The skylands central rail station seems to be 100% functional now. Please report if there are any issues.

The tracks however are flawed still. I am not sure what it is but there are no stations on the copy-pasted tracks and some holes. I will have to try again but I might be running into the limits of the system by trying to paste a 3200 x 5 x 3 large block into unloaded chunks and hoping that it works as expected.

Since the city is getting larger and larger and therefore also more confusing, I followed the advice from Riedi to install street names. We decided to name all the north-south leading streets “1st Street West”, “2nd Street East” etc. with the center at the eiffel tower (and east-west coordinate 0). The street signs are already installed at every corner of the city.

The East-West facing streets will be named preferably after VIPs where a building from them is located. So as a start, the street between the cathedral and the Conservatory (both built by Plutomaster) is called “Pluto Lane”. More streets will be named and signs attached in the coming days!

I created a new rail line which goes through a couple of occupied lots. It affects all lots with the number 18. I chose this place because it affects the least users but is still reasonably in the center of the map. The affected users are:

• jamistador
• crossbreed23
• fingermouse
• enickcnln
• tcorbin
• samoli
• jaedinator

Currently I only built the actual railway in empty lots. It goes on sea level (63-66 height) on the north edge of the lots (200-204). I already protected the area so you know exactly which blocks will be affected. As an affected user, please check if this crosses any of your important constructions. The please reply here with one of the following answers:

• I don’t care, if you drill the hole it won’t affect me
• I don’t care but help me relocate some of my stuff that’s in the way
• I am fine but I would like it higher/lower/further south
• I don’t want that at all

Since the Railway in the city is getting more and more stations, and the connectivity is getting better, I now created a new page for the Uncovery MTR together with a map that shows the stations and locations of the public railways. The map will be updated regularly.

Please take a look. I am always open for suggestions on station and railway names.

I have added enkl’s temple-building to the south-west of the city. Around it, i created a couple of lots which will become some upper-class residential buildings in a future contest. The nice thing is that the structure roughly follows the shoreline so we have enough space to build searfront homes there, too.

The only big question is the W-E skyrail. It would, if going straight, coming from inbetween the star observatory and the jail, OVER the building which is of course a no-go. So there are two options: either make a corner around the building or move the whole track 4 blocks south. What do you think is best? Moving it north, parallel to the Eiffel tower is not an option in my opinion.

I have started to work on the city railways. There are now 4 main stations that are accessible:

• The central station (near the central admin bldg)
• the southern city station (near the bank)
• the tower bridge (near the new bridge)
• the old spawn, now called “central outpost” (I reset the area btw, there were too many defunct/empty buildings)
• the pyramids

What I did:

• All the stations are now a standardized design. (except the central). Try it out, i think it is very practical
• I installed announcement signs on all of them
• exits that go no-where are blocked
• usable exits have signs on them
• buildings that have a connection to the railway have always one direction to go. It will be the one to the further away station. If you want to go to the closer one, you can walk

What’s the plan?

• Unless someone wants to use the same elevated railway design on their lot, this type of railway will be used only in the city. The normal lots will keep the current style railway & stations
• Technically there is a possibility at a station to have several entries, merging all into the same track but then dropping you off in different places. I might build something for the outer lots in the city or in a special train station. If you have a thought-through idea how to do that while using station signs and a high degree of automation, please tell me. Ideally it should be so efficient that people do not need to teleport anymore but still arrive in a reasonable time at their lots. from the outposts.
• I will expand the city-railway stations as needed and as the city grows.

Any other ideas regarding the railroads are of course always welcome.

As some of you might have seen, I have built a bridge over the harbor as a first big addition to the city outside of it’s current area. I am planning more stuff in various forms and sizes. Here is a list of it. PLEASE do not ask me to specify those so you can start building already. Since those will be contests, I will have to come up with specific rules how large etc these can be and I do not have those details yet.

• a harbor with big boats
• a harbor with small boats
• a rich residential area
• a poor residential area
• an industrial area
• a farming area (not too large)
• a suburban area with town-houses and small gardens in front of the houses
• a beach with sunchairs etc
• a waterfront boardwalk area (see this video)
• a waterfront housing area

I also have started to reserve lots that directly touch the central area or the old spawn area. IF YOU OWN SUCH A LOT touching the old spawn or central area, and you are willing to give it away, I will let you choose an alternative free lot and help you move any buildings that you have above ground on your lot to a new lot. The lots concerned are:

• L15-L23
• L23-S23
• S15-S23

OSF was already kind enough to agree to that. Those relocations do not have any timeline and will only be happening once the city is growing into you area. I would think that it will take 3 more months until those lots would help to expand the city. However, I think earlier information is always better.

You DO NOT have to do that. I am happy if you do, but apart from getting a new lot, there are no other benefits. See it as a chance to get a mint fresh lot. If instead you like your lot and want to stay so close to the city, keep it.

