I have copied the jungle contest to the city. I would like to ask the elders to help with the required terra-forming, tree-planting and path-building. Please also help contest submitters to re-place missing pictures and other items. You can reach the area with /warp jungle

The new contest is also live, please see the contest page for details! There will be REAL prizes this time!

I have now finally gone through the contest entries and the winners are out. There is only one designer level user and the others are all architects or settlers. So I grouped the designer with the architects. Sleeping_owl also had the overall best entry

Architects:

1. Vixengold (level up, 2 stack of Diamonds)
2. patpat211 (2 stack of Diamonds)
3. scarovese (1 stack of Diamonds)

Settlers

1. sleeping_owl (level up, 2 stack of Diamonds)
2. kzr_nvd (2 stack of Diamonds)
3. kaosrin (1 stack of Diamonds)

Congratz to all winners! I will be copying the entries over to the city, due to the amount of entries however only those with a score of 2 or higher! Contest winnings are already in your deposit boxes!

Once I managed to copy everything over, I will start the new contest.

Please head over to the Jungle Contest page and vote ASAP! We will be voting for one week only this time to make sure that we can start the next contest soon!

We have the jungle contest right now and it will end soon. For the next contest (and I do not know yet what it will be), I will be giving out real winnings. To be specific, I have 3 games in my steam inventory that I got as bonuses for buying other games:

• Portal (1 copy, from 2007)
• Bioshock (1 copy, from 2007)
• X-Com Enemy Unknown (1 copy, from 2012)
• DotA 2 (10 copies) from Sleepystrangekid
• 25 USD from KidCodiwise
• 25 USD from enkl0001
• Minecraft (1 copy) from lilroc
• Terraria (1 copy) from JoBilly

I decided to give those away. So what I will do is the following: There will be a build contest. I will make a proper ranking, regardless of user level. Then, the top user will have the choice to pick either 1 of the games, or pass (in case he/she does not want it or has it already). Then the next user in the ranks will be able to to the same for whatever is left over in the list. Of course, we will still do an additional tiered ranking as usual and hand out rank upgrades!

[Update]

I have received emails from users who want to contribute. So here is how:

• Either you have a game in your steam inventory that you do not use anymore and pledge to give this to one of the winners. I then add this to the list here. Once there is a winner, you will give the game to the winner who chose that reward.
• Or you want to contribute cash via paypal. You simply by another donators level and send me an email that this is for the contest instead of a donators level. I will add all the money together. You can give any amount you want, big or small. The money will be another optional prize for the winners to chose from. However, the winning user has to pick a game on steam from that money. If there is more money than the game is worth, the rest stays on the rewards list for the next one to chose. If the money left over is too little to buy something from, it will go into the next contest. We will most likely determine a max prize range for the game to be bought.

[/Update]

The next thing to do will be to wait until the server is updated and then to decide on what the next contest will be. Suggestions welcome!

Please all note that if you think your contest entry is done or almost done, please submit it on the website! Only submitted entries will be voted on!

If you have some technical issues submitting, please send me an email with the text that you are trying to enter and your lot number ASAP. I will not start working on reported issues 3 days after the contest closed….

Dear all,

as promised I have created a new contest. Please go over to the contest manager and take a look. Please make sure that all of your tree is in the build area so that it does not get cut off when we copy stuff over.

[Update] I wanted to make it clearer what I wrote above:

• It is no problem if some leaves stick out over your build area. Just be aware that those will not be copied over. If you place a tree in the corner of your lot, 2 sides will have the leaves cut off when we copy it.
• The 6 blocks clearance is only a helping guideline to tell you the radius that large trees use when making leaves. You do not need to keep 6 blocks completely empty on the inside of your lot.

• I have now cleared the contest area in the aether, so we are ready for the next contest. I am currently working on the new one. I need to do some testing, but it should be up soon
• I also refunded all the contests entries and you should all have your contest materials in your deposit box. Due to a bug, it is not possible anymore to do /withdraw all. I have disabled that function now for security. Please withdraw line-by-line. I am working on fixing this.
• There is a new /warp now called “xmas” where you can see all submitted contest builds. This warp works only in the city, as usual.
• I would like to ask the elders and masters to help making the area around the xmas entries nicer with some roads etc.

I have just closed the XMas Contest: We had 27 submissions, quite amazing! Since this time we had so many Citizens and Settlers I split them into two groups. So let’s start from the lower levels:

The best ranked entry from the 5 Settlers is coming from tbrewda36, and of course she is promoted to Architect, and wins a stack of Diamonds!

Next level up, we are coming to the Citizens, where we have 11 submissions! The highest ranked entry there is from PioneerTomb187, and he also wins an upgrade to Architect, and a stack of Diamonds!

