Hi all,

I hope you are all doing well and are enjoying this holiday season, be that opening presents, being with family or just enjoying the end of a rather busy year. This year by far has been a challenging year for many. With all of us trying our upmost to return to a relative normal after uncertainties, lockdowns and an unpredictable future. As a community we have made it through the year and are soon approaching our 10^th year of sentinel and we are still going strong albeit with our own ups and down. As its coming to a close on another year, we would like to take some time to reflect on what we have achieved as a community, even without realising we have gone through many changes in these last 12 months.

From January, we updated to 1.18, one of Minecraft’s biggest updates for a players perspective and from a technical standpoint. This update gave us newer terrain, deeper depths and whole new blocks for us to play with. We produced another video with the help of Mr_RS_ and Migas, you can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9lOljWkI0M. It's a wonderful town highlight of Gotham City. On some more somber news we had in January; Fjerreiro stepped down as Co-Owner and Migas stepped down as Owner passing on the baton to Paulina – Sentinels 3^rd owner. Migas as owner has over seen much of Sentinel's History and is now enjoying his retirement from staffing duties.

February, we introduced our new voting shop, points and tokens, this was a major change from the old tokens, we have been using for many years. (We hope to make further changes soon to make voting more worthwhile for you!). We released another video; this has been used on all our voting sites as a server preview. You can watch this video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abt1Ayjitv4

In March, we ran our Easter egg hunt again with all new hiding spots and some which frustrated players! Due to a server update/upgrade, we had to change one of our core plugins handling inventories across worlds, over all this has been a smooth experience for many and has allowed for a more seamless experience between two different worlds than before. Over the years we have gotten more adept in updating plugins and ensuring a smooth playing experience for us all.

April, we yet again made a major change to sentinel for a day (April Fools Day), we removed ranks and made everyone a fellow Greenie, showing us all that we all once started on sentinel as one and it took other fellow players around us to make us feel part of a community.

During May, Migas started his short series called SentinelCraft Memory Lane, looking back at into Sentinels History and key players who have shaped it into what we have today. We also released another town spotlight video focused on Ducktopia! You can watch that here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rU3iHq0TIBw. We had our 9^th Anniversary Prom with major dedication to the planning from Moog, Bugsy, Quazy and many more. We also had a special prom video made for the occasion! You can watch that here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHmIahXXUKo

Near the start of June and rather spontaneously we brough a new world to Sentinel. This was Origin, a completely survival experience, a major change up to what we offer with Horizon and Kattalox. This improved greatly the player count on the server and very much showed us a new path to go down and from this point we started our planning of seasonal events.

July was a busy month for us! Crates made a short return before yet again another plugin update broke them, we try but sometimes plugin authors are just not nice with us! We also announced our roadmap of what we wanted to introduce to you all by the end of the year, this was ambitious as it had many major changes. We also promoted Bugsy and Moog to Senior Admins after all the dedication and high quality work they have put into sentinel during their time here, we thought it would be fitting to promote them both at the same time. Something you may not have known, we unknowingly got Moog to plan his own Senior Admin party under the rouse that it would be only Bugsy being promoted! One year after making one of the biggest changes in Sentinels History with our bungee network release, we re-released minigames, we hope with time we can introduce some other minigames.

August and September were quiet months for us at sentinel with it being back to school and for us a major shock to the system, we did not have as much time as we would have liked to dedicate towards Sentinel.

October picked up for us, we saw more events to celebrate such as Halloween and a whole murder mystery house to explore designed and delivered by Bugsy, Moog and Quazy.

November, we saw Alleys come to Origin through their own building event We introduced our seasonal event planning with the introduction of Dimension our seasonal world. We started with a different type of Skyblock and automation and the top players will get a care package to help them in the following season! We have begun the planning for the second season of Dimension.

Lastly December, we started up advent again with different gifts for each day of till Christmas. We have also run the Christmas Delivery Service. Head Crates have come back with the effort of Annu and Bugsy. We completely rewrote our website to much more modern theme to help push Sentinel into the future, this also has the added benefit of being much cheaper for us to host than our old site!

Overall, this year we have made many changes and improvements, we hope to keep making improvements in 2023 and for you to celebreate them with us. We have many ideas and plans in the works and we aim to let you know about them as soon as we have them in a workable place!

We hope you have an enjoyable holiday.

--SentinelCraft