The History of Sponge

This page is split into two main parts:
  • the history of the project itself
  • the history of our beloved mascot Spongie

The History of the Project

Sponge was founded as a better alternative to the APIs that were available as of September 2014. The Sponge Staff consists of many people from different Communities, e.g. Spout/Spoutcraft, Forge, Cauldron and a few others.

When the development of Bukkit and Cauldron reached an abrupt end, the Minecraft community was shocked. Several developers from the above mentioned communities gathered in #nextstep on Esper.NET and discussed the future of Minecraft modding. It was decided that there certainly was a demand for a new API as the CraftBukkit repository (Cauldron too) was taken down.

Several goals should be achieved with the new API:
  • consistency
  • stability across Minecraft updates
  • ease of use
  • compliance with the Mojang EULA
  • protection against DMCA takedowns

While the goals were mostly clear, the route to be taken was not. The soon-to-be Project was still nameless too. The first mention of Sponge as the projects name was on Sept, 6th by Firehead94. Obviously, the name stuck.

The initial commit to SpongeAPI and SpongeForge was made on September 7th and 8th, 2014 by one of the Sponge Project leaders, Zidane. This was the beginning of the development of SpongeAPI and SpongeForge (named Sponge at the time).

On September 7th, 2014 the initial commit to Granite, an API based upon Vanilla Minecraft was made. Granite, originally started as an independent project, was planned to implement its own API and SpongeAPI. Granite and SpongeForge coexisted until April 20th, 2015.

The development of SpongeForge and the API gained momentum leading to a first API release on December 1st, 2014. However, this version was far from feature complete and an API-only release, meaning that there was no official implementation available at that time.

On December 26th, 2014 the Granite Team decided to limit Granite to the usage of SpongeAPI. That made Granite the first unofficial Sponge Implementation for Vanilla Minecraft. On March 26th, the Granite Team finally joined the Sponge Team and Granite became SpongeVanilla, the official SpongeAPI implementation for Vanilla Minecraft. About a month later the unification of the Granite and SpongeForge codebase began in SpongeCommon. SpongeCommon was created to hold all shared code between the two implementations while implementation-specific code remains in SpongeVanilla and SpongeForge.

On April 21st, 2015 SpongeAPI 2.0 was finally released. On April 25th, 2015 development builds of SpongeForge (#428, Inspired Wallaroo) were finally made available. The first alpha build of SpongeVanilla (DEV#17) was released on September 13th, 2015.

On December 31st, 2015 SpongeAPI 3.0.0 was released, along with SpongeForge (#1000) and SpongeVanilla (#129) entering their beta.

Spongie - our Mascot

Spongie is our friendly, helpful and somewhat soaky mascot. Don’t make her cry, as she’s a very sensitive person.

The History of Spongie

Spongie first appeared in #Sponge on Esper.NET around September 2014. She was created and posted by DragonsPainter. Strad, another user, felt that Spongie would look better with a moogle-like antenna, a Forge furnace instead of a Cauldron and replaced the Spigot with Spout. An anonymous user then removed all labels and introduced her as the icon and background logo for the Sponge reddit section.

This older version of Spongie sadly isn’t available as vector graphic. Thus Sponge staff decided to create a new vectorised version. Two new drafts were then posted on State of Spongie. The currently used assets are located here.