gain some XP

Open end, as long as players on AES are interested to play

Remember you can support what we do by donating on Liberapay! 🫶

This week on AES 4

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 23:00:00 GMT

🕹️ Arcade

TNT Tag: countdown sounds are played for spectators as well
TNT Tag: improved messaging when multiple people are taggers
Dig Race: added BGM

❓ Misc

New website!

Our website used to be a higgledy-piggledy solution, made in _Zaizen_'s free time whilst Giova and Zughy focused on game development. We wanted something that portrayed the aesthetics of A.E.S., so we opted for a complete overhaul - trying to keep it as static as possible.

The website works both with and without javascript: the former features a few animations and a game of life on the side of the page. This last one was, not gonna lie, vibe-coded. It features the Soothing 32 palette, made by Zughy, which is also used over the rest of the website.

Another addition is the "FAQ" section, which can always be useful - especially for new players. Moving on, our community spaces are now way more defined and you can clearly see the numbering of "This week on AES" blog posts. Last but not least, custom cursors!

Remember you can support what we do by donating on Liberapay! 🫶

This week on AES 3

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 23:00:00 GMT

✏️ Quikbild

Queue waiting time reduced, 30->15 seconds
QuikBild now accepts translations for the game itself (HUD and messages) via Weblate.

Previously, translating QuikBild required sending the developers the translation manually or via code changes. Now, you can translate the game in the Weblate UI hosted by Codeberg, with the same account you use for the other AES mods.
Translating the word list this way is not yet possible, but a long-term goal.

🕹️ Arcade

Arcade party: you can now enter as a player whilst a game is in progress

You'll be added as a spectator until the next round begins (and be warned in chat about it). Maybe you can't win the game but at least you don't have to wait until the whole arcade party is over. Also, if you were a player and you left by accident, your points are kept
Dig race: don't crash if there's only one player left
Dig race: fixed an edge case where players could go outside the pillar when getting teleported (losing their chances to win)

❓ Misc

Spectate mode: prevent leaving inadvertently during the first second

In the heat of a match, people might get eliminated whilst still fighting. And if the slot they were currently clicking/tapping with is the same where the spectate quit item has been put, they might click/tap the quit item by accident. After discussing this through, we've opted for graying out the quit item for a second, so even if it's clicked, nothing happens
Development: introduced "Good first issue" labels

You want to contribute to the code but you don't know how? "Good first issue"-labelled issues are the way to start! https://gitlab.com/groups/zughy-friends-minetest/-/issues/?label_name[]=Good%20first%20issue

📅 Coming next

March 07: Block League map "Tunnel Pro" will be enabled for 24 hours. Join the fun and level up your weapons!

Remember you can support what we do by donating on Liberapay! 🫶

This week on AES 2

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 23:00:00 GMT

🔫 Block League

Players and spectators can chat with each other

Beware: team chat remains invisible to spectators

🧙 Fantasy Brawl

Players and spectators can chat with each other
Moonbound Grove: Background music volume slightly increased

🕹️ Arcade

New minigame in Arcade Party mode: Dig Race

Are you good at digging? Better than a mole? Then GO FOR IT.
This minigame was originally made by k327 for their server "Luplay Minigames" (where you can also find some of our minigames). Find the source code here: https://codeberg.org/k327/dig_race
Arcade Tournament completed: The new Arcade Champions are known and got their statues on the podium. Congratulations to CoolClutch for winning the tournament
The best 5 players have received the "Arcade Champion" title and the best 3 got onto the podium.
1. CoolClutch (scored 20 points)
2. k327 (scored 13)
3. Extrem (scored 12)
4. omar333 (scored 9)
5. Firekiller (scored 7)
Colour Jump: players and spectators can chat with each other
TNT Run: players and spectators can chat with each other

🏟️ Hub

Journalist removed (will re-appear whenever there are news to share)

Remember you can support what we do by donating on Liberapay! 🫶

This week on AES 1

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 23:00:00 GMT

🔫 Block League

Neden2: game duration decreased, 10m -> 6m
Neden1: game duration increased, 5m -> 6m

🧙 Fantasy Brawl

Moonbound Grove: map lasted more than Desert Dune. Now they last the same (4m)
BUGFIX: Infector puddles healing effects weren't stacking