If you are creating floors out of Chests, furnaces or dispensers, please consider that they cause massive lag. to players near them.  Therefore, when you make submissions for contests, please make sure that you do not use any of them excessively. I just had to remove 240 furnaces from the library building.

I have now created a new user level, called “citizen”. This user level is for those who are here since a long time. Currently this is set to 4 months (4 x 30 days). It is a level below “architect” and above “settler”. This user level should be automatically assigned if you login to the website and your account there was created 4 month ago.

There is no additional rights associated with this rank for now. I want to see first how many months we need to choose for this level to understand how many people are eligible. Once I adjusted the time span properly, I will start assigning additional rights to that level. So please stand by….

I know relocated the spawn for settlers into it’s own floor in the city, as well as the portals to the outposts. The minecart ministry is moved to its own building in the city which is still under construction. I will be adding to it with some more complex and complete samples of minecart usage over the coming days.

The question is how to proceed. Theoretically I can also move the guest spawn to the city and delete the old spawn. I know we have been running with the old spawn for quite some months now, so I feel a bit nostalgic about it, but I think the city is a much better place to start for guests so they can see immediately what cool stuff you all build. So moving the guest spawn would be a good idea, but what to do with the old spawn village?

Just as the darklands gate, the nether gate now also has it’s own floor in the General Admin building!

I want to re-introduce a grammar question to the whitelist process. It should be something similar to:

Fill in the blanks correctly: “When I am am at my ___ house, I eat her ___ and watch TV.

• mothers – cakes
• mother’s – cake’s
• mother’s – cakes

The best one will be integrated into the whitelist. It has to be HARD. You should include 3 empty fields into the sentence.

I have started the upgrade and testing process on the temp server. I will be installing all the plugins and then moving the settings over too. Expect some functions to work differently from before during the transition. Since I do not have the time to work on it in one section, some stuff works and others does not. If there is anything significant not working such as building, please tell me.

I am having trouble to get a working system with settlers and the public area going. Why? I mean the public area to be a place where people can mine, build and play around for a while before they need to go and read tons of rules about lots etc. I also wanted people to be able to go and mine for basics to get alive to their lot the first time.

You remember as it was before, we had a public area that was plundered, griefed and generally looked terrible. I could reset it, but regenerating a area larger than 100×100 is causing trouble technically. In the extreme case it will cause chunk fails outside the regenerated area. Also we started building the city, so the logical thing was to create a place that would regen itself.

So I created the temporary world, which is deleted once a week. This works fine, except that now some people stay peasant and work together with others settlers as miners on lots where they have permission. They basically use the temp world as a easy version of the darklands and abuse the system. It might also be that some people connect with 2 accounts from the same PC, one settler, one peasant to ease mining.

So the most probable solution is this here:

• remove the peasant status. give guests a kit they can get for walking around (minmal armor, stone sword, wooden sword) since they cannot get that otherwise
• remove the temp world completely
• integrate the questionnaires for guests and settlers into one

Or

• generally disallow peasants to build in the normal world
• keep the temporary map so they can mine there instead of using kits

Solutions that DO NOT WORK:

• time-limit the peasant status (this requires annoying programming work, databases etc etc)
• regularly automatically regenerate a small area (if the chunk is not loaded, I get the above mentioned chunkfails)

Your opinion is requested here. I am not sure which one is the better solution or if there are alternatives.

I will be on a business trip until next monday, so I will be online less. If you have an issue, please send me an email.

I changed the way the public area works. First of all, I created a new, temporary world. Only peasants can build there. The temporary world has a central area that cannot be touched (marked by glowstones), and beyond there can be used for materials. This world will be reset every Wednesday midnight (HKG time). Everybody else has to go to the darklands for free mining.

The public area is now called central area and only architects and VIPs can build there. It is not for free mining & building but rather to build a city together. Before you start building there, talk to me about what & where. I am about to reset the central area in 100×100 sized blocks from the north on. I will try to leave the larger buildings but the stuff right outside of spawn will go away since it has been griefed beyond recognition anyhow.

I updated the website and questions according to the new changes. If you find stuff that is not updated yet, please tell me.

If you are a VIP, you can submit a throne for the VIP lounge. It has to be on a max surface of 2×3 and 3 blocks high. Place screenshots here that allow me to reconstruct the throne for you in the lounge. Make sure it has a sign with your name.

We discovered a monster castle south-west of the spawn in the darklands! Beware, do not even attempt to go by yourself! There are more mobs than you would dare to even look at!

The chests in the castles are said to have lapis, clay, lightstone and diamonds! Please try to find it, and report here how you conquered it!

[Update] The first raid with 2 brave warriors already failed on the third floor! Make sure you bring your equipment along! But the first two floors are raided already![/Update]

• The spawn for VIPs & Architects is now in the city!
• The darklands gate is now in the city!