• 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.

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.

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.

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

• Issues Opened:
  • Issue No. 77, E_NOTICE: Undefined variable: newstatus (  bug  )
  • Issue No. 76, Users with Vanity don’t get ++ when donating (  enhancement  )
  • Issue No. 75, Bonemeal can grow grass in other lots (  wontfix  )
• Issues Closed:
  • Issue No. 74, E_NOTICE: Array to string conversion (  bug  )
  • Issue No. 73, E_NOTICE: Undefined index: sleeping_owl (  bug  )
  • Issue No. 72, E_NOTICE: Undefined offset: 1 (  bug  )
  • Issue No. 66, Enable Deathlands world reset (  bug   Priority 1  )
  • Issue No. 19, Registered days is wrong for some users (  bug  )
  • Issue No. 15, Check_lot_owner gets called after lot manager process finished, causes error (  bug  )
  • Issue No. 11, Add automated process for donations including gifts (  enhancement  )

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• jonno (from MasterDonatorPlus to ElderDonatorPlus)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• alleywig (from DesignerDonatorPlus to MasterDonatorPlus)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

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.

I have added a link to a new 3D object generator to the Build Tools page.

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.

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• chenoa (from ArchitectDonatorPlus to DesignerDonatorPlus)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

Please note that the deathlands reset is not working yet, and I don’t have a lot of timethis week to fix it.

So please stand by until this is done. Until then the commitment score will reset every 7 days but the world won’t.

Since we have another PVP world now, I wanted to remind everyone about the rules:

If you have any kind of tool installed that gives you an advantage in the game, it’s not allowed.

This includes any kind of tool or map that allows you to see other players in PVP, see ores, caves or helps you fight is forbidden. Stick to the rules. Remember we ban, but never unban.

I have created an automatically updated list of all the code issues (bugs etc) that are currently known.I hope this will create clarity on which bugs are known and what is being worked on.

Some of these are maybe a bit technical specially the “code enhancement” tagged ones. You can access that list through the Features menu under the “Development Status” tab.

I will expand this function. The goal is that you will be able to click on an item and see the details as well as get a bit of an idea how much work is being done in the background.

Karma was just fixed. Thanks to floored1585 for assisting on this!

You can now type /hardcore exit at the spawn area (100 blocks away form the center) and it will teleport you to spawn. You can then enter the deathlands again with /hardcore start.

If you die and therefore exit the deathlands that way, you cannot go in until the next reset.

I also reset all users that did not have committed blocks yet, so they can try again.

I fully understand that people would want to be able to pause a hardcore game and I would like to enable it. The question is how. There are issues of practicability and also of effort required to do it. So here are the options:

1. You can exit the deathlands when you are in the spawn-area. There would not be a portal (since I cannot rebuild it every week) but a command that checks where you are. Effort: Small. Practicability: Limited. You would have to come back to the center each time.
2. You can exit the deathlands wherever, by command. When you re-enter, it will teleport you back to the place you were. Effort: I am not even sure it’s possible. There is a risk that it would teleport you always to the surface. I can try surely and see how it works. Also, this version would require to check for your health. I don’t want people to bail on a fight. Practicability: 100% – if possible.

So what I will do now is to implement version 1) since version 2) would require 1) to be in place anyhow (i.e. a command). Let’s see how that works and then see if version 2) is needed and possible.

I just finished the first version of a new game on the server. Thanks to stephdeg for the proposal!

Hardcore Game!

What does it do?

• You play minecraft – as vanilla as it gets – and try to survive as long as possible.
• You are in a separate world (deathlands) and cannot take anything back to the empire etc. This is about survival, not building.
• You cannot leave the world once entered. You can log off the server and log back on, but the only way out is to die.
• PVP is on, except for a 200×200 square at spawn.
• If you die, you are out, and cannot go back until game restart.
• One game lasts a week. At a certain day of the week, the map is deleted, your inventory is gone, your score is reset.
• You make points by committing diamond blocks. One diamond block is worth 100 points. If you commit a block, it’s gone and you get the score credited.
• The person with the highest score at the end of the week wins the round.

What will come?

• We can decide on more blocks that can be committed – and their value.
• This is a test to see everything is as expected. Once we confirm, we set a day of the week for the reset.
• A web interface for score tracking

How do you do it?

• Warp to the new world with /hardcore start
• Get the current score with /hardcore score
• Commit a diamond block with /hardcore commit while holding a diamond block
  ATTENTION: This will take ALL diamond blocks out of your inventory!

What can you do?

• Try it, and tell me if everything works
• Make proposals for improvements

• The developer of the disguises plugin finally released a working version, so disguises work again!
• the /who and /where command are fixed!