I have today massively reduced the natural spawning of ZombiePigmen that happens around Netherportals outside of the nether. The issue is that some players built huge arrays of them to spawn thousands of pigmen and harvest them in automated machinery. Now there is a by-lot maximum cap of 10 pigmen.

I disabled those for the same reason I disabled IronGolem and Villager farms. The simply allow you to automate things in the game that turn it into a creative-mode like system. While these spawning methods were initially meant for the single-player experience, users can get together and built far too effective systems that let you harvest too many goods in a too short time and often create heavy lag at the same time.

Nether portals for example cannot be switched on & off automatically, and an unattended system would spawn hundreds of mobs in one lot in a very short time. So I hope you all understand that I switch those off. I know it’s fun to build these automatons, specially the big ones. But they destroy the server economy and the survival gameplay.

I have realized (with some hints from users) that despite the wither arena being smaller now and such, that it was still possible to kill several of them in very short time. So I placed 3 mob spawners into the arena: 1 Zombie, 1 Skeleton and 1 Zombie-Pigman spawner. I also placed 4 open lava- streams from the ceiling.

In the first test, this setup is already proven to be much more challenging. There is a clear need now for people to go in organized groups. I would like to get feedback from some people once someone managed to kill the wither. Currently there is one inside, unbeaten. I want it to be hard, but not impossible.

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• iamjonno23 (from DesignerDonator to MasterDonator)
• bdogg73 (from Citizen to Architect)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

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• zekurom (from CitizenDonatorPlus to ArchitectDonatorPlus)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

Thanks to the help of sleepystrangekid, we now have a new and improved wither arena! It is much smaller now and hopefully more difficult! It can be reached just as the old one from the city by typing /warp witherarena

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• miner22122 (from Citizen to Architect)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

I am currently working on a improvement of the system where exceptions in the code will generate an email sent to me. This allows me to react in an extreme case at the same time or even earlier than you realize that there is an issue.

On top of that, I am working on removing old code that was used to do the old lot application processes. This is a bit tricky since I have to make sure that nothing important is deleted. So it takes abit more time than just deleting a file.

On top of that, as you all know, I still have to activate the new lot reset process. I am quite busy right now and want to make sure it works properly and not delete someone’s stuff. I will hopefully be able to finish that this weekend.

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• Tar_Bender (from CitizenDonatorPlus to ArchitectDonatorPlus)

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Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• cousac (from Architect to Designer)

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I have now activated the new lot manager. If you are above Guest level, you should use that for any lot changes that you want to do. This includes lot resets and so on. At the same time, I have also re-done the code behind the settler test.

Unfortunately, this is a huge, complicated process. There are several different databases in the background being affected, from user rights over lot management and custom ones. There are dozens of places where the process can fail or unexpected things can happen. Please be so kind and help me debug this by NOT abusing errors. Whenever you use a function, please try to see if:

• you can use only stuff that you are supposed to use. If you can suddenly get lots that you should not, get something for free that you should not etc, please report it!
• you can use all the tools properly. If something fails, please report it!
• check if new users have issues with the settler application. Unless they get a message that they answered the questions wrong, please tell them to be patient and to file a ticket.

Also, I have not enabled the actual resetting of lots yet. So if you chose to reset your lot, please be aware that your choice will be stored in the system but not executed yet. I want to make sure everything works fine before I need to undo lot resets….

I was made aware by ktechwhiz that we did not have a server logo for the server list in the minecraft client that is possible now since 1.7.2.

That made me think that we do not have a real logo for the server at all. I thought it would be great if we had one, so here is the first step in the process to get one: Ideas.

We need ideas for the logo first. What should be in it? It should not be just text in my opinion. I am also not sure that my in-game face would be the best thing, since minecraft faces are already all over the place.

So please post your ideas below as comments! I will then list them all up and the one I like most will win something™!

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• tbrewda36 (from ArchitectDonatorPlus to DesignerDonatorPlus)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• Prowler14 (from Citizen to Architect)

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Since it is now New Year in Hong Kong (where I am), I wanted to wish you all a happy new year and all the best for 2014!

I also wanted to thank you all for being such an awesome bunch of people! If you weren’t, I would have closed the server a long time ago! Thanks to all who help make this a better place, be it by helping others, organizing builds, donating, banning and of course having fun!

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• Sleeping_Owl (from DesignerDonatorPlus to MasterDonatorPlus)
• KennyKenz366 (from Citizen to Architect)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

I will be on a trip until the 13th of January. The time where I will be significantly off-line will be until January 1st. So please do not burn the server down, and report any serious issue that persists over 30 minutes to me. I can still come in and fix things, but there might be some hours delay until I get to a PC. I hope I will have some time to advance the lot manager. The issue is that all the code we have been writing over the last years has been developing into a kind of patchwork and while I have been doing the first things to clean it up, everything I do now for the lot manager makes me bump into more areas where I think that the code needs a cleanup.

So I hope you all have a good time over the holidays and have fun building! See you in the new year!

I am currently working to revamp the complete lot reservation & reset system. We are moving to a much more integrated lot manager page. Here is what you will be able to do with the new system You will be able to…

• abandon, move or reset flatlands lots
• chose your new flatlands config from a set of different versions or move to empire.
• abandon, move or reset skyblock lots
• chose how your new skyblock is configured from a set of different versions.
• abandon, move or reset 1.2.1 version empire lots
• see and change members of all your lots
• see and change snow-fall option in case you are donator
• reset your aether lot (we will generate a version with 1.7.2 biomes soon)
• abandon or transfer kingdom lots
• register to new lots in all worlds

That means that the current lot reset page will disappear along with the lot reservation pages under the “access” tab. However, for the coming couple of weeks, further lot resets will be suspended. Since I am on holiday for some time, I do not want to run an automated system that resets lots when I am not around. the risk of something going wrong is too high.

I have recently received (and executed) a ban request. However, the ban request was supposed to send me attached a logfile of the recent chat. This did not work properly so now I simply take the logfile and scan every line for the mention of the username and attach those. The requesting user gets a report of the lines being scanned and how many have been sent to me, so if there are zero lines, something went wrong and the requestor can submit a trouble ticket.

I have reviewed all maps now and simplified the process of generating them. As a consequence we now have lot maps for all user lots in all worlds, including corner and street lots in the empire. Now the heatmap and the locations of users on the map is now 100% accurate, too.