🏟️ Hub

Added a Journalist NPC

Wanna know when the next big thing is? They probably know

🕹️ Arcade

New TNT Run map: “LavaMine”

Built by i35, Kevin13 and Saruman during the January map building contest, it's been put as a permanent map instead of AspenValley
TNT Run map "AspenValley" now available only through the arcade party

❓ Misc

Translations: languages using apostrophes (e.g. Italian, French) can actually use them now

Oh boi, for how silly it might sound, this was actually quite a journey. Luanti used to have a custom translation format (.tr) until Luanti 5.10. .tr had created issues with Weblate, the platform we use for translating the server (check it out if you wanna help!), until we switched to the new format Luanti adopted: .po - that is, an industry standard. It took us... weeks to find the strength and migrate everything; but everything seems to work now, HAH! If you wanna know more about it, Zughy gave a talk at FOSDEM this year, on Luanti, translations and A.E.S. ~~The nightmare is over~~

📅 Coming next

Arcade Tournament: Join us on Friday, there are even a few seats left for you. Read the full announcement

Remember you can support what we do by donating on Liberapay! 🫶

This week on AES 0

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 23:00:00 GMT

🔫 Block League

SMG: removed secondary fire

⛅️ Skywars

Team mode: HUD on top of your teammates, to always know where they are and how much life they have left

Remember you can support what we do by donating on Liberapay! 🫶

AES Arcade tournament

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 23:00:00 GMT

Hi everyone! We are happy to invite you to the 2nd AES Arcade Tournament!

In short:
📅 20 February at 20.00 UTC (21.00 CET)
📍 Find us in the lobby!
✉️ Application: In-game /mail to fnetx or via our Matrix channel
🫂 First 16 applications will be accepted
🏅 Reward: In-game title for first 5 ranks, first 3 will be placed on the winner's podium in front of the arcade hall
💪 Practice the arcade games in a training session on Feb 06 at 19.00 UTC (20.00 CET)

What?

It's been a long time since the first Arcade Tournament happened on AES. Now, it's time for the trophies to move on to the new generation of players.

Join us for the second (but definitely not the last) Arcade Tournament.

Rules and application

We'll accept 16 players for the tournament. The first ones to apply get their seat.
If you don't show up before 20.15 UTC on the day, you cannot take part in the tournament. Additionally, you will not be allowed to participate in any other AES tournament within the next year.
To apply, just write an in-game message via /mail to "fnetX" or to our Matrix channel
The participants get a confirmation before February 18
If you are not accepted, you are still invited to join and have fun. Any free seats (e.g. when players don't show up) will be distributed last minute.

How does it work?

On that day, the participants will be randomly distributed onto 4 groups.
The groups compete against each other using the "Arcade Party" and the points are added up.
If there is a tie in the end, the first ranks will play against each other in a final party.

The schedule looks like this:

20.00: Opening ceremony and fun playing
20.10: Match A vs B
20.15: Match C vs D
20.20: Match A vs C
20.25: Match B vs D
20.30: Points are added up. If there is a tie, a final match will be held.
20.40: Award ceremony and announcement of winners

Devlog: How We Compressed a Billion Nodes into 17MB

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 23:00:00 GMT

Our story starts with a client requesting a "simple" Battle Royale minigame. That supposedly simple request sent our definitively-very-well-paid developer (Giov4) down a two-year-long rabbit hole of algorithmic problems that turned out to be anything but simple: isn't life beautiful?

But let’s start from the beginning.

To have a great Battle Royale mode, you need a great map reset system. We already had one, battle-tested in our Skywars minigame, but it had been designed for small, floating islands and tightly scoped arenas.

This new project was different. The map was massive—about 1000 x 512 x 1000 nodes. We were dealing with a volume of roughly half a billion nodes.

This is a technical deep dive into how standard engine tools failed at this scale, how we crashed servers with 20GB RAM spikes (oopsie!), and how we eventually ended up writing a custom Octree implementation to manage the unmanageable. We'll also pretend to make the topic funny with some pictures, like the one below. Haha, pictures!

