The nolagg plugin had a std. setting that limited items to 80 per chunk. I increased that now to 200. So if you have a farm, it will most likely output max 200 items per harvest. I hope this is enough. You can add another button that does the rest and harvest it in section.

I would like to ask all masters & elders not to change the spawn areas anymore. There are several issues that happened recently:

• someone redecorated the story house. This is an issue since one of the stories said “look out the right window”. The window is gone now. The lower floor that was built instead will never be used and is only a gadget hardly anyone sees. While the house looks nice, it has lost functionality and adds confusion to new users
• someone added about 10 signs to the golden “lessons” building, about 5 of them said “read the website” in different wordings, and other instructions, help etc. FYI, there is a FAQ entry that we do not want to have signs with instructions how the server works in spawn for a good reason.
• Someone added about 6 signs that point to the portal house to spawn. It makes it look terrible. If the portal house is that hard to find, we need to change the system instead of making the spawn look like crap.

If you think there is a chance to improve how new users experience the server or how the immediate spawn area looks like, contribute at the issue tracker instead of running around plastering everything with signs. If you are too lazy to contribute through the issue tracker, then rather leave stuff as it is. In the end it is me who has to fix stuff again otherwise.

There are many items that are existing in game, but which you cannot obtain in survival mode, such as a fire block. There are other items such as nether warts which have a block (115 in this example) and an item (372) that have a similar name, but only the item is available. The block is marked red in the wiki’s item list. Until now, if you searched for netherwart in the shop, it would show you item 115, but if you tried to buy it, it would not have any sellers. However, plenty of 372 are in the shop.

To stop this confusion, the shop now will warn you if you try to /find or /search for an unavailable block. It will also tell you if you put up a purchase request for one of these.

I just fixed the issue that some enchanted items cannot be retrieved from the shop. I fixed remaining enchanted items in the shop, so whatever is in the shop now with an enchantment, can be withdrawn without a problem.

I heard now several times that people were griefed by using switches to start harvesting mechanisms or luring away animals though open doors. The only way to stop that, would be to enable users to disable switches, as we do it in towny. There is an issue with that however:

In the empire, 100% of the area is covered by lots. Many of the lots have large builds or even walls. Most of the doors now are iron to keep the creepers out. If we allow blocking of switch-use, we run the risk that new users have to take massive detours to reach their lot due to closed doors.

Since the griefing is only occasional, I would recommend instead that you remove the switches and buttons that allow access to your most important assets and place them only when you use them once you see that you are a victim of griefing.

If we see that this is a more widespread issue, we can think also about alternative methods. At the same time I will see if we use a monitoring plugin so we can ban those users right away.

We have a new announcement channel! inQuish was kind enough to whip up a small plugin that lets our website backend and other services talk into a special channel on the server. Everyone automatically joins this channel, you cannot speak in it, and you cannot escape leave it… All stuff like the website updates and the restarts etc will be in this channel. The channel will also be broadcast to the IRC chat as soon as I figure out how to do that properly.

I updated the information how to contribute to the server on the help page. If you want to try out your programming skills or think that something on the server can be improved, please do not hesitate to contribute through the issue tracker. All info how you can do so is now on the help page.

We now have reached 2000 registered users! That means that 0.033% of all registered minecraft players have been on the server – if that means anything at all. It also means that in average we have 3 users per day registering on the website since it exists!

Well, whatever this means, I am happy about it and we hopefully can see this server grow even faster in the future!