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!

I had some thoughts about how to develop the server further. Here are my ideas. Comments are welcome as usual.

• Expand the city to fill the whole public area. If more space is needed, claim free lots on the borders for it.
• Create a public world for peasants only instead of the public area. It would be regenerated every night/reboot. Settlers+ cannot go the public area anymore and have to go to the darklands for free mining/building
• Use the current spawn area only for guests, peasants and maybe settlers. Remove mall and other buildings form the current spawn that are not essential for beginners. Use the city for all others to spawn there. Architects and VIPs spawn in a different place/floor/building.
• Move important functions to the city (Arena, Mall, Hospital, etc)

So far so good. Opinions welcome!

I got the question today if griefing in the darklands was allowed or not. Of course it is not. But if someone wants to complain to me about griefers in the darklands, he better have a proof in his hands. This can be a screenshot, video or time (GMT or Hong Kong time please!) where a chat occurred that prooves WHO was griefing.

If I do not have a concrete proof who was griefing, I cannot do anything. So if you want to be safe from griefers, please do not start building in the darklands!

The fact that some people seem to like to build in the darklands a lot makes me think however if I should start making lots in the darklands. If enough people agree to this, I might do it. The previous post I made was more to state that I do not want to start manual protection there. If I setup once a lot system for a certain limited area, its a piece of work to get it once done, but it would be then easier to make a system out of it.

[Update] Please let me specify on the above: The lots would only be on a part of the land, the rest of the darklands would be still public area. I would probably take the current buildings as a starting point and make a dozen lots around them. Nothing as big as the normal world, and stuff outside the lots would still be public. The map would also still be endless. I limited the map outside the lots on the normal world because I did not want to mess it up in case we want to expand the lots. With the darklands map being endless, I can have lots anywhere I like, also in a new area. [/Update]

[Update 2]As an added security level I have blocked Peasants from building in the darklands. Guests have been blocked already since the beginning.[/Update]

• Using the warpgate to the nether occasionally knows out a whole chunk of the map where the gate is. I do not know why this happens, but so far it did twice. If you see that, please tell me immediately so I can fix it.
• destroying a minecart while you ride it teleports you back on the track. You have to exit it normally instead of destroying it.

I have seen that some of you have been starting to build some larger structures in the darklands, and made them easy to find. I want to make you aware of the following (just in case you wonder): I will not protect property in the darklands, no matter how great it looks. I created the lots in the normal world so that I do not have to go to every user and protect their stuff manually. So I will not go back to “manual mode” in the darklands. If you build there, griefing is your risk only.

I have transferred now a bunch of buildings to the city. I have come to the following conclusion: I will NOT give the owners building rights once the buildings are in the city. It is just too much work to do and manage that.

So if you want to have your building in the city, I will copy it there unless you want me to remove it from your lot. Those people whose building was already moved by me, can get a copy of the building back on their lot. Contact me here and tell me where you want it. I will put it back.

If your building is in the city and you want to upgrade it or make considerable changes, please change the building on your lot and I will then overwrite the updated building in the city with the new one.

I now installed a cheat protection software. The important part is that it does not allow you anymore to lag-climb out of holes by quickly placing blocks below you in restricted areas (spawn, other people’s lots etc).

This means that there is a risk for you to get stuck. While in the normal world you can get out of a hole by using /spawn, in the darklands spawn area that is not possible. You would have to wait until I come online and get you out of there. So watch where you walk!

If you get stuck, you can leave a message anywhere on the site with your coordinates (press F3) and I will fix the area so you can get out when you log back in.