I switched off that disguises protect you from mobs.

We have a new help system that integrates with the website and the game at the same time. There is a new command: /ticket to open and close tickets. I still have to make additional features and allow more people to answer tickets, but the system is there. It does not work on chat anymore but rather on email base. People who open a ticket in-game get a confirmation email and can reply to it also on the new website support page.

I removed the chat system since it did not really allow to contact players once they were offline. I hope to expand the functions of the new ticket system to be more powerful over the coming days.

We unfortunately lost about 2 hours of work since I did something stupid in the preparation for a new cool feature to the server. Sorry about that!

Instead of running around searching for large farms, we have now hardcoded breeding limits. This means that any attempt to breed more animals than configured will fail. That includes the use of spawn eggs. If you use a spawn egg to create an animal despite having reached the limit, the egg will be gone, but you will NOT get an additional animal. So please be careful what you do.

How do you know if you reached your limit? Use the /headcount command. In worlds with lots, the count goes per lot. In worlds w/o lots (darklands, nether), it goes per chunk (16×16 blocks). Here are the limits for sheep, cows, chicken & pigs:

• Lot worlds: 10 each per lot
• Other worlds: 5 each per chunk

That means that you can have maximal 40 animals per lot or 20 per chunk depending on the world. If there are animals spawning by themselves in your lot, they will count into that number. PLEASE do not take this as an encouragement to always have minimum 40 animals on your lot. The more animals, the more lag! If you had more animals already, they will not be automatically killed, but please reduce the animals to the limit.

Azkedar helped to modify an existing plugin to enable this, so thanks a lot to our C0dr!

Here is an interesting image that puts up statistics on where to find ores:

I know this is a rant, but I am the admin, so yeah….

Got this email:

Ok so i just recently signed up for uncovery but i forget my email that i used to get the password but i didnt think it would matter so i just carried on but then i wanted land but i could because i need to login so can you delete my account from the website so i can start again? Also hiosa Helped me and told me you could help

Sent this answer:

1) if you want to be understood, use punctuation. I guess you do not want to be understood. Why should I read it then?
2) how shall I guess your email? I did not even get your username from you? Who are you? Are you stupid?
3) Did you try this here: http://uncovery.me/wp-login.php?action=lostpassword ? you only need your username there, not your email. You will get an email to the address you chose.

Your request is SO stupid, malformed and unhelpful that you BETTER NOT tell me your username. I would ban you otherwise for asking stupid questions, according to the rules. So you sort out your trouble by yourself, otherwise it was your last day on my server.

Update: His reply:

I was typing fast because I was talking to people… Sorry? But thanks for nothing.

My reply:

You made a mistake by forgetting your email address. Then expect me to help, but you do not give me ANY information that enables me to help you. You do it in a way that makes it even hard to read your question. Because you did not feel it was important enough to stop whatever else you are doing. But you expect me to stop whatever I am doing and guessing who you are and what you want.

And you tell ME “Thanks for nothing”?. Well you are welcome.

• As a surprise for halloween I have given all users (except guests) the power to disguise as ANY mob! Use the normal mob disguise commands to disguise!
• On top of that you can use ANY block as a hat! (like the pumpkins) Hold a block and use /hat to disguise!

Here some detail info on the mob disguise options!

• This includes: babies, colored sheep, sized slimes/magmacubes, tamed/aggressive wolves, tabby/tuxedo/siamese cats, saddled pigs, villager occupations, and charged creepers
  • Also unnatural slime/magmacube sizes: bigger, massive, godzilla
• You can also set the disguise on fire and hold blocks as an Enderman

Use these commands for the extra options:

• /dis or /disguise [mobname] – Disguise as a mob (If no mob is given, the available mobs are listed) {also gives current disguise}
• /dis baby [mobname] – Disguise as a baby mob (If no mob is given, the current disguise is used)
• /dis <color> [sheep] – Disguise as a colored sheep
• /dis charged creeper – Disguise as a charged creeper
• /dis <tiny/small/big/bigger/massive/godzilla> [slime/magmacube] – Disguise as a specifically-sized slime or magmacube
• /dis <tamed/aggressive> [wolf] – Disguise as a tamed or aggressive wolf
• /dis <tabby/tuxedo/siamese> [ocelot] – Disguise as a tabby, tuxedo, or siamese cat
• /dis <saddled> [pig] – Disguise as a saddled pig
• /dis <burning> [mobname] – Disguise as a burning form of any mob
• /dis <librarian/priest/blacksmith/butcher> [villager] – Disguise as a villager with an occupation
• /dis hold <block name/id #> – Hold blocks as an Enderman

I need some help to finish the contest refund system. It will allow everyone to get their contest entry back in the form of blocks into their deposit. To do that, I need to convert the blocks in everyone’s build into blocks people can hold and move them into the deposit of each person. For that, I need a list of all blocks that people cannot normally obtain in-game and the block the unavailable block should be converted to. Someone needs to go to the Minecraft wiki and make a list of all blocks that are listed in red there and find out what the appropriate conversion would be. Example format:

8=>0, 9=>0, 55=>331, …

this cannot be done in haste. For example, pistons and doors are two blocks in-game but have to convert into one air block and one door ITEM. 0 would be air so all blocks that would convert into nothing should be 0.

thanks!

Here is a little announcement for the coming weeks. We have Halloween coming up as well as our 2 year anniversary. Also btw we just overstepped 700 days of server activities AND 700 active users!

So what is coming up? First of all I have some fun goodie for all users during the last two weeks of October in the spirit of Halloween! Announcement will follow around the 14th of October.

