We just lost 6 hours of whatever was done in the kingdom since the last restart of the server. There was a severe error that I cannot possibly fix in the map. I assume some corruption going on. The server complained about a chunk being in an unexpected place. Don’t ask me how this can happen.

Anyhow, I reloaded the backup from 6 hours ago, I hope not too much broke because of this. Please report immediately if you see some strange stuff on the map.

Since different places in the new city world will host different buildings in order to avoid too much compression, appropriate environments as well as less lag, I changed the original first, smaller portal building into a “city region” portal building with portals to the sky scrapers, the desert and the tree houses. Check out the portals and visit those places!

Egypt is already completely copied over. If you have additional ideas how to enlarge this area or if you want to build additional things for it, please go ahead!

There are more and more developments in the (new) city:

• We have a very cozy spawn area now thanks to the elders who built them!
• I started to copy the biggest sky scrapers over to the western peninsula of the spawn island.
• I also copied the 4 “educational” building over to the city, north-east of spawn, as a kind of university cluster. I plan to move the stadium somewhere near there, so that items of daily use can be accessed easily.
• I have started to copy over the first tree house contest areas and scouted for a desert that can hold the pyramid etc.

What needs to be built now is a better access to the areas where contest entries are placed. There is an urgent need for illuminated walkways on the city area so people can find the different places and walk around and into the buildings w/o falling into holes and bumping into trees.

Any help there is appreciated. Also, any support on how to group buildings and where to place them is very helpful. If anyone wants to help with this, please let me know. I essentially need someone to go around the old city, look at the buildings and then mark out areas for each in the new city so I can copy-paste them there.

I would like to remind everyone about the building rules on the server. The flatlands is a creative map, so you can build what you like there except:

• offensive stuff – just like everywhere else
• stuff that creates lag, specially redstone builds that are working all the time

The temp server on port 25564 is now running the latest release candidate.

Since the 1.9 is still not finished, I though I try something new. I installed a 1.9.4 server on port 25564 hard mode. Try to survive it!

I moved the server to port 25565. There are too many confusions with users connecting to the proper port which are unnecessary. We originally moved to 25564 a year ago since there was no whitelist. We have a whitelist now and therefore can move back to 25565. I am announcing this a bit beforehand so you know what is coming. If you see you cannot connect, please try the other port.

In short: You can connect to uncovery minecraft now by entering “uncovery.net” (w/o a port numnber) into the server field of your minecraft client

I had to close the temp server with the pre-release. The server was using up 60-80% of the CPU time w/o anyone being logged in even. IT lagged the 1.8 server quite considerably. Sorry about that. We will have to wait for a more stable version.

Although my diving case leaked (it was brand new…) and I could take pictures only on one dive, I could take some really nice pictures in my opinion. Since people asked, here are the good ones.

The camera is a Olympus PEN E-PL2 and the case is a PT-EP03 with an external flash UW UFL-1

I finally now updated the page where the virtualshop commands are described to reflect the changes in the plugin.

Just arrived in Bali after more than 14 hours travel – airplane delayed etc. Got an email saying the server and the website was down. Turns out the harddisk was full from the twice-a-day backups. Freed 160 GB data. Should delete the stuff more often.

Dear uncovererers (hu?), there is now finally a 1.9Pre2 server up. This is a temp map to fool around on and to get familiar with the 1.9 features. Do not waste your time here to build crazy stuff. It will be deleted. (Did I mention that before?)

Also, as usual, the temp server is whitelisted with a DIFFERENT system. Same list though. This means that if you are a new user who just joined, you most probably won’t be able to login on the temp server. The 1.9 whitelist gets only updated on server restart.

Anywho, I will be leaving in 24 hours to Bali, diving. I will most probably have some slow internet access sometime during the day, but I might not be able to do crazy stuff.

Note: All of the below things will happen when this server is updated to 1.9 and if there is no strong indication that the maps will change fundamentally again within the next couple of weeks.

