Author Archives: uncovery

About uncovery

Owner & admin of this server.

Small info regarding mob spawners

Posted on by

Please note that the mob spawners only revert to aggressive mobs once a passive mob tries to spawn from the spawner. If you had a spawner that never spawned any of the mobs you selected with a spawn egg, there is a chance that it will stay like that until you create the conditions that this passive mob would actually spawn, and then it will revert to aggressive mobs.

New Rule, new FAQ layout

Posted on by

I improved the FAQ layout to a collapsible one. There is still work to be done on the layout to make it look a bit nicer, and there is a potential to group things by category which also still needs to be finalized, but in principle it’s done.

Also, there I added a new rule to make it even more explicit why I was not happy about the whole spawner eggs incident:

Do not circumvent rules or game limitations. There are several things we limit in the game, such as deposit boxes, amount of lots, headcount per lot etc. However, there will be always some bugs, oversights or new game features that will allow to circumvent those limits. Do not exploit those. Instead submit a bug report that there is a way to circumvent the limits.

New FAQ entry

Posted on by

My kingdom lot has snow on the ground, but it never snows! How can I make it snow?
The kingdom was created a long time ago. Since then, biome definitions have changed. The snow might be still around from the time when the old biome had snow on it. The new one might not have snow at all. Please go to the location in question and press F3. Check what the name of the biome is and then check if it’s on the list of Snowy Biomes.

Last clarification on the mob spawn & eggs issue

Posted on by
  • We will soon disable the spawners that spawn friendly mobs
  • We will then add the eggs again to the shop.
  • We will either make the spawners spawn a random mob or give out hostile mob eggs for people to make the spawners productive again
  • Everyone will have to reduce the amount of mobs on their lot to fit the headcount
  • nobody will have to return any other goods, pay money back or destroy something.
  • Whoever feels that they want to leave the server, please go ahead. ASAP. I rather have a server with 3 people who like it than 300 who only sit around and complain without providing a solution or even want to have a constructive discussion. IF you are undecided, I am happy to build a command such as /ragequit you can use to ban yourself automatically. Just ask. Takes only 5 minutes. Much less than this whole discussion.

Clarification on Mob spawners & Spawn Eggs

Posted on by

So there seem to have been some misunderstandings regarding the last post and what the actual issue is. You can put things together while reading all the comments on the previous post, but for ease of access and clarity, let me summarize things here.

So first of all, spawn eggs are not meant to be in Survival mode. Survival mode is about not having unlimited things of everything. While vanilla provides for some unlimited items when you work out how to do it (like using a mob spawner as a resource once you made sure that the mobs cannot attack you), I do not think that those are good in a multi-player scenario. While it’s very hard to get all the resources one wants in single player, multi player can provide for these things through separation of labor. The only reason we offered spawn eggs in the shop at a reasonably cheap price was that you could bread most of these animals afterwards anyhow. But you still had to breed them. They did not jump in unlimited numbers out of a magic box. This whole scenario is by the way also in gross violation of one of our biggest rules:  “No handouts”. To be honest I am a bit disappointed that nobody ever thought that this whole situation is not how we have been running the server for the last years and asked me if I was aware about this. Well, lessons learned, I will have to take more time with the next update and make sure I understand all the repercussions of the new features.

So following this, the option that you can essentially gather unlimited resources and those even in unlimited variations (think horse types, cat colors etc) is something that you can expect in creative mode, but not in survival. There is a clear conflict between easy accessible spawn eggs and having the spawner option at the same time.

So my conclusion is that one of them has to go. Either we prevent the spawners to be altered by spawn eggs, or the spawn eggs disappear. Since I do not have a ready-made solution to revert what has been done to the spawners, I removed the eggs from the shop. If we find a practicable solution for the spawners, the eggs will be back in the shop.

Mob Eggs & Spawners

Posted on by

So, as I only found out today, you can convert any spawner to spawn any animal as long as you have the corresponding egg to do so. This is a standard 1.8 feature.

Now this is an issue on several levels:

  • I am still selling eggs in the shop. How much sense does it make to sell a horse egg for 1000 Uncs when someone buys it and then sells live horses off his lot?
  • The whole value of any animal where a spawn egg exists is practically zero because of this. I am a bit disappointed on this possibility because I felt that there are already too many things that are too easy to get.
  • Changing this behavior is quite tricky. Everyone who used this so far will have an advantage beyond everyone who comes afterwards.

So I basically now removed all my spawn eggs from the shop. People will have to get looking again or work together to get the animals.

If anyone has an alternative solution, please let me know.

Today’s development updates

Posted on by

This is a daily update on the status of the work done behind the scenes. You can see the complete status here.

Development status page 95% done!

Posted on by

The page where you can follow the development status is now 90% done!

You can see now the open and closed issues as well as any comments to the issues. I hope this will bring more transparency to what we are working on.

What still needs to be done there is some more styling to make it look better and possibly also a list of all the code changes so you can see if the development is currently active or not.

Server Update

Posted on by

So I just updated all server packages (not the minecraft server, rather the operating system etc) and rebooted the server in preparation for the leap-second. There is a certain small chance that a server crashes while the leap second happens. It’s advisable to restart the server manually before that to see if something else would prevent the server from booting up properly. Normally servers like the one we are using is running for months without being rebooted, so it can happen that something sneaks in preventing it from starting properly.

So now that the server seems to be running properly, we can wait for the leap second and hope that everything runs well. There is no risk that something gets damaged, just that the server might freeze and requires a reboot.