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.

Since some smart kids (banned from the server meanwhile) started spamming the teamspeak server, we now installed user levels on the Teamspeak Server. Please read the Chat Page on the website for more info and on how to get your user level.

I have installed some basic plugins now and enabled the cross-server chat! Yay!

I have programed some new statistics that show the status of the server in some more figures. Here is the most important stuff.

• We have 3.6k people who did the whitelist test.
• 2k+ of those people (60% of registered) logged in on the server, Those who never logged in might be spam accounts, but they still did the whitelist. No idea yet what happened there. This surely deserves more investigation to find out why we are losing 40% of all users after the whitelist.
• 1109 users, 50% of those who logged in, are still guests and never became settlers. Some of them might have given up on the settler quiz, others came just to look around.
• We still have 623 lot occupants, so they have been online in the last 60 days, this means that almost 28% of all users that ever seen the inside of this server still are around! I think this is quite amazing!
• 40% of all logged in people  ‘only’ made it to settler level, 57% of them are still active
• 154 made stayed here for more than 2 months and became citizen, around 7% of those who logged in.
• We have 54 days in average online time per user. This is distorted of course by recent joiners and people who are here since 600+ days.

See the full statistics here.

I have now successfully implemented the donator auto-adjustment. Your userlevel will now reflect the new donator status. You will be able to see how long your donation lasts in the server status section on the right bar of the homepage. Your donations will remain secret to other players however. We had some upgrades and some downgrades due to the new system. If you think your new level is not correct, please comment here. If someone sees the user Audofrag, please ask him to contact me since I cannot track back his donation 100%.

Also, DonatorPlus level can now disguise as a mob, depending on the userlevel. Higher level can disguise as more mobs. Please see details on this feature on the Userlevels & Commands page.

I have now made a decision on the donators level topic I talked about in an earlier post. Some background:

I am paying for this server in cash, and I could use a much smaller & cheaper one if I would not be running a minecraft server. However, I do not rely on the donations to be able to afford it. I wont people to understand however that this stuff is not for free, and I want to make sure people do not take things for granted.

Further I want to make sure that a user that donated 2 USD 2 years ago gets a different level of appreciation than a user who donated 50 USD just yesterday. Also. I do not want to diminish the 2 USD since I know people give what they can, and not everyone has the same means available. So after listening to some comments in-game on the issue I made the following decision:

• People who donate get an eternal ‘+’ status. It’s a badge that you donated something – sometimes. This requires however that the amount you donated is higher than the fee Paypal takes. If you donate 1 Cent, I do not get any of it. Paypal takes it all. So no + for you.
• The amount I receive from the donation gets used up in a speed of 1 USD / Month. I rather round up here and count only full months. If you donated and still have donation leftover, you get a ++ status with all its privileges. I will add the mob-disguise plugin soon to those. So you can troll your friends by running around as a chicken etc. What mobs will be available? I do not know yet, let’s see. Maybe I keep the creeper for myself :D.
  Calculation Example: If you donated 12 USD 10 months ago, you would have 2 more months of ++ today. If you donated another 10 USD 2 months ago, you would have 10 months left. (12 – 10) + (10 – 2) = 10
• The level will adjust automatically like your citizen status
• There are only 4 people that will be “downgraded” by this change. 2 ++ donators who donated a long time ago and 2 + donators who donated less than required so that some money would be left over for the server.
• I still need to implement this all, so no changes as of this being published.

I have been thinking and trying out several things over the past few days and just wanted to share a bit.

• I have thought about how to deal with the skylands. Since many users simply flatten the ground and do not use it as skylands, and since the island structure seems perfect for group builds (like you need to build a bridge to get somewhere), it seemed a bit misused. I do not think however I will change the current skylands from what it is. Resetting lots is a bit of a pain since it often boots all users off the server, but I also do not want to create another world for skylands. maybe just an alternative hunger world scenario?
• I have been thinking of limiting donator status by 1USD / month. If you donate 1 USD, you are donator for one month. Every month, your level decreases by 1 USD. You need to keep a level of 12 USD to stay donator ++ level. The amount is calculated by what I get after Godaddy substracts their fee and now how much you spend. The question is what happens with a deposit slot if you loose your status? Would the system hand you the stuff automatically if you have space? Would you have a deadline to withdraw? That is a bit more complicated to do.
• Cake day is another idea. While I do not want to convert too much into reddit, we can give certain gifts on the 1st year (365 days) and the second. This will be possible with the above function since we would calculate how long a user has been online once a day and the donations etc. I am thinking of a nice set of diamond armor or something along the lines.

Nothing has been decided, just brainstorming.

When you win a random enchanted item from the voting lottery, you were in the past able to win enchanted chainmail. However, as we all know, chainmail is only available in creative mode. To stick with the general theme of keeping our survival mode as much as possible similar to vanilla survival mode, I now removed the chainmail. It has been there only due to an oversight on my side when I programmed the enchanting table for these goods.

I have now added a donation stats section to the server status on the right side bar of the frontpage. You can see for example today:

Server cost so far: 2835.00 USD
Donated amount: 1572.09 USD
Balance: 1262.91 USD

So the overall costs since the server is live is 2.8k USD and all the donations that came in since then made up for more than half of that! Thanks again to the donators!

As you can see from our newly designed users list, we now have over 600 lots occupied. So we had 600 people that were active on the server during the last 8 weeks. I consider this number one of the best indicators of the server health and am quite happy that this number continues to rise.

So thanks everyone for making this server what it is and have fun mining & crafting :D

When you give karma to someone, the system will tell you now if you give karma for the first time to that user and if not if you gave a different karma value before.

I have made a new flowchart and inserted it on the shop page that should explain the shop and how it works a bit better. Some new people thought that the shop is like on other servers buying anything or selling everything, and the difference between buy & request, sell & offer was maybe not really clear from the first instance to everyone. Comments welcome.

I have revamped the server’s user list just now to be more consistent with the look & feel of other lists that we have. On the bottom of the list we now also have a small statistic list about user levels etc.

If You click on a username you can see additional info such as screenshots of their lots, karma etc etc.

I now made a full karma list on the website’s karma page. Also, banned users are not shown anymore.