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.

I created a new page to show where the server is going to and what I am working on.

You can now buy spiderwebs in the shop. Do a /list uncovery to see it.

I now opened the shop officially for enchanted stuff (same for deposits). However there seem to be some rare bugs with damaged goods so I decided to block those from the shop for now. But I think this is not such a big loss. Specially if we can enable enchantments instead. Please be aware that sometimes you might get a message that an item is damaged while it should not be. That is the bug that I am talking about.

If you have an item that is new or does not show a damage-bar but is rejected from the shop system, please do not use it, keep it and tell me about it. I need to investigate to find a solution to the issue.

With the great help of azkedar I managed to regenerate new, mint, island-in-the-sky lookalike skylands lots! And it seems that this is a method that is supported by the very internals of bukkit, so it’s to stay around!

All that is left to do regenerate some 50-70 lots in the skylands…. which will take some time. But at least it works now. Thanks Azkedar!

I will be on another business trip this week so probably I will have only little to no time to connect to the server. The good news are that there is a first beta build for 1.2 bukkit out, and that the major plugins also are running to be ready. So if all goes well I will upgrade the server to 1.2.3 coming weekend.

I will be reachable via email and lot applications and other issues can be addressed quite well however. So if you have any issues, please post to the blog and I should get an email (which is not the case with forum updates).

Have a great week!

I installed a TEMPORARY 1.2 server on port 25564.

There was a bug with the server. I reinstalled it, please check if it works now and comment if it crashes. Please note that I am running the Carftbukkit developer releases. There are bound to be bugs. As of this writing for example, plants do not grow and mobs do not spawn except for mob spawners. I will try to update it as new versions come out.

Here are the rules:

• Once I upgrade the main server to 1.2, the map will be deleted. I am not kidding. Do not ask for it or parts to me kept. Depending on how long it takes until I can upgrade, I might delete the map earlier and create a new one. Specially if there are relevant bug fixes for 1.2 out.
• PvP is off, protection is off. I do not want to hear complaints about griefing. I cannot prevent it. If you don’t like griefers, play on the 1.1 server.
• Whitelist is ON. If you just registered, you cannot join however, since the whitelist only updates on a server restart (1.2 issue). And the server does not automatically restart either.

Stories can now clear inventories & give items! All works of course only in the flatlands and the city. Read the Story admin page for further instructions!

If you write a story now, you can enforce that a user is switched to survival mode. This is specially important in flatlands and city stories where you do not want to user to fly or be invincible. Now you can build traps! Of course, for the obvious reasons, you cannot enforce creative mode however.

Also, if you do not want users to jump into your story somewhere in the middle or skip parts of it, simply tell them the last 2-3 letters of the NEXT code in any part of the story. On the next sign, you replace those 2-3 letters with “?”. If a user uses a code with a ? in it, the program will ask him to find the previous story to get the missing code pieces.