Since the new mall is currently on one floor only, there is a LOT of free room up and downstairs. I am not sure what to do with it. There are several possible things:

• A huge, multi-story maze
• A dark, PvP, mob-spawning nightmare (mobs that hurt)
• Rip out the floors and make a huge hall out of the mall below
• whatever else you come up with!

Please comment!

I now removed the access to the old shops. If you still have stuff standing around in the old shops, send me a message and I will give you your stuff when I see you in-game.

I have given now free all lots on the map (now we have 900!). I also enabled the multi-day reservation for the shops. Depending on your level, you can now rent a shop longer.

Also we have a new bug to deal with, they might be removed today:

• Iron doors do not work anymore

You can see now on the 2D map which lots will be reset and then immediately given free for reservation. As I said, it can take some time since this is a manual process and I have to be careful that I do not accidentally do this even one block wrong otherwise stuff from the neighbors will be gone. I will go through them one by one and reset them. From what I have seen so far it works nice except for the one or other half-cut tree which I guess we can all live with.

I have updated the plugins etc to allow the nether to be there.
Please be aware that it is not possible to place portals in the nether to avoid the destruction of real-world structures with the corresponding gate that would be created. Therefore all the gates in the real world come out at the same one in the nether and there can be only one gate in nether that will always point to spawn.

Also, please tell me if you have lag while people are in the nether. Due to the updates the lag should be gone but I want to make sure.

He was unable to keep his brother away from his account who cam on the server and maliciously killed people by using the trust people had in the account owner. Since sharing accounts is not allowed here, I had to ban him.

• Please remove your shops from the mall INCLUDING chests!
• I updated several plugins and the core server. Please tell me if there are problems
• I fixed some issues with the nether, there should be less lag, you should have proper access rights now. Its still same regions as normal world, this will change once the worldguard is updated. There should be less lag now. Please report issues.
• Minecart pressure plates are disabled. Please see this here: http://wiki.bukkit.org/Minecart_Mania-Plugin/Redstone_Sign_Sensors

Ok guys, I enabled the nether. Here is how it works:

• You can build your own portal to get there
• Going back will always bring you to a portal near spawn
• Only Settlers and above can use nether portals
• The nether has the same protection as the normal world, so you cannot just mine anywhere. I will make the nether a public area once I can do that with a bit protected starting point.
• There is a border around the nether like the normal world but much smaller, 190 blocks to be equivalent of the normal map.
• You can find the public area equivalent in spawn and mine there if you want.
• Do NOT teleport people into the server since this might cause problems

If you experience bugs, crashes, lag or similar please tell me.

I am currently working on the new shop system. I want to give a general overview what it will look like. First of all, for a visual check you can go to the mall where you can see a couple of wooden structures on the left. Each of those is one shop. Once the old shops are gone, I will make more. How will it work?

• You can “rent” a shop for a time, probably a week at first. It’s “rent” in quotes because it will be free. It’s still renting since you will have to give the shop back after that time. When you rent, you can pick one of the free locations from a web form (like the lot reservation)
• When the week is over, the shop will be backed up with all its contents. You cannot access the shop then anymore.
• When you rent another shop (same or different location), the backed up shop will be restored at the chosen location and you can change the contents and get your stuff out.
• The drawback: The shops do not have chests or similar containers. All works by commands. You can load stuff from your inventory into the shop with a command and the other way round. This allows me to build shops in spawn w/o giving out build permits, which makes everything easier.

I am currently writing the web interface for this. I also need to write the automatic backup and other processes. The flexibility here is the following:

• I can expand to more shops anytime, very quickly
• I can change the rental time also very easily

Future Development potentials:

• I can setup a short-term shop (1hr rental) or even a flexible rental period with a max time later
• I can give building rights to the shop to allow customization, not sure if this will ever happen however.

I hope I can finish some of the stuff today or tomorrow. Specially the time rental is quite a big piece of work.

As promised, I have now activated the multiple lot reservation. This means that Architects can reserve 2 lots and VIPs can reserve 4 lots. Please go to the “Become a settler” page and choose your additional lots if you are VIP or Architect. Please tell me if everything works fine.

[UPDATE]There was a bug that assigned Settler level to people after the additional lots are approved. Please check, once you get the approval that you have the correct user level and reply to the latest email you got if the bug still persists.[/UPDATE]

Next up: I will go through the user list and find out who has not been online this year, maybe even since end of January and remove the lots from these users. They will not be given out yet since I cannot reset them yet. Once I can do that (this might take a while as it seems), I will also reset those lots. So if you have the chance now to reserve an additional lot, but would like the lot next to you, you will have to wait until I can reset them. Otherwise, please choose any other lot on the map.

