• 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.

So the skylands has places where you everything is dark and you seem not to be able to place blocks. Also, the minimap is messed up there. You try to place blocks but cannot see anything happening. However when you leave the area (unload the chunk) and come back, the blocks that you tried to place but could not see, are actually there. Also, now the chunk properly displays in the minimap. The whole chunk that was first compelety invisible, is suddenly there.

It seems to me that only completely empty chunks are affected, those where there is not one single block. I am not sure if that is a bug where bukkit does not load chunks w/o contents or if there is a different issue. Clearly the map files are OK. Dynmap also renders the map w/o the issue the minimap has.

So I am not sure what has to be done to fix this issue. I posted this now at first to the author of the skylands plugin. I will see if we need to escalate this to the bukkit team.

This has the following consequences: If you have an empty chunk in the skylands where you cannot place a block, place one, go to spawn, come back and it should be fine provided that no-one else is in the area. This is a good workaround for now. Latest after the server restart, the empty area will be fine – if you at least attempted to place a block there.

The Skylands files are corrupted. Many chunks (mostly the empty though) are damaged and one cannot build there. I am currently evaluating what to do to fix it. At the minimum we will get a rollback. In the worst case scenario I will block building there and simply copy-paste one build after the other into a new world – however that will look like. The 200×200 lots are too big to reset so there might be some alternative in the works.

Currently the skylands are disabled, I will re-enable them once I know how to handle that.

I have created a new FAQ entry:

• I built something amazing for the city! Can you copy it over?
  Do not build something because you think the city needs it. Do not ask me to copy things because “you built it for the city”. Specially not if it took you 30 minutes to build it. If you want your stuff to be seen, post it on the forum. If I think the city needs it, I will copy it.

To make you understand why this is a FAQ now: I have received about every month once such a request. Many times the buildings were bad, unfinished, made for a special purpose nobody needed or any combination of those. I want to avoid people wasting time to build some type of Arena we don’t need or me being obliged to coach them in a week long review process to a level where the building would be remotely acceptable as a showpiece for the server. It’s frustrating for all involved.

If you think you are great at building something, just do it. If it is good, it WILL end up in the city. If we need something, it will be either done in a contest or I will tell people who I trust with their building skills to do it. That is one of the basic privileges of the higher ranks. If you just joined the server yesterday you are most likely NOT in the position to submit something for the city in the first 3 days you are here.

We have a new support chat system where users can open help tickets and Masters and Elders can claim the tickets and enter in a personal chat with the person needing help. This should avoid the permanent chat on the global channel of people needing help. If you see someone needing help for stuff like the settlers quiz, please encourage them to open a support ticket for help instead of spamming the channel. I created a page with the commands to use it.

I have upgraded the server now to 1.3.1 for TESTING. Please come over and help testing the setup, specially access rights, inventories and new: Ender Chests.

I have set it up so that all survival worlds share the ender chests just like your personal inventories EXCEPT for the darklands – so while you can bring stuff into the darklands in your inventories, you wont be able to use ender chests there to transport their contents to other worlds. – keeping it hard to play there.

This is a test setup. If we run into any issues, I will revert to the last saved status of the 1.2.5 server and try to fix whatever the issue was. So please don’t build or mine like hell, it might be reverted. Currently all looks fine though.

I will make a blogpost when the decision is made if we keep that setup or not. Until then the 1.3 temp server will remain. After the decision is done, I will move the 1.3 darklands to the upgraded server.

I have gotten reports that people were griefed in the darklands. Aparently someone with a Xray plugin is going hunting for chests. Please understand that I am not able to track that. The plugin I have alerts me when people are mining ores and not when they are opening chests. If you want to protect your chests, then place an ore on the 6 spots around it so that anyone who opens a chest has to dig through ore before being able to open it.

All I can do is check if the people going for the chests also have mined normal ores with Xray and ban them for that.