The Failure of Standard Approaches

Our legacy reset system relied on a fairly standard approach: tracking changes. We hooked into the engine’s Lua functions and callbacks (e.g. on_place, on_dig, set_node) and simply recorded every modification a player made. When the match ended, we reversed the list.

Great, right? Hah, you dumb dumb: such approach falls apart in a complex game mode, because surprise, callbacks don't really track everything. Enter Voxel Manipulators!

Luanti allows modders to use Voxel Manipulators (VoxelManips) to perform bulk block operations efficiently. These operations bypass Lua callbacks entirely to maintain performance, so unfortunately there is no way you can track their changes. As an example, imagine you want to cause a really big TNT explosion and you use a VoxelManip to do that: TNT goes kaboom, blocks go kaboom, oh wait we can't track that, you realise your map is gone for good, internal screaming, 5 stages of acceptance 1 per second, reevaluation of your life goals, go back to your childhood, find a comfortable thought, you remember your map is still gone for good, WE'RE HAVING FUN!

Even worse were liquids: flowing lava updates the map but doesn't trigger a set_node event, so... yes, again, no way to track it. Your map is now a simulation of Venus, you're welcome.

The Memory Wall

Since we couldn't trust the callbacks to catch everything, we thought: "Let's just save the area beforehand and restore it when the game ends." Here we meet our friends VoxelManips again, because the standard way in Luanti to read a map area is using a VoxelManip object. This reads the map data into a flat array in memory: for small areas this is blazing fast. For a billion nodes, it’s... quite an experience. When we tried to load the full arena into RAM to create our snapshot, the server's memory usage skyrocketed to something like 20GB, freezing the server.

We thought of partitioning the map into smaller chunks — saving them as standard schematic files on disk — but we would have hit an I/O bottleneck. Saving 100k+ small files would have taken forever. On the contrary, saving fewer, larger files would have brought us back to the memory problem: to write a large schematic, you first have to load that large area into RAM. It was a deadlock. We needed a way to store a massive, sparse dataset in memory without the overhead of a flat array.

Now, it might be possible that we might have lied about the definitively-very-well-paid part. So in the end for the Battle Royale we decided to use the original Skywars system, paired with custom unefficient but compatible implementations of liquids and TNT nodes.

Until...

...Giov4 decided to hate himself. He spent two years working on a solution for this problem during his free time, instead of having fun, doing drugs or, seriously, anything but this. And what was the solution? Abandon the engine's default storage formats and implement a custom data structure: an octree.

Voxel worlds are highly repetitive: a 16x16x16 chunk of the sky is usually 4096 nodes of air, a chunk of the underground is often 4096 nodes of stone, and so on. A flat array just stores 4096 entries for both. An octree, instead, is recursive. If a subdivision of the tree contains identical nodes, it collapses into a single leaf. That meaning: a 16x16x16 chunk of air doesn't take 4096 memory slots anymore; it takes one.

Unfortunately all the octree graphs out there suck and all this is made in our free time. So yes, this is AI made.

But simply using an octree wasn't enough; we had to implement several layers of aggressive compression to get the footprint down. Big nerd time incoming.

Dominant Node Optimization

When the system scans a chunk, it calculates the most frequent node. If a chunk is 80% stone, 10% dirt, and 10% air, we don't store the stone. We set "Stone" as the default value for that specific tree node and only store the exceptions. Then, if a generated octree matches the global default of the map (usually air), it is discarded entirely and the default value is read from the map itself. In a map that is 50% sky, this basically slashes the memory usage in half!

ZSTD Compression

Once the octree is built, it is serialized into a string and compressed using ZSTD. We are basically constructing the map by streaming compressed mapblocks!

The results were absurd: a 1 billion node map that required almost 20GB of RAM in a raw format was compressed down to just 17MB on disk. In RAM, when fully loaded but compressed, it occupied roughly 30MB. That’s ~1,205x smaller on disk and ~683x smaller in memory!

The Lazy Memory Model

Unfortunately compressing the map is only half the battle. You still need to read it — as démodé as that may sound. If we decompressed the entire map into a flat array, only to look up a single node, we would loop back to the initial problem.

