I enabled a new hunger feature. The game will shrink the world border by one block per minute, to a minimum radius of 20 blocks. This is to prevent a game where 6 people start, a huge map is created and the leftover two get stuck in opposite corners for hours without doing anything to bring the game forward.

The setting of a smaller world border is triggered by people joining, leaving or switching worlds. So if there is no activity on the server beyond the theoretical maximum duration of the game, the world will keep the same size. If there is a lot of activity, it will shrink every minute by one block, if there is less activity, it will shrink in larger jumps. This is to prevent to have too many triggers when the server is busy that might overload the server.

If you are cornered by a shrinkage underground, you should be teleported to the surface. So be aware about the time of the game, and do not corner yourself! It should not kill you however.

This is still up for testing. Please try it out so we can adjust it when necessary.

I want to try to get rid of the skylands again. Here is the list of users who still have a lot there:

• blakavalanche
• hydroflame62
• colossal92
• luklukk

If you do not anything from that, tell me (here in a comment or a ticket) and I will reset it. If there is anything on the lot that you would like to transfer over to another lot, please mark it with red wool, send me the coordinates of one corner and the target corner etc so I can reliably, easily copy & paste it. This means no “the building on the lot to emp_a1” but rather something along the lines of

I marked all 8 corners of a spaceship in lot sky_a1. The lower-right corner is at -100, 10 -150. This corner should be at -200, 20, 300 in lot aet_01, there is a blue wool block in the spot. There is no need to rotate the item.

If you have anything there that you still need and that does not need to involve me for copying, please move it and I will reset the lot then. If there are any other issues, feel free to contact me so we can find a solution. I would be happy to remove the world within the next 2 weeks.

I now added walkways to the map that we use to reset aether lots. This means that newly reset lots will have the walkways now, too. Of course there are still some walkways in the current aether that are missing those walkways. If you get one of these lots, you can either build them yourself or ask me, then I will make them.

You can now deposit items in the end! This means that you can now win a dragon egg and actually take it home!

I have now fixed – as a final outstanding item since the upgrade – the heads trophies from hunger games. You should be able to get the trophy head of your victims according to the hunger games page. Please try it and tell me if it works!

I have checked all the new blocks and updated the shop settings and all new blocks should be fine for deposit and trading in the shop. Please tell me if there are any issues.

I have properly loaded now the backup of the skyblock world from the day before the upgrade. Should be all back in order and working now.

I have for the first time today fixed a single corrupted empire lot. Here is the story:

The server crashed with a quite nasty error message:

net.minecraft.server.v1_5_R2.ReportedException: Loading entity NBT

I do not know where this error comes from or how it is created, but it basically means the map is broken.

I figured it crashed when either Xecaria went /home or when azkedar joined on his empire lot. Not when other people did anything. Their lots also border to each other. So I teleported to the corner between their lots and there, the server crashed again. Bingo.

So I did the following: I reloaded a backup of the empire world from yesterday. I then symlinked the backed up empire to the folder where normally the RAMdisk empire is symlinked to, and restarted the server. I could login on the location in question, so I knew the backup did not have the error.

As a next step, I moved the mint empire world that we copy lots from to reset them when users disappear out of the way and replaced it with the empire backup from yesterday. Then I removed Xecaria as an owner from the lot and inserted an expired user. I shut down the server and told the server to reset expired lots. It replaced the lot then with the backup.

And it worked. I was hoping that Xecaria’s lot emp_o20 had the error so I would not have to reset the other 3 lots in the quadrant too. And luckily it worked. Thanks to Azkedars chunk replacing tool, the lot system, the fact that we aligned lots with chunks and that I discovered the backup issue and fixed it yesterday :)

I recently removed the unsubmitted contest entry from the contest lot so the judging would be easier. I however realized that there was a mistake in the system and so I was not able to refund those items through the deposit system. Trying to reload from backups, I also realized that the backups for the aether world were broken. Somehow the files that were backed up are from December. I do not even know where those came from.

So for those who built but did not submit a contest entry, sorry but the items are gone. Luckily, most of them are only jungle trees and leaves. I will make sure that the actually submitted contest entries are being worked on properly.

