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.

I just finished the first epic story called “Sand Storms”! It spans 23 different stations and is a true adventure – not for the faint hearted!

Check it out in the old portal building!

If you want to write a story, please go to the Story Admin page and start writing!

Note: Since some people apparently refuse to read through the text below, prefer to panic and then ask me for a solution of a problem they only assumed despite the fact that it is written below that there is no reason to worry about anything, and then come running to me with fatalistic comments about their stuff in the skylands and start planning for the apocalypse, here is the TL:DR for you:

I will NOT delete the skylands.

You will NOT loose your stuff if you have a lot there.

There is no reason to worry.

We all liked and used the skylands as they were created some months ago. They were created to allow a bigger space for larger constructions. There should be little land or nothing in them. There are several issues with the skylands now however:

• I cannot regenerate them when they are abandoned. Regenerating them creates a normal word. Same if I would simply delete the save files on the server.
• It is troublesome to delete them once a lot is abandoned. I need to “delete” the contents so that it becomes a void at least. However doing so lags the server so much that all users are disconnected for some 30-60 seconds.
• When 1.2 comes out, all lots will have a 256+ building height, meaning twice as much as now.

The only solution is to simply let it ‘die’ by not giving out additional lots there and hoping that someday we will have an alternative. I have a similar issue with the flatlands by the way, but the lots are much smaller so there is no issue with deleting them. It just takes much longer for me to do it since I have to first select & delete the land above 64 blocks and then do set to soil for below 64 blocks instead of just typing //regen.

Since 1.2 will be out hopefully this or next month, I will not do anything to see what happens. However it is likely that I will in the long run deprecate the skylands just as the ‘old world’.

And it goes like this:

[10:27] unc-bot cerberus4562 has joined.
[10:27] unc-bot cerberus4562 (city): help!
[10:27] unc-bot uncovery {Evil Overlord} (city): hey there
[10:27] unc-bot lvasold++ (city): Hello.
[10:27] unc-bot skilletfk++ (city): Welcome!
[10:27] unc-bot cerberus4562 (city): help!
[10:28] unc-bot silver82 (city): welcome
[10:28] unc-bot Xecaria (empire): ?
[10:28] unc-bot lvasold++ (city): Welcome to the server.
[10:28] unc-bot uncovery {Evil Overlord} (city): please ask your questions
[10:28] unc-bot cerberus4562 (city): cheers n all that 4 da welcome but my best server says ‘cant reach server’ how do i fix it??!
[10:28] unc-bot kddk (city): click that button at spawn
[10:28] unc-bot Xecaria (empire): no clue
[10:28] unc-bot cerberus4562 (city): ?
[10:28] unc-bot skilletfk++ (city): perhaps if you deleted it from your list?
[10:29] unc-bot cerberus4562 (city): nope
[10:29] unc-bot cerberus4562 (city): its there
[10:29] unc-bot lvasold++ (city): your best server? what server is that?
[10:29] unc-bot skilletfk++ (city): then the problem would go away?
[10:29] unc-bot cerberus4562 (city): called anticraft
[10:29] unc-bot uncovery {Evil Overlord} (city): well I am sorry I cannot help you with other servers
[10:29] unc-bot cerberus4562 (city): oh ok
[10:29] unc-bot cerberus4562 has quit.

While elders can jail abusive players to prevent them from doing physical damage in the game, abusive players can sometimes still be an issue in chat. Now I have given the elders the possibility to mute people in chats through the command

/ch mute [channel] <player>

I just finished writing the new function for goods deposit. It is integrated into the Uncovery Shop & Deposit system. Depositing is free, however the space you have available is limited, depending on the userlevel as you can see on the trading page.

Please use /ws help to see what functions there are.

Elders can now use the commands

/tptoggle

This prevents other users to telport to them until they use the command again.

You can now check your selling / buying history in-game by using

/ws history buy
and
/ws history sell

Sometimes players are stuck in the void. This is caused by a minecart bug, where the player teleports out of a minecart but the game thinks he is still in there. In this case elders can fix it by using /mm eject <playername>.

Server is back up now…

I am running several upgrades on the server so it is down for 15-20 minutes

I have created a new page that lists featured builds. If you have a description of your builds in the respective forum, I will add a link to it on that page.

I upgraded several modules on the server such as the database driver and others and this caused some email & other smaller issues. It should be all fixed now and all past requests for lots etc should now be processed. If you still have outstanding requests, please re-submit.

I have made a forum section specifically to show off your build and the story behind it.

please note you can use <img src=”http://url.com/picture.jpg”> to show pictures in your posts.

Please note that the command that has to be used to enter a hunger game is now

/warp hunger

and can be used as the old command by masters and elders to start a hunger game. The warp will now bring you to the exact center of the hunger game world unlike the old command with a rather random location.

I have now upgraded to the recommended build of Bukkit 1.1 which uses all the facilities of the 1.1 release of Bukkit, including the terrain generation. Here is how future terrain updates will affect the server, as far as I can say now:

All “normal worlds” such as empire, kingdom, darklands etc will have scenery breaks in them when a user lets his lot expire and it it regenerated by me. HOWEVER it seems that at least recently generated worlds (empire, darklands) will not change the biomes (snow in the desert etc) when there is an update, but also never get new biomes. I regenerated two abandoned lots in the empire now and it seems as if the breaks in the landscape are not a really terrible thing. They occur only in some few corners of the lot, and the landscape generally looks the same. So I guess I will leave it as is.

All non-normal worlds (skylands and flatlands) are currently non-regeneratable. This means that if someone abandons a lot, I will have to either manually create a new terrain (for flatlands, this works quite fast) or simply leave an empty void (for skylands, same effort as the old method, but no islands in the sky) behind. Both are currently manageable, but not as originally intended at least.

For the flatIands, I COULD use the new flat terrain as you know it from the single player for the flatlands, but that terrain is at level 5 and you see the void fog there as if you dig down in a normal world until that level. Since we do not have too many users for that world, I am not really sure what to do. I can either migrate everyone to a new world and have the annoyance of the void fog (people would have to build at least one layer of soil at a higher level) or leave everything as is. You opinions are welcome there.

In the end, the story is that managing the server does not get any easier. I am still running with at least 3 plugins that are essentially abandoned and half-broken and the terrain editor seems to remain an issue for some worlds at least.