The solution was a Lazy Loading system backed by an LRU (Least Recently Used) cache. The map stays compressed in RAM and when the game queries a specific location:

We identify which compressed "blob" (chunk) contains that coordinate;
We check the LRU cache;
If it's a miss, we decompress only that specific chunk, parse the octree, and cache the result;
If it's a hit, we query the cached tree.

The cache size is limited to 5% of the server's max memory budget. However, because the decompressed octree structure is so lightweight, filling this budget is difficult. In practice, the cache is almost never emptied; once a chunk is loaded, it stays resident until the server restarts. Combined with the fact that players naturally congregate in specific zones — ignoring the map's extremes — we rarely encounter a cache miss, bypassing the decompression pipeline entirely!

Asynchronous Architecture

Nice, we are finally don- No.

Luanti is single-threaded. This means if you try to process 1 billion nodes on the main thread, the server will hang for minutes. Our system had to be entirely asynchronous.

Reading: we can't access the map directly from a worker thread. So the main thread grabs raw map data in manageable batches (via VoxelManip) and dispatches them to a pool of worker threads. These workers handle the heavy lifting — constructing the octree and running ZSTD compression — in isolation. Nice job, worker threads!

Writing: restoring the map is harder because we must write to the world on the main thread. To prevent lag, we implemented a Time Budget system (defaulting to 50ms per tick). The system processes the restore queue in small steps, checking the clock after every batch. If the budget is exceeded, it yields and resumes in the next frame. Simple but effective.

Auto-Tune: determining the right batch size for each server — how much data to grab or write at once — is very important. If the batch is too big, memory spikes; too small, and overhead kills performance. We built a tool that benchmarks the saving pipeline on the live server. It empirically tests different batch volumes to find the "sweet spot" that fits the server's hardware limits, ensuring that neither reading nor writing operations ever trigger a stutter. Perfect for potato servers as well as computers with RGBs.

The Surgical Restore

Finally, we had to solve the actual reset. Even with efficient storage, re-writing half a billion nodes takes... time. We don't want the player having to wait for minutes after every match (especially not in the era of TikTok attention spans — oh, look, a squirrel!).

So we went back to tracking map modifications, but in a smarter way. We used on_mapblocks_changed, a recently-introduced engine callback that notifies mods about all mapblocks modifications.

When a chunk is modified, we mark it as "Dirty" (🫦), while in the background, we verify this change against our compressed reference. If they match (e.g. a false positive triggered by the engine emerging the chunks), we discard the entry.

If they differ, we schedule it for a restore. When the match ends, we don't reload the whole map. We only overwrite the specific chunks that are actually dirty!

So, uhm... What a journey.

If you made it this far without your brain melting from all the "octree" and "VoxelManip" talk (contrary to Zughy, during his proofreading): congratulations! You deserve a cookie. 🍪

Basically, what did we learn today? We learned that Lua is actually pretty capable if you treat it nicely. Sure, we miss C++ sometimes (who doesn't love a good ol' segfault?), but proving that you can solve "hardcore" engine problems just by writing smarter Lua scripts was... oddly satisfying.

It wasn't a solo trip, though. AI helped us generating a massive suite of 69+ tests and keeping the docs tidy from day one. Well aware of the nature of the majority of these tools, we hope to have used them for the common good (the octree mod is free software, AGPL 3.0) as a way to accelerate what was already in our minds but that on our own it would have taken us months and months - we only rely on donations and we're not a company.

Anyway, thanks for reading our technical ramblings. We’ve got more stuff coming in the future, equally painful but hopefully equally fun.

If you want to help turning our definitively-very-well-paid developers into definitively-incredibly-well-paid ones, take a look at our Liberapay :3

See you around! ❤️

Building contest 2026

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 23:00:00 GMT

Hi everyone! We are happy to invite you to the AES map building contest 2026.

In short:
🫂 1-3 players per team (unlimited applications)
📅 02-12 January
📍 mg-studio.splvs.net : 30000
💬 Event chat
ℹ️ Some of the maps will get featured on Luanti AES minigame server afterwards

What?

During two weeks, you'll be able to build and test your map in small teams (1 - 3 players) on a dedicated "Minigame Studio" server. You can build maps with fewer players, but it will be much less fun and please remember that it is a challenging project. We prefer applications in teams.

We will try to assist you with feedback and suggestions (also see the "Map building tips and hints" section below), and we're available for your questions.

