✈️ The Logbook: Three Weeks Above the Clouds
How Season 1 of STYGION MC got off the ground, lost a day, found its own voice and learned to fly, told day by day.
How Season 1 of STYGION MC got off the ground, lost a day, found its own voice, and learned to fly. Told the way it happened, day by day, with a little less sleep than recommended.
Chapter 1: The Saturday we kept moving 🕓
It was supposed to open at noon. Then, the evening before, we looked at the list of things still left to do and quietly moved the opening to four in the afternoon. Nobody complained. Well, almost nobody. 😅
At 16:00 on Saturday, 10 October, the whitelist came down. The announcement went out, and within minutes the first people were falling out of the sky into a world of airships, propellers, rails and copper. Nobody had told them how any of it worked, and that was the fun part.
By evening there were contraptions in the air. Some of them were even meant to fly. Others mostly proved that gravity still works. One thing was clear by the end of the first night: no plan survives forty people building engines at the same time.
That same evening, a little after eight, the server got its first big update while people were still exploring. /rtp threw you somewhere random, /tpa pulled you to a friend, and /back took you back to where you'd just been. It also brought rewards for voting on server lists, and a chat and tab list finally dressed in the colours of the brand. Getting lost had officially become optional. 🧭
Chapter 2: Sunday, and a shelf of medals 🏅
You know what a brand new server needs on its second day? Something to compete over.
On Sunday, 11 October, badges arrived, and with them the idea that Aeronautics is Season 1. Every tier is its own badge, so you're not just "Sailor", you're Sailor I, then II, then III, and everyone can see which one. The thresholds come from what you actually do in game. You can't buy them, and you can't talk your way into them. The leaderboard went up on the website, and suddenly people were checking it the way you check the weather. 📈
That same weekend the server learned rule 10: PvP only when both sides agree. Ambushing someone who is busy building their first propeller is not a sport. 🙃
The launcher came along too. It got the badges, a richer Discord status that shows which server you're on and for how long, and a window that finally opens at a sensible size. VOIDIVIDE also released STYGION OS that day: his desktop look for Linux, one command, with its own little video. Because why release one thing on a Sunday when you can release four.
Chapter 3: The quiet days and a very loud bug report 🔍
Then came a few calmer days. The server ran, people built, and the list of reports kept growing.
One of them stuck with us. A player wrote in: every twenty minutes or so, their whole PC would freeze. Not the game, the whole PC. They had a strong machine with a brand new graphics card, and the more RAM they gave the game, the worse it got. We dug through their logs line by line. No out-of-memory errors, no crashes, nothing on the server side. In the end everything pointed at the graphics driver choking on one combination: shaders together with the physics that makes the airships fly.
We didn't want to blindly change the pack on a hunch, so we wrote back with a few things to try first. We kept that lesson for later, though, and it came back a week later as one of the most important decisions of the month. 🧩
On 16 October the launcher learned to measure. "Measure on my PC" makes a copy of your instance, plays a fixed scene for ninety seconds and tells you how the pack will really run on your computer, without guessing and without sending anything unless you say so. With it came presets, including Potato Mode, for the brave souls on old laptops. 🥔
On 17 October the server got louder in the best way. Write someone's name with @ in chat and they hear a sound, even on Discord. Crates started to spin. They didn't have to, but they do now, and it's glorious. 🎰 And a whole vote party arrived: when enough people vote, a bossbar appears, titles fly across the screen, a lucky player gets something random from the pack, and everyone celebrates.
The next morning we found out the vote party had been crashing quietly every five minutes because one setting was missing. It was fixed the same day. Parties are hard. 🎉
That day also brought a second wave of badges with better names than we had any right to: Aeronaut, Hard Landing, Mechanic, Trackmaster, Treasure Hunter. And VIPs got proper roles on Discord in the colours of their rank.
Chapter 4: 05:50 💀
Sunday, 18 October, 05:50. The drive in our server stopped. No warning, no slowing down, no last words. One moment everything was running, the next there was a kernel panic and silence.
The drive itself could not be saved.
What followed was the longest Sunday of the season. In went a brand new drive and a fresh system, and everything was rebuilt from the ground up: the website, the accounts, the ranks, the shop, the map of the trains, the server itself. The accounts, ranks and settings came back from the cloud backups, and the world came back from the most recent copy we had of it.
And here's the honest part: the last day of play didn't make it. If you built something on 17 October, you probably had to build it again. We're sorry. That's the one thing in this whole story we'd change if we could. 🫡
So we changed what we could. Backups now run four times a day, and every single night a full copy of the world goes somewhere safe, far away from the server. Should the next drive decide to retire early, it won't take a day of your building with it.
Chapter 5: The same Sunday, our own pack 📦
Here's the part that sounds made up: on the same day, STYGION MC switched from a public modpack to our own: STYGION: Aeronautics 1.0.
Why on earth do that on the worst possible day? Because the server had to be rebuilt anyway, and a pack you don't control is a pack that can change under your feet. With our own pack we decide what goes in, what gets updated and when, and we can fix things ourselves instead of waiting for someone else.
The first versions came out fast, several that same day. The menus had text cut in half, the pause screen was blacked out, and CurseForge rejected one of the versions because a mod inside it hadn't been approved yet. Every one of those got fixed the same day. 🔧 The launcher got a fix too, after a player found that saving their RAM setting crashed it. Thank you, that player.