Second of all, some bigger news regarding userlevels and voting rewards during the month of November where we will have some long term new stuff and one surprise every single day on which I have been working on together with the elders.

I went through some ideas for trick-or-treat, most of them abandoned. Here is a list of what was abandoned:

• Replace all Diamond ores with pumpkins
• 1% chance for a ban for the lottery
• Converting all of empire into a snow biome
• 1% chance for lightning strike on any shop transaction
• random, secret & changing word triggers 1-week channel mute

If you have ideas on how to trick-or-treat, please let me know here!

You might have trouble logging in to the server right now. Please be patient and try later again. The issue is on the side of minecraft.net and neither we nor you can do something about it.

The new version of the plugin that manage game mode and inventories are breaking the way enderchests store data. There is a high risk that when the next version comes out, all ender chest inventories will be wiped.

So make sure that you do not keep inventories in enderchests when you log out. Once the final version of that plugin is out I will upgrade and there is a chance that all your stuff in the enderchests will be gone. You have been warned.

Here is again a preview of what I will be working next:

• the new contest system, as described before. This will be the next thing I plan working on
• The kingdom. I plan on trying the current dev build of the multiverse plugin wich is needed for the ‘large biome’ generator. If it works well, we can finally create the kingdom
• advertising. Since we have a lot of space now and also a larger world would not cause issues since resetting lots is now a non-issue, we can advertise on reddit again and get more users. If you want to put your builds on reddit, please go ahead.

I have now enabled the 1-month lot reset frame and this resulted in 190 reset lots (130 in empire, 60 in the flatlands). As you can see from the users directory, we still have now 645 active users with lots, despite the changes. This shows me again that I made the right decision on this move. We can now start advertising for the server on reddit again and attract even more active users!

If you are having issues connecting right now, please note that this is neither your fault nor mine. Minecraft.net has a history of issues almost every Sunday to overload with the high amount of users trying to authenticate their login. So it seems that we have to wait until it’s daylight in Europe and someone wakes up and kicks the servers.

From the lot of feedback that I have received, I came to a conclusion on the issue ofmap enlargement vs. earlier Lot resets. First of all, some info however.

The issue of lot resets is a lengthy one. I want to give some background so you understand how this works currently. There are 3 different methods to reset a lot currently:

1. The //regen command from Worldedit. This is creating working lots, broken trees and this command has a massive memory leak. So after using it 3-4 times, I have to restart the server. While I was now able to submit a proper bug report to the author, we would have to wait for a fix to get this to work, and that still leaves us with broken trees as that in return is a minecraft bug (which I also could submit now). So it will for a longer time a either broken or unusable method.
2. The regeneration by chunk. This is using the plugin azkedar wrote. The fact that we have this plugin also helped making 2 proper bug report for the above. Chunks are sections of 16×16 blocks from bedrock to sky. This method turned out to be even more broken than the first. It places a chunk over an old one, and then starts creating structures in the lower-right corner such as trees and underground stuff like mineshafts, and then stops a couple of blocks while it works through the chunk upwards and left. So a tree has its trunk in the lower right corner, the leaves further right and down are missing and the mineshafts that start there go for a couple of blocks and end in a wall. 8×8 chunks per lot of that mess. In my opinion that is not acceptable.
3. The copy-paste. I created another empire from scratch with lots (world “newemp”). I go to the right location in the new world, copy a whole lot, move to the empire and paste it over the existing lot. This creates a perfect world with all we need but has the disadvantage that this is quite slow.

From my perspective the 3rd method is the only really sustainable one. But also the slowest. Due to a bug however this cannot be a fluent process steered by a program. Otherwise I could write a program chain that does almost everything for the user including warping him through worlds, copy paste etc. If I try that, it crashes the server.

Enlarging the map would increase the amount of lots that have to be reset. Given the issues above this would not be a good way to go – as long as there is an alternative.

Shortening the reset time would therefore be the best alternative. If we assume that only a small group of those hat have not been here for one month will actually come back, then the actual work will not increase – except during the time I catch up with the suddenly expired lots.

Regarding the option of a reminder letter: I will not send a reminder for people to log back in before the lot expires. I want people who come here because they want to, not people who come here because they are told. We are finally not a library you have to go to to return a book.

Regarding the leave of absence, that can only work if we limit that to once a year and if we can automate it. I do not want this to be extra work for me and I do not want people to use it on a permanent base. I see this as a low priority.

I now changed the 2D map so that lot members only show when you hover over a lot. Owners are always shown. This was needed because some users need to give access to so many other users that the lot below was completely hidden.

Our 2nd anniversary is coming up with the 1st of November! I am thinking about things to do during that week and how to make this week special for everyone, old and new users alike! I would like to ask everyone for suggestions what to do during the week and on the anniversary, and how to engage users to join and do something special!

Guys, we had massive java crashes over the course of the day and I have no idea what is happening. I first rebooted the machine, undid some changes in the hope it would fix something, and it worked for 2 hours or so and then crashed again several times. I have upgraded a couple of things but I cannot trace the issue. I got a [Too many errors] on the console as well as the crash report from java at times:

with different contents in “Problematic frame”. This is quite a serious issue that is why I have created a new, temp bukkit server and will now see how I can add plugins one by one and see if it works. So until then the normal server will be frozen. Unfortunately this comes at the worst of times since I will be leaving for a trip tonight for 2 weeks. I will see how much I can fix during the trip, but it looks like we will have to live with a not-fully operational server for some days. If you have any ideas how to debug something like this, please let me know. All help greatly appreciated.

I updated the chat plugin and now /msg <user>  and /t /g etc chat channel abbreviations work again also.