I added a new tower to my castle. It has a spiral of many side-towers that circle the building. There a 3 starting on each floor, reaching to the next floor. 1 of them houses the staircase to the next floor, the 2 others are empty. I would like to invite all Master and Elder level users to come and decorate one of them. Here are the building guidelines:

• You can make the entrance smaller and fit a door.  Otherwise please do not make too dramatic changes to the structure. If in doubt, ask me. If it looks cool and fits the overall tower, I am happy to discuss.
• Please do not use glow stone
• You can put anything inside. Redstone machinery, living quarters, a safebox – anything goes
• Please put your name on a sign outside located similar to the floor number sign.
• Do not use the ground floor or top floor rooms.

There is a new snapshot for MC out, that features a new world type with  “large biomes”. Here is a picture of what that means. I wonder if that would be a good idea for the daklands, if we expand the borders accordingly. Currently the darklands are about 2500×2500 blocks large, maybe 3k or 4k would be better in that case.

Of course this would come only in effect after the next version of minecraft is released.

Comments?

I wanted to share with you today that we had an all-time visitors high two days ago with more than 700 people on the website in a single day. The visit statistics on the website has been continuously increasing since January (graph from Jan 2012-today):

We might be reaching the 1000 visitors mark if things continue like that. So a big thanks to all who have been contributing in any way to the server, be it builds, friendliness to others, coding, reporting errors, etc etc etc, every little bit helps to make this server a better place!

So a ‘yay’ for the Uncovery community!

I changed the reboot cycle from 8:00 & 20:00 to 16:00 HKG time. this means that we will have one less reboot & backup per day. The 2 reboots a day were originally introduced since older versions of the software got into issues after running too long. I now changed the reboot time to the moment when the server is most empty.

So less interruptions and less backup space used. We use the backups so seldom that this will not be an issue. There are also methods to backup maps w/o a reboot, I will look into that just to make sure.

I wanted to move the darklands on the weekend to use towny. However I found out that thee is an issue with the permissions system to make it work properly. Sicne the permissions system has not been updated recently, I would have to migrate the whole permssions over to a new system. I am not sure what it currently the best way. I am trying to get in touch with the author of the system and see if there is a patch available.

I want to remember everyone that industrial farming is causing massive lag. If you set up a farm that gives you more than a chest of goods per harvest, you’re overdoing it. The issue is that the growth of a huge area needs processor time and causes issues.

So take down those farms.

The plugin that manages XP & inventory exchanges was fixed by azkedar. So I could open the end again. Happy dragon-fighting!

I found out now that regenerating lots will in some cases create different landscapes and biomes. While the general coastlines, rivers etc will stay the same, expect some half-mountains, biome breaks and other oddities. It is not as bad as it was in the old days where mountains would start rising in the middle of an ocean, but still quite visible at instances. Unfortunately there is not a lot I can do about that.

The only good thing is that it will not start snowing in places where the lot was not reset.

This is NOT a decision but a discussion. People who start panicking about consequences at this moment will be shot or something like that.

After discussing with some people I thought it would be good to merge the kingdom and the darklands. This would mean that the darklands lots would disappear, I would reset the whole map to start off clean and install towny on it. This would allow people to use it just as the kingdom. Now here are the hard consequences out of that:

• Getting a darklands space would cost money. I am not sure how much it will be, but something like 50 uncs per plot or so. A standard plot is 16×16 only.
• the darklands would still have to be reset after a minecraft update to benefit from the new biomes, materials etc. So it would not be something where you create amazing builds. I would be happy to accept builds from there for contests or if you manage to finish something great before the map is reset, I can copy them to the city.
• The darklands could be endless in size, but would not be backed up then OR be limited and be included in the backups.

I would be happy to hear opinions on this.

I finished the voting lottery! You can now win cool prizes whenever you vote! 100 Uncs are fixed prize and other stuff is dropped in your deposit so you can vote while offline from the server! Have fun!

[Update]
There is now a display of what you can win with what chance on the voting page!
[/Update]

I am planning on a voting lottery, and there should be some interesting prizes instead of the cake all the time. What I have to figure out is what prizes to give and how likely it should be to get the prizes without cluttering the whole thing up with too much random stuff.

The way it would work is the following: You vote for the server and draw a random number between 1 and 100. Then there will be a table that will determine what you won by the number you got.