And because a Sunday like that clearly wasn't eventful enough, the mining world opened as well: /warp mine, amplified terrain with mountains that need their own weather forecast, and ore everywhere you swing a pickaxe. It resets on the first Monday of every month at 05:00. (Yes, that's tomorrow. Get your stuff out.) ⛏️
Chapter 6: English first, and real instruments 🎻
A few days later, on 23 October, we made a decision that might not look like much: everything public is English first. Every room, every button, every announcement, every line the bot says. Czech is still everywhere, but it comes second. STYGION has players from all over, and they should feel at home from the very first message. Of course, if you write to us in Czech, we answer in Czech. 🇬🇧🇨🇿
The same day, the pack got a fix for a crash that hit people who used Chisels & Bits together with shaders. That was three separate reports, all with one cause.
And somewhere in the background, something new started: music. Not stock music. Ours, written with real instruments. That will matter in two days.
Chapter 7: Saturday, 25 October: the big one 🚀
This was the biggest day of the season so far, and it started early.
First came launcher 0.13, which we called "Nothing gets lost." It was built around everything we'd learned the week before. It backs up your worlds before anything risky. When the game crashes, it can find the culprit and start the game in safe mode. It remembers your own changes and keeps them when the pack updates. And one button copies the crash log, so you can paste it straight into a ticket. After the week we'd had, the name wasn't an accident. 💾
Then came STYGION: Aeronautics 1.1.
56 new mods. 36 updates. 1,584 quests. A dark interface across the whole pack, because your eyes deserve it. Proximity voice chat, so you can now hear someone three chunks away yelling "WHO TOOK MY PROPELLER", which is exactly how it should be. 🎙️
And the music: the main menu now plays "Aeronautics", a three-and-a-half-minute airship theme written for this pack, with three more songs of ours beside it, and the theme has its own music disc in the game. If you've been sitting on the title screen longer than you'd like to admit, now you know why. 🎶
STYGION Shaders 1.1 came with it too, with three profiles: Laptop, Default and Beauty. Pick by your hardware or by your ego. Distant Horizons finally drew far-away land properly instead of letting you see through it. 🌅
Over the next day, as more people jumped in, the patches followed: keys that mods had quietly taken over were given back to you, and a too-eager inventory mod was taught some manners. Then came the one we'd been waiting to make since that first lag report: shaders and Distant Horizons are now off by default. The game starts smooth on almost any PC, and anyone who wants the beauty can switch it on in Video Settings with one click.
Keystone joined the party with a new chat: your chat and tab list now take on the look you've picked, and images and emoji from Discord show up right in the game.
Chapter 8: Small fixes and big rules 🧱
The next days were quieter, but not empty. Chat from the game reached Discord again, and the server's English, Czech and Global channels started sharing one room there.
Over these weeks the rules grew too, and every new one came from something that actually happened. Rule 12: no railways in the Nether. (Small lava-loop trains are fine. We're not monsters.) 🚂🔥 Rule 13 is about generated structures and loot chests, so the next person who finds a ruin still finds a ruin.
Chapter 9: 30 October: make it faster, don't make excuses ⚡
Big modpacks are heavy, and the easy way out is to hide it: smaller worlds, fewer features, "please don't build that here". We decided not to go that way. Instead, on 30 October, we built our own mod: STYGION Optimize.
It went from nothing to its fourth version in a single day. 😮💨
- Saving the world no longer freezes the server. It saves in the background, safely, while the game keeps going.
- Picking up a block with Carry On will no longer kick you off the server.
- The airship physics no longer has to stop the world to load a chunk or rebuild a ship.
That evening it went up on CurseForge for anyone to use, and you can switch off each fix in the config. The next day it got even faster: one of the most expensive checks inside another mod dropped by 96 %.
The same day brought a few smaller wins. Server-list votes now come with rewards for streaks: 7 days in a row gets you 3 days of VIP, and 30 days in a row gets you 7 days of VIP+. The top three voters of the month get even more. Discord got sturdier against spam bots: brand new accounts can read everything, but can only write once they link a player in game. And the store got November codes: REMEMBER11 and FREEDOM17. 🛍️
Chapter 10: Halloween and the launcher that wouldn't stop 🎃
On 31 October the launcher reached its fifth version in three weeks. If yours updated itself five times this month, that wasn't a bug. It was us, waving. 👋
Launcher 0.14 keeps the configs you changed after an update, so your tweaks are yours for good. Pack updates get their own window with clear progress. Fabric mods now run inside NeoForge thanks to Sinytra Connector. And the launcher won't let you add a mod that would stop the game from starting. Oh, and there isn't a single piece of cut-off text in it anymore. We checked. Every. Single. Window. 🔍
That day the website also got its own page for running a Create Aeronautics server, for anyone who wants to build one of their own.
Chapter 11: Today 📖
Today is 1 November. As we write this, 9 people are on the server, and it's ticking along at a steady 20 TPS. The vote page now shows Czech players the four Czech server lists and everyone else the four world ones, so the rewards are fair for everybody.
Since the gates opened, the code behind STYGION has changed 1,949 times across 14 projects. We lost one drive and one day of play along the way, and we hope never to lose either again.
And something bigger is sitting in the CurseForge queue right now, waiting for someone at CurseForge to press a button. 👀 We'll tell you all about it when it's out.
Epilogue: Thank you 💜
None of this happened in a vacuum. Every fix in this logbook exists because someone played, found something odd and told us. You posted a crash log, sent a screenshot, or yelled into voice chat until we heard you. Some of you even rebuilt a whole day's work after 18 October.
Thank you. Keep building ridiculous things. Keep breaking them. Keep telling us.
See you in the sky. ✈️☁️