About Uncovery Minecraft

Basic Principles
I would like to point out a few of the general principles of how this server is run, so that you can better understand why the rules are in place and where this server might go in the future.

    • Survival means survival. If you are in a survival mode world, you will have to gather your own resources and try to survive the monsters and other difficulties by your own wits and knowledge.  This also means that there are no handouts in terms of resources. If something is hard to get, it is supposed to be that way. You must walk to get where you need to go, elders will not /tp you for your own convenience. There will be no workaround for difficult things.
    • I want the environment to look somewhat natural. That’s why I do not allow giant writings, graffiti, pixel art, or other garish structures on the survival maps. There are plenty of other servers that allow that.
    • I want builds to be protected from griefing. I do my best to give your buildings the best protection possible. That is why you can apply for a protected area of 128×128 cubes (bedrock to sky, so 128x128x256 to be precise). You can allow others to work in your area, but doing so is at your own risk. Also, for your protection, fire spread, lava ignition and TNT explosions are disabled. This is because even though areas can be protected, the wooden structures can be burnt down without fire protection. I have it set up so that you can light one log, but it won’t ignite nearby blocks. Same for lava. Also, since one can build a TNT cannon, there is no way to protect other users lots from damage unless I prevent TNT explosions from damaging blocks. Creeper explosions also do not damage blocks. However, all explosions will still harm players and mobs.

For more complete information on the rules and policies of this server, please familiarize yourself with the following pages:

To see who’s been here recently, view the Users listing.

The History of Uncovery and its Maps
This server has seen several maps since it was started in October of 2010. The first one was a “creative” map where people pretty much built what they liked and got the unlimited materials to do so. At that time, I let people build first and then once there was something substantial, I would come over in-game and protect the structure according to its actual dimensions.

Then, mobs got enabled in multiplayer, and I wanted to include them into the game. However if nobody has to mine for resources, and if everyone can build endless lighted spaces in no time, and have as much food as they want, there is no point to having mobs. This led me to the conclusion that we have to disable the unlimited resources. And, to be fair to new players who cannot harvest materials from their old construction, I decided to start a new map.

The second map started off well, but as the popularity of Minecraft rose, so did the number of users checking in and wanting to have a protected space. I realized that the random assignment of spaces, such that I have to walk to and manually protect in-game, was not going to work. Therefore, I wrote a script in PHP that would write a config file for the protection plugin, with a map of 1000×1000 blocks completely allocated like a chessboard. No free spaces between sectors, a large public area and a fixed spawn space. On top of this I created an automatic system to white-list users, give them building rights and reserved lots.

Later, I realized that people want to have the chance to explore spaces and not only see their own 100×100 lot. So I created the Darklands where I tried to make it as difficult as possible to build stuff and to stay safe mobs. But people were able to explore the endless country and harvest resources as much as they liked.

A short while later, I discovered Towny and decided that was a better system for allowing players to explore a large map as well as collaborate on large builds if they wished. So I discontinued Darklands and created Kingdom. Kingdom did not have the same restrictions on building and was totally managed by Towny.

Finally, when terrain generation was updated in Minecraft 1.1, I re-opened Darklands and revamped it to include protected lots. Around 1.2.5, we removed lots again from the darklands and introduced towny to the darklands and the nether to allow custom protection.

We also removed the old “world” and temporarily the kingdom too for cleanup work and a clearer separation of worlds and their reasons for being.

Updates

During the times when Minecraft is updated and the server protection (i,e. the Bukkit recommended build) is catching up with the changes, we always run the normal map for those who did not upgrade and an alternative, and a temporary map for those who did upgrade. Once the server protection is working for the latest version of Minecraft, I delete the temp map and switch the main server over to the latest version of Minecraft.

As you probably know, Minecraft is always a bit buggy, the plugins too. There are frequent updates which break one feature or another, or might shut down the whole server for a while. Please have patience with that. If you ask me “when will [whatever] work?”, all I can tell you is “As soon as the software works.”

Hardware
We are hosted at 1and1 on a dedicated machine with the following specs:

Conclusion
While I am always happy to hear suggestions about new plugins, know about bugs and try to improve the server in content and performance, the above points will not change. So asking for handouts, changes in protection, etc. will not get any result. Please do not try. I had enough of that and can only suggest this: If you don’t like it, go somewhere else.