So I reviewed the whole backup process. It’s a bit complicated since we have a RAM disk, a worlds folder, a temp synchronization folder and a world that are not backed up (darklands), lots of backend functions and quite a lot of data (several GB). If I want to retrieve something from a11GB backup, the whole think becomes a nightmare. So I split the backup into even more smaller parts now to ensure that we are having quality files and made sure that all the data is actually there and from the right date.

Hope this does not happen again.

As the title says… congratz :)

This has nothing to do with minecraft, but as you may know, I am a hobby photographer and I won a 3rd place in a photo contest of the largest German computer magazine!

The contest title was “City landscapes”. If you click through the images on the page you will see mine in b&w as the 3rd image (“username a-head”, should be uncovery but the user account there is more than 10 years old…). This is the image that won:

I am super-proud since this is the first time I participated in a contest and I am also winning a prize already :) Yay!

I am upgrading the server to 1.5.1. Since there are some unique resources that cannot be shared by a temp and the normal server at the same time, I need to shutdown the system to install additional plugins to test them. So please be patient while this is happening.

I have now had the time to catch up with the pending donations. Thanks a lot to the people who donated! I have sent each of you an email to the address quoted in the donation (which is the one you use for your paypal account).

If you re-login on the website now, you will get your donator status. If there is anyone still outstanding, please let me know so I can check into the matter.

I have been able to do initial tests with the 1.5 version of the server and at the minimum I can report that there are no obvious error messages from any of the important plugins. The next step will be to make a temp setup with random maps, using the current full configurations of the plugins. Once that shows up without errors, we can basically upgrade the server.

I then still I have to go through the custom plugins like the shop and make sure that all new blocks are accounted for etc so we do not break the shop.

I hope I can do it this week. The issue is that I will be on a business trip until Wednesday night and I am not sure how much time I will have to do it. I would hope that I can do it until latest this coming weekend. I will then also close the current contest and put it up for voting.

The server OS has been upgraded to the latest version, and to take advantage of the updates 100%, I restarted the server. The issue was that the server, on reboot, unexpectedly prompted for a disk scan – which shows up before the remote connection is enabled. Since the server is hosted at a provider, the server was unreachable to me since then. I contacted the provider immediately, but until they got someone to go to the server, check it, ask me for the password needed to do the disk scan, until I had time to reply, and then until they again got there to start the disk scan, some hours passed away.

So far so good, just some downtime. There should be only minimal loss of data/changes for people who have been working on the server until the last minute.

Tomorrow I will test the 1.5 setup and see if we can upgrade already with the minimum configuration necessary. Maybe some functions will have to wait until the plugins are updated, but I will try to get the main functionalities running on 1.5 ASAP.

I have just finished my last day diving here and will make my back home this afternoon. In the meantime, I thought I give you a look at the best pictures of the week diving I did.

You can see them on my photography website here. The top 3 rows of images are from this holiday. The ones before from previous dives over the last 4 years.

We will be setting up a new server for banned users so they stop sending me emails to get back in. The new server will have a full-access lot protection for easier griefing, cash rewards for swearing and and a help vampire setup that restores your health whenever you ask a question.

On top of that, you can buy op-level with cash, and we hired a group of elders to come over when your first dirt hut is finished to look at it and clap. I will give out my personal phone number and skype username to answer questions that people might have on how to join.

Hiosa will be the senior pixel art helper. You send him an image by email and he will come over to your lot and build it for you.

The joining-criteria are that you need to have been banned for at least 24 hours and that you are able to spell your name in large block letters across your lot, immediate op level if you can work a penis or a swastika into the text.

I have temporarily cleared the temp server map and started a new one. The old one seemed to have causing troubles. Until I can find out how to pinpoint them and solve them, there will be temp map running.

Also, you might have noticed that I have not been online lot recently. I had a couple of business trips and right now sitting in an airport again leaving for a week of holidays. If there is an update on Bukkit or anything else, I can react to it, but since I am going diving, I will not be connected 24/7.