I heard now several times that people were griefed by using switches to start harvesting mechanisms or luring away animals though open doors. The only way to stop that, would be to enable users to disable switches, as we do it in towny. There is an issue with that however:

In the empire, 100% of the area is covered by lots. Many of the lots have large builds or even walls. Most of the doors now are iron to keep the creepers out. If we allow blocking of switch-use, we run the risk that new users have to take massive detours to reach their lot due to closed doors.

Since the griefing is only occasional, I would recommend instead that you remove the switches and buttons that allow access to your most important assets and place them only when you use them once you see that you are a victim of griefing.

If we see that this is a more widespread issue, we can think also about alternative methods. At the same time I will see if we use a monitoring plugin so we can ban those users right away.

We have a new announcement channel! inQuish was kind enough to whip up a small plugin that lets our website backend and other services talk into a special channel on the server. Everyone automatically joins this channel, you cannot speak in it, and you cannot escape leave it… All stuff like the website updates and the restarts etc will be in this channel. The channel will also be broadcast to the IRC chat as soon as I figure out how to do that properly.

I updated the information how to contribute to the server on the help page. If you want to try out your programming skills or think that something on the server can be improved, please do not hesitate to contribute through the issue tracker. All info how you can do so is now on the help page.

We now have reached 2000 registered users! That means that 0.033% of all registered minecraft players have been on the server – if that means anything at all. It also means that in average we have 3 users per day registering on the website since it exists!

Well, whatever this means, I am happy about it and we hopefully can see this server grow even faster in the future!

I created a set of 12 new header images. As you can see, there is a frame set and a changing picture/logo combination. I hope you all like it. I am always happy to get new proposals of things to be included, mostly only things from the city though.

General proposals on how to make the website more unique without going all the way to the standardized minecraft look of so many other websites like the wiki would be great.

After reviewing the feedback from the recent survey regarding the shop, we’ve made some small changes to hopefully make it work better for everyone.

• /find, /list, and /cancel will now assume “offer” if you don’t specify request or offer. So /find cobblestone will work again.
• /offer can now take an optional “silent” argument anywhere to suppress the sales announcements, so you can avoid spamming when posting large quantities to the shop. For example: /offer 5 silent will post all of the item in your hand at a price of 5 and will not generate any announcement.
• /withdraw all can now be used to withdraw everything from the deposit. It will stop if it runs out of room in your inventory.
• /withdraw @sender can now be used to withdraw everything from a particular sender, for example my personal favorite:
  /withdraw @lottery

There were also some small changes to the help and error messages:

• /sell now reminds you that you might mean /offer instead when you don’t give a shop-id.
• All messages now omit /ws from the command syntax, except for /ws help where it is always required. Every other command can be written without /ws (though you can write it if you wish), and it’s shorter and clearer to write it that way.

Of course, please report any problems with the shop system that may arise. Thanks!

It was reported that the shop might not be working properly in some instances, specially when handing over items to you – but still working fine in most cases. We currently could not reproduce this reliably to identify issues. One thing that might be an issue is the fact that the lottery might hand out items with impossible enchantments that are then irretrievable.

Please help solving this with the following: If you see anything that is working not as expected, please check if there is any error message visible. If so, send a screenshot. If it is something you can try again, (like selling something and you did not loose items) then try again. If it happens again, or if it is something that you cannot reproduce (like you tried to buy something, items were not received, but the offer is not there anymore), then please post a report here immediately. We need to know from whom, at what time you tried to buy how much of what and what exactly happened.

If we do not get this information it is very hard to fix things. So any information you have is very helpful to get a result here.

The server is now running on a new DNS & IP address successfully. I also made all the changes at the server lists etc. Also all contents of the website have been updated.
I also made some changes to the way the different parts of the page access the database. There might be still a couple of glitches. If you find something does not work, please tell me ASAP.

I will move the server to the domain uncovery.me this weekend. If you cannot connect, please try the new address. The move should take only a couple of minutes. The website and the minecraft server should then both run on that domain name. So there will be no more confusion between uncovery.net and minecraft.uncovery.net.

I enabled now a field that lets you warp places in a story. Specifically, it lets you warp to one of the /warp points. The nice thing is that I can create warp points for you that are otherwise not visible in the /warp list. To prevent abuse, I made it so you cannot warp to one of the pre-made warp points, only to one that I created for you. To achieve this, all warp names have to start with “story_”. Talk to me if you want to have a warp point for your story. Also, this works only in the city – since it’s a story tool, not a taxi service.

See the story admin for details.

After much discussion has been done in various places, I came to the following conclusion:

In order to allow flatlands users to rank up & be recognized for their work, we will start contests exclusively for the flatlands. Winners of the contests however will NOT immediately recieve a level upgrade like the survival players since there is MUCH less work in creative builds than in survival builds. We will create a ladder system where someone has to win a set of contests (2+) to get a level upgrade.

The builds from the creative contests will be copied to a different part of the city so users know if things have been built creative or survival and creative builds will not make survival builds look worse.

However, this requires that we keep up the same standards of living for the flatlands as for the empire and other places. This has as it’s main consequence that pixelart is now not anymore tolerated in the flatlands.

So all flatlands users, you have until 10th of June to remove all your pixels art, writing etc!

I am wondering how to make it possible for flatlands users to advance in levels. I created a card on our issue tracker. Please discuss there about possible solutions.

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.