In the end, some maps will be featured on the AES minigame server. Every team member with an accepted map will gain the "Map builder" prefix on AES for 6 months. There are no single winners nor leaderboards.

We are looking forward to your creativity.
~ Zughy, Giov4, _Zaizen_ – AES administrators
~ Enlive, fnetX, awertc – Studio assistants

How does it work?

On a dedicated server, we grant every team a building area of 150x150x150 nodes and set up the required tools for your build (e.g. WorldEdit). You then proceed to develop your map in this area. There are several public feedback sessions that you can use to get feedback on your drafts. It allows you to test your map with more players and get feedback from other teams.

Accepted maps

We currently only accept map submissions for the following minigames:

Sumo
TNT Run
TNT Tag
Fantasy Brawl
Block League
Murder
Skywars

Unfortunately, we don't currently accept submissions for

Colour Jump
Quikbuild
Baloon Bop

Public testing sessions

If you want to test your map with other players, you can do it at any time. Additionally, we offer several testing sessions where you are invited to test your map and those of others and share feedback.

Even if you are not participating in the contest, we kindly invite you to test the maps of others.

If you cannot participate in the testing sessions, this is not a big deal. You might miss an opportunity to obtain feedback on your map, and we encourage you to invite friends to test the map at other times.

Testing sessions occur on the following dates:

Jan 04, 15.00 UTC: First optional map testing session and feedback.
Jan 09, 19.00 UTC: Second map testing session. We recommend that your map is somewhat ready to play and you only need to fine-tune the gameplay after this session.

How to apply?

Deadline: January 02, 2026, 20.00 UTC

One member of the team needs to send the application ingame to the "mg-studio" account to AES.

Join the AES minigame server
Go to the mailman NPC and interact with it
In the menu that is opened, select writing a new message
Enter "mg-studio" as the recipient and write your application
Provide the following details:
- Give your team a name.
- List the names of the other players.
- Tell us, for which minigame you want to build a map (see list of allowed games above)
All team members need to register a new account on the "Minigame Studio" server (your credentials from AES are not accepted at this server):
- Address: mg-studio.splvs.net
- Port: 30000

Schedule

Find the important dates and deadlines below. Generally, all work can happen asynchonously. You are not required to participate at specific times, but we highly encourage you to join the testing sessions.

Dec 22: Applications open.
Dec 29: We start setting up teams that applied on the Studio server. Once your arena has been set up, you can start building.
Jan 02, 20.00 UTC: Applications close. Building officially starts.
- Teams that have technical difficulties or haven't yet received their plot are invited to discuss the details with us.
Jan 07: AES staff members provide feedback for your maps.
Jan 12, 21.00 UTC: Building ends and your maps are submitted to BlockExchange.
- You don't need to be online. We'll upload whatever is in your area at the given time.
Jan 14: AES staff evaluates the maps and announce the results.

Stay in touch

We invite you to stay in touch with us and other teams for feedback and fun. You have several options:

Join the Studio server and chat with us and others.
Send further emails to "mg-studio" on AES (see apllication on how to do this)
Join our Matrix room for sharing screenshots and asking for feedback.

Rules and conditions

The server rules from AES apply to the minigame studio as well. Please be nice to each other.
Destroying the work of others is strictly prohibited. We won't tolerate any offenses and suspend members who are discovered griefing from the contest.
Be respectful with the work of others. If you don't like something, try to give valuable feedback over insulting language.
Your maps are submitted under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license. With your participation, you agree to license your work under the terms of this license.
- This is important to allow your map to be used on AES and potentially other servers. It grants everyone the rights to copy your map, use it and improve it, as long as they quote you.

Evaluation and Criteria

We are looking forward to your submissions and enabling some of them on AES in the long term. Please see below for the criteria that we use to judge your map:

Gameplay: Most importantly, your map should be fun to play. We use the observation from the testing sessions and our own to assess if the map works well. Maps that are too large or not easy to understand are less unlikely to work well.

Innovation: We value if you try innovative ideas in gameplay that differ from those of existing maps, but it is not a strict requirement. Please try to balance with gameplay: If it is too complicated to understand, it is unlikely to be fun. You can also use the first days to experiment with your idea.

