Worldguard received a minor update today which allows me to prevent mobs from spawning on selected lots. So I disabled mob spawning completely in the spawn areas of all 3 worlds. This does not prevent mobs from other lots to walk over into those areas, which might be an issue in the nether. The other areas should be fine though due to size or walls.

As you might now, Notch has announced minecraft 1.5 for next week. On the other hand I announce holiday 2011.3 next week. This means that I will be off for the second time this year after XMas and Chinese New Year. I will be going to some obscure island in Indonesia for diving (yay!) with some limited internet access (nay!). Which means: I might have trouble updating the server in time if the plugins are quick updating or even to setup a parallel server for those who upgrade their client.

So rather wait with updating your client until you see an announcement here that a parallel server is running OR that your old client tells you it’s outdated when you try to connect.

Today I had the time to update the darklands as I wanted to have them since the beginning:

• They are endless big
• You can mine and do as you like
• creepers explode
• all kinds of illumination except lightstone is impossible
• it is impossible to /warp, /tp, /home, /spawn, /sethome etc

So infinite riches have their price and the play there should be even harder than SSP. Have fun!

To be clear(er): You have to either die or go back through the portal in the tower through which you came in to get back to the normal world. Please do not come and ask what happens if all sand/whatever in a reasonable distance is gone. Once this happens, we will see what we do.

I have added a new warp gate in spawn that brings you to the city. The city currently has 2 actual buildings and 4 more that are more placeholders than anything else. The streets layout as width is concerned is final. The materials used can be changed anytime. I would also favor a non-car-related design. I would be interested to get more proposals. Please think about how it would look like when the streets become really long.

I updated today to the latest versions of the plugins etc. and something must have gone wrong because at least one building got completely messed up etc.

I realized this some 2-3 hours after updating the server. So instead of trying to fix something that is almost impossible I rather opted to revert the map to the status it was when I updated. This means that if you logged in right after I updated, all what you did until this blog post is undone.

Sorry about this, but but could not help it.

I am on a business trip until Sunday night so I won’t be online a lot. If there is an issue, please post to the forum or blog…

I came up with a new project! Here it is:

• The public area is underused and will be replaced by the darklands as soon as the warping issues are fixed.
• I would like to encourage community building and have a larger project where anyone can participate.

This is why I propose a city project where we will start in the middle of the public area to build a large city, with a center made of larger buildings. Here is how you can participate :

The city center should be made of skyscrapers and buildings of the size of 20×20 blocks. You can build them out of any material you like, preferably not out of 100% cobble. Please build them on your lot and I will then move them to public area. We will start somewhere in the middle, build the streets etc and protect the area from griefers.

So here is what you do: Build a 20×20 building with any height and no cellar. Put a sign on it somewhere so people know who built it. Then post a comment here with the lot number and the coordinates of the tower. Make sure that you have a staircase going to the upper floors, no ladders please. At max a hidden water elevator as an elevator.

I will then cut & paste the building over to the public area.

I am also asking for a proposal how the streets should look like. You can post the same here and I will pick one and use it for the whole center of the city.

You can make diners, offices, residential whatever. But please no town houses etc that would not be found outside of a larger city like new york etc.

Finally, the issue that is preventing me from opening the darklands is an official bug and therefore has a chance to be fixed. This does not mean however that this can happen within the next 24 hours. The bug first has to be fixed, then we have to wait for the next recommended build to be released, then for the plugins to be updated to work with that release. That can take a week or two.

So what can we do in the meantime? I do not want to open the gate to prevent people from complaining that they did not see a sign or something and died. So I made a command that you only read here after you read the warning.

If you go into the darklands, you will generate a chunkfail. You might be caught in limbo and fall forever without dying. You have to relogin to die and then you loose your stuff. So to get out of the chunkfail you have to try to be quick and move towards the closest visible block next to you. If you do not manage that. Then you can go there and have fun. So to get there you need to use a warp-point called “darklands” and the command to warp is /warp <warppoint> (leave the <> away of course).

So if you get in there, have fun. If you die in there, don’t complain. There is a save-zone around the spawn tower marked with a wall. The save-zone extends around the wall for a couple of blocks. Do not complain about griefers in that world.

