The Jungle

The Jungle the furthest away from The Capital.

## History

Following a period where new communities had been introduced every three months since the start of The Dome, there were originally no plans to start a new one until after the 1.18 update released. Plans changed, however, when WhiteLikePaste learned that The Old World had reached the 4 GB limit to download backups for realms.

Continuing to host The Old World on the realm would be a risky proposition moving forward. This was especially true around that time as void chunk errors were becoming more frequent and loading backups was a common occurrence. This resulted in The Old World being taken offline while a solution determined.

### Move to The Jungle

Fortunately, WhiteLikePaste had been testing out ideas for potential future communities so the map for The Jungle was already available on the Java Edition. Previously WhiteLikePaste had a much longer timeframe to work with in regards to preparing a new area. But given the unexpected nature of the switch to The Jungle, all preparations were condensed into a two day period.

Due to the incident happening in the middle of the month, the Willow Classic III had already been scheduled to take place in The Old World and Willow had spent time prepping it for Halloween. In order to move forward with the event, WhiteLikePaste brought The Coliseum into The Jungle map as well.

While there was some disappointment about temporarily having to leave The Old World, there was also a lot of excitement around the move as many considered it to be a nice change of pace and an opportunity for a start fresh. But there were some who lost the drive to start over and chose to wait for The Old World to go back up despite knowing that their progress would be brought back with them.

Although under an entirely different set of circumstances, the situation bore a striking resemblance to the start of The Island, which was coming up on its one year anniversary around that time. The Old World being down would also gave WhiteLikePaste the opportunity to perform some much needed maintenance on and fix issues that had accumulated over the previous year.

   After two days of preparation, The Jungle was opened up to existing realm members. The fresh start resulted in a surge in player activity with player counts holding consistently around 10 online for the first few weeks. Several new players were recruited around this time also and players began establishing smaller locations within The Jungle. Each of these would be given their own names.

### Battle For The End and The Jungle Run

Initially the Battle For The End was planned as a way of closing out the time in The Jungle map and as an end to the Realm Era as a whole. Plans changed when a glitch occurred that brought The Ender Dragon into the overworld somewhere around 0,0. This led to realm crashes as players attempted to interact with it. The Battle For The End would be pushed back and become the first event on the server. Luckily, RescueLynn81, Mama071416, Black1ightningg, and Peculier32 had already been testing out a race through The Jungle which would become The Jungle Run and serve as the event for that month.

### Server Transition

Throughout the duration of The Jungle, WhiteLikePaste had been testing various server providers in an effort to determine the best one while also learning how to operate a server on the backend. During this period Committee Members, Mayors, and Groundskeepers were brought into copies of The Old World in an effort to stress test the server.

Ultimately, it was determined that a Shockbyte server was the most reliable. At that point it was simply a matter of waiting for an official release date for the 1.18 update as the plan was to bring The Jungle into The Old World in an area surrounded entirely by 1.18 chunks.

### World Merge Delay

The second world merge was scheduled to take place on December 1st, 2021. However, WhiteLikePaste failed to take into consideration that the program being used for the world merge, Amulet, would not be updated to accommodate a 1.18 world right away. The server was still opened up to everyone as planned and most people chose to return to The Old World and wait for The Jungle to be brought in. But in order to prevent anyone from losing access to their stuff, both The Old World and The Jungle would run concurrently until Amulet was updated.

Although it took longer than expected, the program was updated on January 18th, 2022 and The Jungle was finally brought into The Old World the following day.

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