Hello all, I have been working on a few small features to make the deposit boxes more useful, especially in combination with the shop. These are now available:

• Buy, sell, or offer items directly to or from your deposit box. This uses separate commands: /depotbuy, /depotsell, and /depotoffer. Since these only work on your deposit, you can even use these commands from inventory-restricted worlds (such as the Darklands). Of course, they require that your depositbox is not full, and in order to buy stuff into your deposit, require that you have 1 free space.
• Withdraw items by name rather than just by ID. So you can do /withdraw stone 256 to withdraw 256 units of stone, without having to know the ID. It will even attempt to withdraw from more than one depositbox if the same item is found in more than one.
• /depositall will deposit your entire inventory at once, as long as they will fit in the deposit. This can be useful when used with the lot_reset user, to quickly move your items before a reset.
• /depositbox consolidate will try to combine your deposit slots, so if you have the same item from three users, the shop, and the lottery, it will take all of those slots and combine them into one slot, without needing to move them to your inventory first. This requires that you either have a free slot or that you already have the item in a self-deposited slot.

These commands have been documented on the Money and Trading page. Please let me know or create a ticket if there is any issue with any of these commands, or about any other issues with the shop or deposit. Thanks!

Recently we’ve been having a permissions glitch where users suddenly lose all their permissions. They cannot even pick up items or even speak in chat. Resolving the glitch usually involves disconnecting and reconnecting, and hoping it’s fixed. Then you have to go and re join all your chat channels…

I looked at the code for the permissions plugin and I’ve made a guess as to how to fix it, however I can’t make the glitch happen in my tests. So Unc’s agreed to install my patch, and we’ll just have to wait and see if this happens again.

So, if anyone has this glitch happen again as of about an hour prior to this blog post, please reply and let us know :( … On the other hand if we go a while without another glitch, we can assume the patch works and I’ll submit it to the author of our permissions plugin.

Thanks for your help!

Once again, it’s happened. The new release of MC, 1.4.6, is not backwards-compatible with 1.4.5. The server is still running 1.4.5. So, if you want to continue to play on this server, either do not upgrade, or be prepared to downgrade.

As usual, we are waiting on a stable build of Bukkit for 1.4.6 before we can upgrade the server.

Some of us have been talking and came up with an idea to sort of give guidelines for how to enforce rules and encourage good behavior in a way that’s healthy for our community. We came up with this:

Suggested Code of Conduct

We hope that by giving all players suggestions to act more consistently, it’ll reduce tensions and drama and generally keep our server the great place we love. Many of us were already doing some or all of the things we recommend, and mostly it is common sense stuff, but we felt it would be helpful to lay it all out.

For those unaware, it is now possible to buy the head of a vanquished opponent for 1000 uncs after you win a hunger game. See the hunger games page (scroll to bottom) for details.

IMPORTANT!

• The heads you pay for as trophies, once placed, cannot be picked up. EDIT: The heads can now be picked up! However, they do not drop. They are teleported instantly into an empty slot in your inventory. If you do not have an empty slot in your inventory when you break one, it will be gone for good.
• The heads cannot be moved through shop or deposit. Doing so will result in nothing but a regular steve head coming out.

We’ve installed a new shop update, which changes the way a couple of commands work, and introduces a couple of new commands. The idea is to make it easier to get information out of the shop’s history and about current listings. The trading page has been updated with the changes and new commands. But, to summarize:

• Improved (hopefully) in-game help text for many commands
• Shop announcements now include the shop-id of the new request or offer, if available Edit: Works all the time now.
• You can now add the word check to your command when buying, selling, offering or requesting. This will do a “dry run”, showing you what will happen with that command without actually moving any money, items, or announcements. This is useful for “checking” that you have the right command. For example: /buy 21831 check will show you what would happen if you did /buy 21831, so you can be sure your shop-id is right. If everything is okay, just hit up-arrow and delete the “check” to do it for real!
• The /history command now works on items, e.g. /history glowstone. Note: There is currently a bug with /history sell, looking into that.
• The /find command is more flexible now. You can now search for specific enchantments, or for items above or below a certain price, and you can use these in combination. For exmaple, /find diamondsword ench:sharp <1000 will find any diamondswords for sale for under 1000 uncs with a Sharpness enchantment.
• /find @new is now the default, so just do /find r to find requests.Use /find new without an at sign for new items now. Also look for enchantments now with /find ench (without an @ sign). Edit: The ability to find the item in hand was re-added as before.
• The Shop Data web page now shows the enchantments in the “History” query, so you can see why one diamondpick sold for 2000 and another only 600.
• New command: /info gives you summary of completed sales with many flexible options. By default, shows you the top 10 items sold in the past week, sorted by total value in uncs. But it can also, for example, do /info sellers diamond 90, which tells you the top 10 players who sold diamond in the past 90 days, sorted by total value of their sales. See the shop page for more details.

Note: There is a bug with the buyer: and seller: arguments, looking into that too.

• New command: /trend gives you information on price trends. Never again have to guess what an item is worth based on current shop listings! This compares the completed sales in past week with the week before to show changes in price, by default showing the 10 items with the most change. This means that if you buy someone out to repost their sales at a higher price, you are driving down the average price, so beware! You can of course ask for the price trend on a specific item, for example /trend diamond. The length of the periods and the amount of sales to require for a trend is also configurable, see the shop page for more details.

I hope these changes are useful. Any bug reports, suggestions, or complaints can be directed to me (azkedar) or to Uncovery himself. Actually, save the complaints for me exclusively. ;)

Minecraft released version 1.4.4 today, and you will be prompted to upgrade when you start the game.

Clients that have upgraded to 1.4.4 will be unable to connect to our server for the time being. Unless you are comfortable with switching your minecraft versions between 1.4.2 and 1.4.4, you should not upgrade your client to the most recent version if you want to play on this server at this time.

After reviewing the feedback from the recent survey regarding the shop, we’ve made some small changes to hopefully make it work better for everyone.

• /find, /list, and /cancel will now assume “offer” if you don’t specify request or offer. So /find cobblestone will work again.
• /offer can now take an optional “silent” argument anywhere to suppress the sales announcements, so you can avoid spamming when posting large quantities to the shop. For example: /offer 5 silent will post all of the item in your hand at a price of 5 and will not generate any announcement.
• /withdraw all can now be used to withdraw everything from the deposit. It will stop if it runs out of room in your inventory.
• /withdraw @sender can now be used to withdraw everything from a particular sender, for example my personal favorite:
  /withdraw @lottery

There were also some small changes to the help and error messages:

• /sell now reminds you that you might mean /offer instead when you don’t give a shop-id.
• All messages now omit /ws from the command syntax, except for /ws help where it is always required. Every other command can be written without /ws (though you can write it if you wish), and it’s shorter and clearer to write it that way.

Of course, please report any problems with the shop system that may arise. Thanks!