Random example: All numbers 1-50 will get you a cake. So you have a 50% chance to get a cake. In that principle there should be items to get, and how likely they are to appear. Stuff that I would think are interesting to give away are:

• a random amount of XP, between 10 to 100 (chance 10%)
• a cake (chance 10%)
• a tripple-enchanted diamond pick (chance 5%)
• a diamond (chance 5%)
• a diamond block (chance 1%)
• a piece of coal (chance 1%)
• 1000 Uncs (chance 1%)
• nothing (chance 2%)
• a random monster egg (chance 10%)
• a random animal/npc egg (chance 15%)
• an iron ingot (chance 8%)
• a random amount of uncs between 100 to 500 (chance 10%)
• a cookie (chance 5%)

What else would be interesting or fun? Everything should add up to 100% of course. It should be fun and exciting but also rewarding.

If you are willing to contribute to the server in ANY way, please join the Trello Project manager and paste your ideas and skills. Whatever you are able and willing to do, we can use your help.

I am back from my holidays!

First of all, thanks for all the members who have been contributing to ways to improve the server during the last week. I have a ton of stuff to do now and I hope I will get something done this week, but it might be a bit hectic since I have a week of work to catch up with.

Secondly, here are the best pictures of the holiday!

The hunger games seem to cause issues. Please don’t use them right now. I will disable the system later.

I will be gone from the 6th April until 15th of April. Most likely I will not have any meaningful internet connection during the whole time. So lot approvals etc might take longer than normally during that time, up to 2 days or longer. Please be patient and tell new people about that. I would also make sense not to make too much advertising for the server in form of videos or reddit posts, to avoid disappointed users that don’t get their lots approved.

I wanted to give an update quickly on what’s brewing and what’s cooked. Please think about these topics and give me your opinions.

• MC 1.2.5 is out. I will update the server as soon as all the plugins confirm that there is no issue.Delays here should not affect us too much since 1.2.5 and 1.2.4 are cross-compatible.
• I am still not firm on the future of the kingdom. However, the current map should disappear sooner or later (April/May). I might generate a smaller map (1000×1000 for example) for community builds.
• If you still have a lot in the old world, please consider moving them to the empire. If you do not want it anymore, please abandon it.
• I am also wondering if the flatlands is the most needed thing on the server. If you have a flatlands lot, please tell me what you think about it. If I would close it, flatlands users would get an empire lot. No decision/schedule yet.
• It seems that we can install portals again. I will most probably install them only to get from world to world, and use warps within the city.
• There is a new minecart plugin, which works however a bit different from minecart mania. The biggest change is that a minecart spawner is now a sign instead of a block. This means we would have to update all stations. All other stuff seems to work similar however. Please see here. I will install this within the next two weeks.

There was a list of compromised minecraft accounts posted. Please check if yours is in the list!

I am “closing down” the kingdom. There has been very little activity and the last large builds, Rome and Pluto’s castle, are either already in the city or being finished up and moved out as well. If there seems to be a large requirement for another revival in the future, we can enable it again. For now, only elders and masters can build there to move out stuff etc. If you have things there and need to get them, please tell me.

If you just joined this server, please note that we are running 2 versions of Minecraft currently:

• Version 1.1 (the old version) where all the plugins, protections and features of the server are currently live
• Version 1.2.4 (The new, current version) where we have only a temporary server without protection and with a temporary map that will be deleted. The Whitelist here is not automatically updated – only on a server restart.

If you are connecting to the server and get a time out, you are probably using the wrong version/port combination. In general, I would strongly recommend that you use version 1.1 and connect to the main server.

I am planning on creating an epic quest with the story admin. This quest will be planned in an out-of-game environment such as a wiki. It will be a multi-branch game, involving as much of the city builds as possible. It will be permanent work-in-progress and ever-expanding through user submissions. Structure proposal

We could have several main story arcs

• The epic quest
• Story Arc “Egypt – find tut anch’s mask”
• Story Arc “Japan – rescue the emperor’s daughter”
• Story Arc “The secret of the cathedral”
• etc.

The story arcs will have several sub-branches and can connect to other story arcs through intermediary quests & bridge-stories.

If you are interested in participating or of you have additional ideas, please comment.