I am on Ａ business trip until Thursday night. Chances are I wont be around a lot until then. Have fun!

We now have a permanent Hunger game setup. Please refer to the hunger game page for details! Have fun!

ATTENTION: PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE read this whole thing properly and think before  you comment. No off-topic “when will 1.8 be out” or “Option X sucks” please. Tell me what you prefer and WHY. If you want to know more about 1.8 please read Notch’s blog. Don’t ask me. Also: When I mention below that something is a lot of work, this means that it will take time to do so. If I am in a busy month or on a trip, it can take weeks to finish stuff. Please keep that in mind when choosing an option. Thanks. So here it is:

There is an issue coming up with 1.8 and the worlds we are running in. The issue is that 1.8 will have a new algorithm to generate the world.

How does this matter?

All the current worlds are generated with the old method. When a player leaves, I reset the area and it gets regenerated with the new method. Same when we expand a currently used world (Kingdom / Nether), it will be generated with the new method.

Why is this a problem?

Since the new method does not align with/care about the old method, there will be 2 different worlds merged into each other as the complete terrain infrastructure will change. Neighboring lots will not have the same height, and strange terrain breaks will happen between biomes and land/see formations. Next to the fact that the map will look unreal, it will also become unpassable in places due to high cliffs appearing the in middle of your path. It will also be less natural and beautiful where the old areas border with the new areas. On top of it there will be new materials/ores/trees/features that only are available in newly generated worlds.

What can we do?

There are several options we have depending on what world we talk about

The World:

1. Keep the world. Reset all unoccupied lots. Over time the occupied lots will be reset when they expire or the owner can ask for a reset. It will take some time but we can simply piece by piece regenerate lots and transform the map into a new world.
   Advantage: Least disruption to normal gameplay. People get the opportunity to keep their lots or move to a new one.
   Disadvantage: Resetting 900 lots is a lot of work. I will need help with that. The map will be really strange for some time.
2. Leave all as it is, create a new world in addition. New lots will be on the new world. People on the old world can choose to abandon their lot and move to a new lot in the new world. The city will be copied over to the new world. Once the old world is empty, we delete it. Copying over other buildings will be most likely not possible or only slowly over time.
   Advantage: Least work. Beautiful new world, beautiful old world.
   Disadvantage: Possible confusions between worlds, further spread of users over multiple worlds. Workload of copying the city, portals, recreating the railway etc which I probably have to do by myself.

The Kingdom:

1. Delete everything that has not been build on so far. Regenerate it and live with a strange break in the landscape. Maybe try to smooth it out a bit afterwards.
   Advantage: least work. Digging on your plot does not give new materials
   Disadvantage: Can be ugly.
2. Create a new world. Let people reclaim the lots/nations/towns they had for free and try to copy/paste overland structures over to the new world.
   Advantage: Beautiful world.
   Disadvantage: Copy/pasting the current huge structures is quite complicated. Some stuff might be impossible (underground structures).

The Skylands:
Do nothing. Since there are no real borders between lots, we can simply regenerate when a lot expires and live with some few small visual breaks.
Advantage: No work. Small issues with visual effects.
Disadvantage: No new materials in the old lots.

I do not see another solution that would make any sense. For one, I refuse to build another railway system. 2nd: copy-pasting stuff of 200×200 size over a void is tricky to impossible

The Nether:
I would simply regenerate a completely new nether.

What should you do now?
Think what the individual options would mean for you. Remember that you would have to start from scratch to take advantage of new ores etc anyhow. Would you rather mine in a mint new world or in a mixed environment world? Tell me what you think is better, if you see additional possibilities and why you think the one or other option is good or bad.
NOTE: If we create a new world/skyland, I will not allow people to have a higher number of lots than before. So if you are for example a settler, you will not be able to have a lot in the old world and the new world.

Is anyone interested in this here? I can create a map that is 250×250 large and has no commands available. So you get in there, and once you die you are out.

If you are looking for help or run out of ideas what to do, please check the new forum section “Megaprojects“. This is the place to post your requests for help or to look where your valuable time can be spent for the greater good.

I am planning to have larger factories in the city, specifically north-west of the tower bridge. We need power plants, refineries, production facilities, warehouses etc.