Design: The maps should look somewhat nice. You don't need to make them an artwork, but please ensure you decorate it accordingly and consistently (e.g. avoid part of a map nicely decorated and the rest of it being only a flat area).

Please don't be disappointed if your map is not accepted in the end. We're doing the contest for fun and we know that not all the maps fit the AES server. But we hope you enjoy building and playing the map with others. You can download the map from BlockExchange in the end and play them with your friends forever!

Map building tips and tricks

In the following sections, we'll share some tips ands tricks on how to build good minigame maps based on our experience. Most importantly, you'll learn something for yourself. Even if your map is not chosen to be made available on AES, we hope that you have a fun time and learned something for your next map idea.

Choosing the correct size: It might be tempting to build large maps. However, please keep in mind that gameplay is not fun if you walk alone and can't find the other players. Especially TNT Tag, Sumo etc don't make sense with large maps, as you are effectively unable to reach the other players. If in doubt, start small.

Balance innovation with proven gameplay: We encourage you to be creative and experiment with gameplay ideas that are not yet present on AES. However, it is well possible that your idea doesn't work out. Please don't be disappointed if this is the case, we still value your experiments. Alternatively, you can try to build a map similar to existing ones and only change decoration.

Keep it simple: Minigame maps are not artwork. You are free to express yourself, but try to start simple and add things over time. If you start with a too complex idea from the start, chances you cannot finish them in time are high.

Manage your time: The building contest is limited in time. Try to keep an eye out. We recommend you to create a working draft of your basic concept as soon as possible and test it in the testing sessions early. It allows you to enhance your concept over time. Try to avoid getting stuck with the details, you can do this towards the end.

Ask for and respect feedback: Observing how other players interact with the map is important. They might have different skillset than you or use different devices (e.g. smartphone vs gaming PC). It allows you to adjust your map if you learn that the average player differs from what you have in your team.

Sumo

You'll need a "jail", the area where players are temporarily limited to after dying (e.g. in "Burning Bridge" is inside one bridge tower, in "Circle" is in the circle itself).
Avoid people camping too much. Make sure that there are no unreachable spots (e.g. a player being thrown in the air should not be able to stay on a pillar or island that no other player can reach afterwards). You can use barriers or player killer air to prevent this...
...But it is better to avoid it as much as possible. It is quite confusing if you are thrown in the air and there is suddenly a barrier, or if you think you can land in a safe spot (e.g. island), but you die instead.
You can make people die using "Player killer air" or "Player killer water". Use what fits best to your map.

Skywars

We'll provide you with more details on how to set up the cages during spawn.

Fantasy Brawl

Please use a flat ground as the base for your map.

Hello World!

Tue, 09 Dec 2025 23:00:00 GMT

Test, test? Does this work? Oh my god, what have I just pres-

So, uhm... Hello! Welcome to our humble abode in that cosmos we call web. We've got a blog now, apparently.

Mm? You don't know much of the server and you're not really sure about why you're here? Regarding the latter: I feel you, why are we here, buddy? What's life? What's love? Why can't we move our pinky toe? And why are you now trying doing it, to then only discover it was a blatant lie? A true mystery. Anyway, regarding the former: we're a Luanti minigames server created by a few friends in 2021, during the pandemic. We wanted to create a safe gaming space where people could have fun without shaking hands with debatable companies. You know, privacy issues, pinkwashing, companies involved in brutal killings and all those lovely things that make you understand how money is worth way more than people's lives 🤩. What have we done in these years? Well, this video is a good recap. Moreover, these are our 2023 and 2024 highlights:

We've decided to start a blog mostly because we want our changelogs to be public, using RSS to deliver them to the Internet. If we keep publishing them on Matrix, as we currently do, we create a barrier for potential new players whom might decide not to look into it further and then leave. Also, using a standard like RSS allows us to automate a few things here and there. Because another important thing is, we're not paid to keep the server running, we only rely on donations. So if we can publish only once and have the post delivered both on Mastodon and Matrix, well, that sounds great to us! Also, speaking about donations... a little one? 👀

So... Yeah, that's it. Don't do drugs. Don't accept candies from strangers.... ~~unless it looks delic-~~

See you around!