There will be a change in user levels. Why? Since we are doing more and more contests that advance people to a higher level, we see people advancing very quickly and well deserved to higher levels. However, there should be a difference between people being at a high level because they are building cool stuff and people who have been at the server for a long time AND at the same time show great social skills, maturity and deep involvement with the server and its development. So what will change?

All VIPs will receive a different name. Most likely Master Builder or something similar. We can fiddle with the naming, important thing is that it reflects that the user has proven to be a better builder than Architect. User rights / commands will not change.

There will be a new user level called “Elder”. Same here for the level name, we can change that later. This new userlevel will be more restrictive. This means that all members of this group will have to propose new members to the group and any vote against it will disable that person from joining. Wait for new commands to be given to Elder levels. The initial group of members will be announced later.

Donators will also change. There will be a + as usual for people who donated but only if they donated more than 12USD. For those who donated less there will be a different sign. Wait for new commands to be given to the 12USD+ donators. Since there I am having some difficulties to know who donated what (some people used realnames or  parents emails instead of their actual data for example), please tell me if you think you got the wrong donator level.

Since there was a technical glitch with the Citizen levels, some people got promoted to citizen too early. In order to fix this, I have removed citizen status form ALL users. But no reason to panic. To get your citizen level back, please simply log on to the website. You should be upgraded instantly. If you have applied for a skylands lot and are not citizen anymore, please tell me so I can reset the lot. You will not be able to build on it anymore anyhow.

I have setup a tool that now shows all users faces in the blog when they post comments as well as in the forum, and also on the map. The usernames are removed from the map. In order to know who is behind the face, hover your mouse over the face and the username should appear.

I just deleted the Google+ account for uncovery minecraft. I got the news that some organizations that opened a + account have had their complete Google Account deleted, including YouTube, Gmail etc, because only “real people” are allowed to have a Google+ account. Since I do not want to risk that, I removed + from the Google Account. The google docs and the Youtube account remain therefore.

I will open it again once Google allows to have organizations have a + account, similar to pages in Facebook.

AS you know there has been a pyramid built by me and decorated by amazing works of the Uncovery community in the Central Area. I want to finish this work but ran a bit out of ideas. So please go there (take the train north form the city) and tell me what else should be built there. I am also looking for volunteers to help making this a feature-packed, fun building to explore.

There is a new VIP lounge now at an undisclosed location! Please keep it secret! Do not /tp non-VIPs there! You get there with /spawn as a VIP and you get out of it with the portals. Updates regarding interior and thrones will follow!

[Update] I now created spaces for thrones along the wall and copied the existing thrones over. Feel free to build your new thrones on the empty spaces.[/Update]

I am also open to suggestions for additional features on the top floor for example. Only in-game please!

I expanded the VIP lounge to have two floors now. The prison floor is not needed anymore since we have a dedicated prison building and the cells in the hospital. If a VIP wants to take the time to build a special building for the VIP’s, please go ahead. It has to be something special though! And it has to be secret!

I have re-enabled the citizen level upgrade. The whole system of upgrades etc will be reworked in the coming days however. Currently too much is happening every time the website is loaded and I rather want to make this stuff happen only every 5-10 minutes or so.

Also, if you scroll down a bit you will see a poll on the sidebars asking for your opinion on possible improvements on the website.

Uncovery Minecraft is now on Google+!
Add Uncovery Minecraft to your circle! If you want to have an invite to Google+, please send an email to minecraft@uncovery.net!

I upgraded the website layout to the latest version. As you can see its a bit more spaced and has some nicer design features. I hope you like it. What’s still left to do is the title image. I will try to finish this until the end of the week.

I have started to make an Uncovery City map at google spreadsheets. Currently I am the only one who can edit.  I am looking for others who can help fill in the blanks and insert comments to the fields regarding the contents of the buildings. We should also have different colors for buildings. The ministries should be in one color as educational buildings. Other colors should be decided if needed. The street names can also be filled in of given already.

If you are interested to help, I can add your google username to the editors list so you have access.

You will now receive 100 uncs for every vote you do for the server! Go to minestatus and vote right now!

I will be leaving for holidays in 12 hours. I will be gone until July 10th. During this time I will have only very limited internet access.

Since there was a repeated bug where during an upgrade to citizen, the permissions file would not be written properly and all users would become guests, I will be suspending further citizen promotions until I am back. Current citizen will stay citizen of course.

So please be patient until I am back. I will try to find out where this bug comes from or how to fix it. Most probably I will convert the system from a “check when the website is loaded” to a scheduled check to avoid too many checks that might interfere with each other. I do not know when I have time for that though.

I just finished all western rails in the skylands. They should be free of lava, water, gravel, holes and have working rail stations every 200 blocks. They also should be in the right location to make sure both lots north and south of them are accesible. If you see some problems on other’s lots, please tell me. If you see stuff broken on your lot, please fix it.

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.