I have now managed to restart the machine. Since I am on the way, I cannot restart the mc server right now, will do so when I get back to my laptop tonight (in 3-4 hours).

I have completed a file system check, and have yet to see the logfiles to see if there was an issue. If there was not, the search for the issue continues..

I am trying to find and fix the issue that has been lagging the server over the recent 24 hours…

Since the map seems to be corrupted in one place or the other, I am now re-rendering the whole 3D map and see if that returns any spots with issues.

I will be traveling over the coming 3 weeks (half business, half private) and therefore can put only minimal attention on the server. Should something crash, please still send me emails etc as usual. But do not panic if I do not log on too often.

After many attempts to slowly push people over the edge of a cliff without them complaining too much, I finally managed to coax everyone from the paradise-like skylands to the mob-infested hell-hole called “aether”.

Thanks to everyone who has participated early on and thanks to everyone else for finally moving yourselves :D. Just kidding of course.

I think I removed the skylands references from the code wherever I could. If you find it mentioned somewhere, please let me know.

We are closing in on the big date, with about 30 days and 800 users short to the goal!I am looking for suggestions what to do on this event, so please comment!

I have processed now a batch of recommendations for promotions. This time, the promoted users to architect are (in no special order):

• Pagreifer
• kzr_nvd
• Iamjonno23
• magmacube_king
• moirdeth
• Kod
• HoldenGs

And patpat2211 to master!

Congratulations!

The server is back up now for some time, but I have not found the place on the map yet that caused the problem. So there is a chance that this comes back.

Sorry guys, the server is down. There is some part of the map which got corrupted and I am not at home to fix it. Once I get home, I will repair it, but until then, you will have to -GASP- go outside and do something in the fresh air….

…

There are new IRC Commands for the elders:

I have just fixed another corrupted lot, the problem was the same as last time but this time it was riedi73’s. I reverted his lots to the status of 24 hours ago and the issue was solved…. no idea where these come from, I hope those get less once the final bukkit versions come out.

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 :)