Then we come already to the Architects, where we also had 5 entries, and the best one was patpat2211 who will be from now on Designer, also receiving a stack of Diamonds!

Among the 2 Designers, the best one was AEROX247, who will have the honor to be Master from today, with – you guessed it – also a stack of Diamonds in his pocket!

The 2 Masters who submitted were led by lilroc17, who will receive 2 stacks of Diamonds, just as the best Elder, KDDK!

The best overall score was achieved by AEROX247, who will get another stack of diamonds on top of it!

All upgrades are already applied and diamonds are in your deposit boxes! I will do my best to copy all 27 contest entries to the city ASAP and then announce the next contest!

Congratz and thanks to everyone for participating!

I found the reason for the holes in the contest lot. I made a mistake in the code that should exclude contest lots from being reset. Since the contest holes are not aligned with chunks, the reset function shot some random holes into the area. Very sorry about this.

Good thing is that the reason was actually trivial and could be fixed. If the teleporting there would have caused this (it caused some severe issues before, such as server crashes). we would have a much harder issue to fix.

So thanks to all who suggested solutions and tried to help here, and sorry again.

I have closed the contest now, so please go and vote!

Also, there were numerous cases where chunk-holes appeared in the area of the contests. I have no idea how these happen and can only suspect that there is an issue with the automated warps. We might have to find a different system here. Maybe it’s fixed with 1.4.6. If some of your contest got damaged through this and you did not have time to fix it until now, please send me a ticket immediately.

Also, if you did not manage to submit your contest until now, please post a message here and I will do that for you. Thanks!

Please be aware that the XMas contest will end in a couple of days! Get building to get a new level!

There is a new contest now open for submission: Christmas! As before, please use the /contest command in-game to participate!

I have copied all the entries to the city so you can see them and fly around. To vote, you can now go on the voting page and start voting! In order to see the contest entries, do a /warp anniversary to be teleported to the contest entries. they are on both sides of the street. Each entry has a sign at the nearest entrance to show who built it.

All contest builds that have not been submitted on the website have already been dismantled and the blocks can be found in the builder’s deposit box. I will be refunding the other contest entries to the submitters soon.

Since we have the new contest entry system now online, where people build in a pre-defined lot, we have much more entries that were never finished. I have now created a new system where people can “submit” their entry and therefore declare it finished. Otherwise we will have to judge abstract art etc for people who did not build much more than a frame around their contest lot.

So you are required to actually put a name and a description of your contest entry on the website once you are certain that your contest entry is worth being judged. If you did not have time to finish (or even start it), just simply do not do anything.

So to submit the entry for the 2 year anniversary contest, please go to the contest manager website and enter a title and description for your contest entry, then press “submit”. Otherwise people cannot vote on it.

I extended the deadline because of this and the 1.4 release to November 4th!

The Anniversary contest will finish in 21 days. Now is the time to finish your build! This time there will be more and more awesome prizes for the contests, so make sure you participate! For more info type /contest in-game!

The parkour contest is now copied over and ready for voting for those who have not done so yet. There were quite some issues with this one. First of all, I got delayed several times copying the entries. Luckily, with the new system, that will not happen again. Second of all, during the contest several of the people who submitted an entry moved their lot to the empire and the lot was reset. In the end we have 3 entries of which 1 I am not even sure who built it since it does not match at all the description (himisawesome’s one). I sent an email to him but did not get an answer. On top of that one user made the surface that much bigger than the rules stated and he refused to change it, so I disqualified him.

All the entries are now in the flatlands lot K10. Please go there ASAP and vote if you have not. I will close this finally on Friday.

I have now moved the contest lots to a different area. Please go there and make sure there are no mistakes. Check that your building is there as expected and that you can edit the whole area. This was a manual process so there is a certain risk that something went wrong. Please do /contest warp 29 <id> to get to the now location!

I have now created a new contest lot. You can therefore join the contest again if you have not done so. The previous contest joiners are still on the old lot. I will move them over in due time. You do not have to do anything. We have now 400×400 space for contests, I hope that is enough!

The contest lot is full, I will have to move it to a larger space. Will try to do so today. Then wee will have place for 4 times more people than now. Did not really expect that…

There is a new contest system up now. It still announces the contest on the website, but you ‘join’ it in-game. It will assign you a creative or survival lot (depending on the contest). You can even teleport to that lot (if you are in the correct world). I still have to write a function that your entry automatically appears on the website for voting. All works through the new /contest command.

Please try out the system and tell me if the help functions are not clear enough or if there is anything to improve. I have created a new contest for everyone to work on! Since people build now in a separate lot, anybody can join in on any contest. Owners of a creative lot need to mine in the darklands to join a survival contest.