I have updated the server and you can connect to the old port. These things are currently not working:

• Darklands. There is a serious issue with chunkfails. I am investigating what could be wrong. No clue as of yet. Some people on the IRC channels assume its a client issue. We will have to wait until a new version of craftbukkit fixes that or the client gets updated to the next version.
• There are still many smaller things that do not work yet. Pictures can still be stolen, cakes can still be eaten. Most of these I would expect to be fixed in the coming days.

What should work now for the first time:

• You should be able to place minecarts on the “public” railway going across lots. Please test this.
• I have the possibility to allow ANYBODY to place minecarts ANYWHERE. Please comment if you do not want this, and why.

Other info:

• Adding members to your lot – this should be fixed now

I have been investigating just now what the status is for the minecraft server development and 1.4. Generally there are good news. Here is what I found:

• There is a craftbukkit build for Minecraft 1.4. This means that plugin developers have the chance to adjust their plugins accordingly. This means that hopefully over the weekend, all essential plugins will be up and running with MC 1.4
• I tested that craftbukkit release with all plugins. Some work already, others do not.
• Worldedit and Worldguard (the most important plugins) are also broken. The developer made an announcement that a version working with 1.4 will be available on Friday. This will also open the (real) darkworld, the railway and a bunch of other things I have been waiting for since more than a month now.
• I will bring the server to 1.4 as soon as user levels and protection is working. Stuff like minecarts, shops etc might come later.

So if you upgraded, I would assume that until Monday, we should have the server up and running until then with 1.4. No promises though!

I finally managed to open the darklands. As described before, its quite dangerous. So if you go there, I do not want any complaints of people who died in there and lost all their diamonds or whatever….

I want to start building a railway north-south and east-west through the map to make commuting with the minecart tracks easier. The minecart track will go first north-south through all lots of the Q row, later I will decide where the east-west row will go through, ideally through line 14 or 15, but I am flexible on that.

With the upcoming update of worldguard anybody will be able to place minecarts on the tracks and we can have a much better commuting system.

[UPDATE]I now expanded all the lots that neighbor existing public railways to expand above and below the railway. That way the lots are not that much smaller than normal lots and you can better integrate the railway into your lot, as well as bridge over the railway to the lots on the other side.

All railway now occupie 5 blocks horizontally, 4 blocks vertically and run at level 63 height.

I want to build now a North-South railway along the Q-row of lots.[/UPDATE]

The users now affected by the North-South railway are:

• BinkyDude
• Zapp3D
• yoshimanssbm
• rthurber

I would be happy to hear as comments here from the affected people if they are fine or not. I already blocked the area from editing so you guys can see what the effect will be.

I now added the last login time to each lot owner on the map so you can see when a lot might become free if the user does not return until then and discovered that some people never even logged in after registration. These lots are of course now also up for grabs.

I updated the building rules regarding lot-wide cascades. If you have huge water/lava-falls please remove them. I do not mind 1×1 or similar cascades in the center, but if your complete lot is surrounded by a 128 block high cascade, you are overdoing it. This falls under the rule of wide/high ugly structure AND under things that cause excessive lag.

I have been working for the last many days on a new game concept that is supposed to solve some issues with the current environment on the server:

– the game is quite easy. Once you have a couple of torches you only die if you accidentally fall into lava etc, but the mobs are not really a challenge
– the public area gets raided for the most valuable materials in a short time
– the whole concept of exploring new lands as in single player does not exist

In order to fix these issues, I need the ability to expand the map. On the current map this conflicts with the existing and possible future lots. If I want to make stuff harder, such as restricting certain tools or commands, I need to open a new world. These things do not work on a per region basis. Also, since the public area is quite small, I would need to reset it every 2-3 weeks. Some people build cool stuff there however, so I prefer to not reset it.

So the only solution is a new world. This new world should be as hard as possible to make sure that people do not use it to build elaborate stuff. People should go there to get stuff not because its easy but because stuff can be found there. So how dangerous will it be there?

– There will be no fire. No torches, no nether rack, no burning wood. No lava, no pumpkins. Only glowstone from the nether.

– There will be creepers that explode and destroy your buildings

– There will not be any teleport commands such as /home, spawn or else. You will have to walk, just like in single player mode. If you get lost, you better build a compass or look at your coordinates.

– There will be no map. So you will not be able to look out for places others went to and find sand there etc.

