Welcome everyone to the new year and the new decade. 2019 was an interesting year for Existence SMP, it saw the conclusion of Season 2 and the start of Season 3 along with two new projects in the form of Hardcore and Keystone.

As we kick off 2020 we’d like to share with the community our plans and approach for the future of Existence SMP. There’s going to be some big changes coming over the next few weeks and months as we look to change the focus of Existence more towards the community and less focused on our official YouTube series

Looking back on 2019

Before getting into the new year it’s worth reflecting on what happened during 2019. As mentioned above we had an array of series and projects, it was an interesting year for us. We gained and lost a lot of members during the year and had a number of struggles behind the scenes to keep things running smoothly.

Along with Season 3 we started Project Keystone and made our Patreon page more official, we always intended to watch how this developed. A number of patrons from the beginning are no longer pledging but there are still a group of members supporting Existence and interested in Keystone, which brings us to the future of the server.

The next step for Project Keystone

With the upgrade to Paper 1.15.1 completed by Keystone Admin Dellta(Dragon), we will be changing the focus of the project from an exclusive patron server to a whitelisted semi-private server for patrons, trusted community members, past members and friends of the server.

Following this change we hope to introduce more members to Project Keystone and have it act as a home server for prominent Existence SMP Community members and friends

So how will this work? The server will remain exclusive and only trusted members will be invited to join and play, we don’t intended on the server being public and see it more as a private server for active and known community members. This will ensure we can moderate the server more effectively and have a closer connected community

A major part of this will include encouraged content creation on the server from members but without the standards and expectations of the official Existence SMP series

We hope to start inviting community members and players straight away.

What about Season 3? Season 4?

Season 3 will be ending either early or mid 2020. In March the Existence Community will be celebrating 4 years and it’s time for a change. Throughout the years we’ve had so many great moments shared across all 3 seasons, however with the same repeating patterns of activity and members we’ve decided to move on from the traditional YouTube SMP style server.

We don’t currently have a date for the conclusion of the series and are currently discussing this. Even though Season 3 will be ending, we will be directing out content creation to Project Keystone, having a much more relaxed and less strict approach to video production, taking the stress and pressure off content creators to create content at their own pace and in their own style.

There’s no plans for a Season 4 anytime soon, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen one day. For now we hope to pursue this new direction in community and maybe one day down the line consider a 4th season when the time is right.

Where to from here?

Our first steps will be with Project Keystone and the changes in direction for the server. Over the next few months as we come to conclusions for Season 3 we will look at changing the operation and layout of the Existence SMP Community across Discord, Patreon, YouTube etc. We still intended to continue the Existence SMP Podcast throughout 2020

Making 2020 great

Thank you all for sticking by us over the years, we’re excited for these changes and hope you’ll join us in creating a great community for 2020

If you have any questions or points of discussion we’d love to talk about it in our Discord server.

A huge thanks to our patrons for the month of January 2020 for continuing to support us during these changes