If you want to build something like that, please inform me. I do not have a limit on the size. I can reserve a space in the city for it, mark it out and you can build directly there with your friends. I will give out rewards for quality finished projects to those who helped with it.

I just found out via YouTube about a very cool redstone feature that I would like to share with you. The idea: There are several things that a block can do which currently does not send any redstone signals, but where you maybe want to know when it happens. such as a furnace is finished baking things or grass is growing on a dirt block. This has probably even more applications, comment if you know others. The cool feature is that it makes a piston expand temporarily. In connection with a flipflop this can permanently switch on power or switch it off. I found the instruction on a video online. A sample setup can be found in the piston ministry top floor.

BTW I was asked now several times if it is true that I will start a terraria server. It is not true. I don’t even own the game. And I am quite busy enough with this server :)

I have created a Kingdom Detailed Data page that shows all the details of the Kingdom in a easy readable format. You can go there to see how big the towns are, who is in which town etc etc.

Have fun!

I installed a new 3D Map system. Please take a look at it. There is a sidebar on the right that lets you switch between worlds and see a list of online players.

I tried hard to display the regions on this one but the system cannot cope with the 900 regions we have… so this will be reserved for the 2D map system I wrote my self.

I have set the map of the kingdom now to 2000×2000 instead of 4000×4000. As a reference, the normal world is 3000×3000 blocks large. Why? I do not want to be forced to start a new map when 1.8 comes out. If we restrict our space usage a bit and stay within reasonable bounds, we can generate the map beyond the current limits once the 1.8 map feautures are out and integrate them into the kingdom.

In the case that the 1.8 features are so different from what we have right now that they would be better used in a new map anyhow, we can still create one. I do not want to ruin the fact that we can do the same on fewer maps by already now expanding unreasonably far into that map.

I will see that I can delete the areas that were already explored but beyond the 2000×2000 border so they can be generated newly once 1.8 comes out.

There are three issues that are known that I would like you to be aware about:

• You might have trouble leaving a town in the kingdom. There is a bug that I am trying to fix together with the developer of the towny plugin. If you get an error saying “Not registered” when trying to leave a town, please tell me and I will manually do this for you
• Due to a wrongly written permissions file (the server screws this up once in a while) we lost the two last days of guest to settler promotions. All you have to do is tell me if you are affected by this and I will make you settler as soon as possible. I fixed the issue for the future. If this problem happens again, maximum 1 person will be affected (i.e. we lose only the most recent change).
• The city  spawn building still has an issue with masters and elders not being able to build there.  Fixed!

The Skylands are open now. The issue with server crashes when someone falls off a cliff in MC should be over now!

Also you can see now people moving on the maps thanks to the help of our new member senocular! If you see him, say thanks!

Since the last update there is a bug in the skylands. When people fall off an island there, they do not die. They logout and later log back in with a negative y-value.

2011-08-08 00:47:47 [INFO] <user> <ip> logged in with entity id 2147226 at ([skylands] 475.0939776106811, -73.83340857907588, 33.99777082139628)

From there on, the server is bust:

2011-08-08 00:48:33 [INFO] Connection reset
2011-08-08 00:48:45 [INFO] Read timed out
2011-08-08 00:49:01 [INFO] Read timed out
2011-08-08 00:49:09 [INFO] Read timed out
2011-08-08 00:49:17 [INFO] Read timed out
2011-08-08 00:49:40 [INFO] Read timed out
2011-08-08 00:49:45 [INFO] Read timed out

Because this has been repeating, I had to shut down the skylands portals for now. If you are there, you should be able to get back with /spawn. They will remain closed until I find a solution to this issue.

Server is back up. Problem solved!

There is an issue with the server that I cannot fix until I gethome in some hours. Please be patient.

We now have 2D and 3D Kingdom maps! The claimed plots are also displayed. Every Nation gets a different color (No sorry you cannot choose) and when you hover over a plot it shows the nation, town name and the Plot number. Cool, eh?

I also limited the map to 2000×2000 blocks for now. I want to avoid that the map becomes GB-sized again.

Find the link to the map in the menu!

The following things are fixed/changed now:

• elders & masters can edit the city now again
• elders & masters can reserve lots properly now
• elders can now reserve 2 skyland lots