As an add-on I created a mob-fortress with a whole lot of mobspawners and treasure inside. The place will be protected so you will have to fight normally through the building to get in. You will need 2-4 people to conquer it and get out alive. I will place the building in random intervals in random places and announce it in a vague way where to find it.

When will this happen? I hope this week. I need the update to the worldguard plugins which is in the world since a month now.

The current public area will stay as it is for everyone to build in and for new players to get some basic resources, but not anymore to get sand etc.

I hope this all will ad new drive to the server. Since this all requires a lot of work from my side, I will not be install any other additions in the near future, since I want to make sure all works fine with this one.

[UPDATE]Regarding the nether, the current issue is the same why I do not open the DarkLands yet. I am unable to give different lot protection there from the normal world. Once this changes, I am happy to make the nether a huge public area, maybe with a protective shelter in the center. It can also be endless.

That said, I have to mention two things: Due to a tool that I have now that measures the CPU clock in comparison with the in-game clock I can tell that the nether and the new world do not cause any lag. But on the other hand, I do not have experience with 10 people being in each world at the same time. All lag in the past 2 weeks has been caused by the server hoster or specific actions on my side that put a heavy load on the server (resetting lots, removing the water from bigdlol’s lot yesterday etc). If I see that the use of the new worlds causes lag, the first solution would be to limit them in size and to reset them more often. If you want to help keeping the server healthy and fast, don’t run for 5 hours into the horizon just for the kicks. Mine the staff that is near the spawn points first.[/UPDATE]

We had some severe lag spikes over the last 5 hours and I once contacted the hosting support about it via web chat about 2 hours ago. I got disconnected in the middle and let it be since the lag was gone by then. What I got out of this was the best way to monitor the lag. So when the lag escalated just now I made the right records and called to the USA support this time to get a reply. While I was on the phone with the support guys I recorded these traceroute figures from my server TO my home provider. So this represents the network inside the provider that should normally reply within a bracket of 2ms, but instead I got this here:
1 ip-184-168-65-251.ip.secureserver.net (184.168.65.251) 220.524 ms 220.521 ms 220.731 ms
2 * * *
3 * * *
4 * * ip-208-109-113-169.ip.secureserver.net (208.109.113.169) 33.251 ms
5 ip-97-74-252-21.ip.secureserver.net (97.74.252.21) 31.845 ms * *
6 * scd-edge-01.inet.qwest.net (63.227.225.69) 31.792 ms *
7 * * *
8 * * *
9 * * *
10 * * *
11 * * *
12 * * *
13 * * *
14 * * *
15 * * *
16 * * *
17 * * *
18 * * *
The stars mean that the server did not reply in time to the request.
From my home I got some replies within an acceptable 200ms, but again some severe spikes within a 2500ms frame, with 350 being considered severe.
So the support there woke up some technicians and they are working on the issue. I figured waiting until they are done is the best solution.
Given that they are in panic-mode already it does not really help to create a trouble-ticket.

On the good side, the server itself never had any delay so far. It is also very likely that some of the lag that occurred over the recent days was caused by the same issue that godaddy has now, and whatever they have to fix will also fix that.

Also, I have NO idea how long this will take. It’s their lifeblood though I would think they do that fast.

Guys if you have lag, please do the following:

Open a command prompt (in windows, click start, then enter “cmd” in the text box above) and type “tracert uncovery.net”, make a screenshot of the results and send it to me (minecraft@uncovery.net).  It should look like the one above.

I got a notice that the shops might be not restoring your property when they expire, get backed up and then get restored. Please all do me the following favor:

When the store gets closer to expiry, please fill it with something w/o value and re-rent the shop. Tell me if you get your stuff back.

If you want to help more, rent a shop for one day put in some cobble and tell me if it gets stored in there, backed up, and restored when you rent it out again.

I have the plan to create a new, parallel world as an eternal, large, public area. I am waiting for the worldguard plugin to finally be released to do that. It HAS to happen one day.

The consequence is that I have to build custom portals between dimensions and this conflicts with the normal nether gates. So from now on, all normal nether gates do not work anymore. To get to the nether, you will have to come to spawn and use the gate that was built there by me. I guess this will be a small inconvenience since coming back one had to go through the spawn anyhow. So I am looking forward to have another world with unlimited resources – but with more danger! Beware what will be coming there! Creeper explosions etc are not excluded!