I have now started to prepare the website for the new world generator. These are the decisions:

• We will have a new map, called “empire” with 400 128×128 lots (20×20 lots, A1-T20, 2560 x 2560 blocks)
• I have created the lot files already and you can preview how this would look like here. The map that you see there is only an example. The lots are the important part.
• This map will be re-generated with a mixed water/land seed once we have a more stable world generation system. I strongly hope that this will happen with 1.9 and not later.
• We will get another map called “city” in which the city will be. Duh. Spawn etc will be there including all great builds from the contests and other nice stuff from the lots.
• That city map will be 1280×1280 blocks large only in the beginning or so. That should enable us to expand  the map further in a later stage with newer world generation systems so we need only to smoothen the borders instead of regenerating the whole place.
• New lots would be given out only in the empire. People can abandon their old lots and move over. Nobody gets more lots then now, and nobody can get a new lot in the old ‘world’.
• What to do until then? Mine your lot. Ask to have it transformed to 1.8 version. Take part in the current contest.

1.9v2 will come out this week. If that version does not crash, I will setup a temp server again with a TEMP map. Yes, I will delete it afterwards, no discussions. So don’t spend too much time there!

Next week I will be on holiday and only on the internet 1-2 times a day (diving!). If 1.9 final comes out then, it would have to wait until 10th October. But anyhow we would have to wait for Bukkit & plugins to be updated, which would take until then anyhow.

I am not able to do the recovery. I don’t have the time to do it after all, sorry about that. I have family over at my home and still work to do on the upgrade, so whoever built during those 12 hours will have to rebuild it. Sorry.

I just had to do a rollback of ‘world’ since parts of the map got corrupted. I tried to copy the bad parts from the backup, but this would not work. The server spammed me with misaligned chunk messages. So the rollback concerns something like the last 12 hours. I can try to restore stuff if your world lot has a number 6 or higher in it. Please post here ASAP and I will copy-paste your lot back in.

00:34:27 HawkEye83 [Settler] (world): hey, it's matt, daniel's soccer...
00:34:45 chpentain: DUDE SIGN OFF YOU COULD GET HIM BANNED
00:34:54 HawkEye83 [Settler] (world): ?
00:35:00 Daiyamondo: -.-
00:35:02 HawkEye83 [Settler] (world): why?
00:35:04 Daiyamondo: -.-
00:35:12 chpentain: if somone else uses your account you get banned
00:35:18 Daiyamondo: Duh.
00:35:19 HawkEye83 [Settler] (world): are u refering 2 j3sus?
00:35:24 Daiyamondo: ......................
00:35:26 chpentain: no you!
00:35:50 HawkEye83 [Settler] (world): we live in the same house and share a computer...
00:36:00 [g] chpentain: there can only be one user per account
00:36:22 HawkEye83 [Settler] (world): I don't see a problem with this...

Well, unfortunately I see a problem with this. Hawkeye, if you want access again, get your ‘friends’ to pay you a new account and make sure they don’t have your password.

I need help writing a new map tool that shows which blocks are stored in the files that store the minecraft data. I need it in PHP or in a normal formula. There is something like that already here: http://dinnerbone.com/minecraft/tools/coordinates/. Essentially I want to input a block file name such as ‘r.0.-2.mcr’ and want to know which blocks would stored inside that file without reading the contents of the file. If you can write something like that, please send it to me. In detail: a minecraft save file is called ‘r.0.-2.mcr’. The numbers 0 and -2 indicate the area of the map covered. I need to know which blocks exactly. I need to know the top-left and the bottom-right X and Z coordinates.

Much appreciated.

Due to the new mapping system of 1.8 I allow people to have their lots reset. If you see me online, I can reset your lot. You can also ask here as a comment. Keep in mind that this will remove ALL your stuff from the lot you reset. On top of that, your lot might be 100% water, most likely if you are south or east of the city. There is no undo.