As I removed the mall shops for the outer regions, I do not want to give out the outer lots yet. I will try to change the mall system within the weekend, and then give out the outer lots.

I have read some reports that a group of hackers goes around servers and spawns items in masses that crash servers and do other serious mayhem. Apparently they are using some code injection that cannot be prevented by the protection plugins.

In order to pre-empt any more serious damage, I switched the reboot & backup cycle from every 12 hours to every 6 hours. So if something strange if going on, please notify me immediately. I will then try to fix the server and if that is not possible I will reset to the last backup. If this causes you to loose anything, please remember, there are no refunds.

Ok, despite the issues mentioned below here is the server on version 1.3. I have found the right combination of plugins that works together. The only things that are not working right now are

• HeroChat for chat channels support
• WarpGates to jumpt to the outposts
• Stats & Achievements
• The chest shops. Fixed!
• You do not get Uncs over time anymore. The feature has been removed by the plugin author.
  ATTENTION:
  I am getting a bit freaked out over this. I get questions every 5 minutes from people asking me
  “Is the UNCs system broken?” – NO. IT IS NOT.  Next Question:
  “How do I then get more money” – YOU MAKE AND SELL STUFF.
  The shops still work. The money still works. You only do NOT get “Money for nothing” anymore.
• Diamond blocks spawn a minecart but do not launch it. fixed!

I will see if I can find reliable alternatives or fixes for these. Until then, please report all bugs or missing stuff here.

Also, what changed is:

• Warping to places takes forever. It is actually better to warp somewhere, log off and re-login.
• Doors can be placed in protected areas.
• Slimes are back in the game

Please note that I cannot change any of those. If I could, I would. Asking me to change that does not help this fact, either.

So go ahead and upgrade your client to 1.3 and join the game!

(just realized that I updated to 1.3 on the 1.3.2011)

To give you a bit of a perspective what is happening right now with the plugins, and to show you what situation I am in right now:

There is a recommended and stable build of the Carftbukkit, version 440, which seems to work quite well with everything.

The world-edit plugin is still in Beta-mode (v.8). It is mostly only updated on the weekends. The current version seems to work however. This plugin is required for the World-guard plugin

The WorldGuard plugin is in alpha. they only patched it up to work with minecraft 1.3. There are some great functions coming, some by my request, but the dev speed is not encouraging right now. They are finishing functions on the issue tracker but there is no workd when a new release will be out. I can only hope for this weekend. This new version will make it much easier and faster to reserve lots (and I will be able to charge for them in Unc’s if I want to :-)

Now the trouble. There are currently 3 plugins that manage permissions. The original currrently version 2.1, a replacement that advanced to 2.5, taken over from another guy because it was abandoned and then groupmanager that fakes to be the old one in version 2.0.

The Warpgates plugin was abandoned too (same guy) and replaced with something that is too alpha for me to use. It seems to allow the gates but no edit them in-game. So this is broken right now.

The Chat is messed up too. There is HeroChat that I have been using so far which is requireing the replacement permissions in version 2.4 (2.5 being the current one) and nevertheless throwing errors at me. There is iChat which is supposed to simply handle the prefix/suffix along with the original permissions plugin but also throws an error. Then there is the Chat component of the Esssentials Plugins which required the groupmanager plugin but at least works with it.

However the groupmanager switched to a different file format which is not really manageable for me. The old one was writable with the Horde:YAML component under PHP to give people permissions. So I can switch to the old permissions, loose the chat indicator who is what level and keep my web interface to give people permissions if they apply for a lot. Or I can dump the chat functions and people cannot register online for a lot anymore without me going and editing the file manually.

I have sent several messages to plugin authors to report about the issues and errors. I can only hope that stuff will get fixed. The result however is that I will keep running 1.2 until I have a clearer pictures what is working and what not.

The bad news are: The maintainer of the following plugins has quit:

• Warp Gates
• Permissions
• iConomy

However, except for the warp gates, there are well working replacements available.

Also, both the WorldEdit and the WorldGuard plugins that are essential for the server being updated to MC 1.3 are being worked on and there are alpha/beta version available but the bugs are still too serious to install them.

So what does that mean?

• It might not take too long until we can upgrade to 1.3, probably Sunday or Monday
• I will have to transfer to a new Shop Plugin and a new Economy plugin for the money management, trying to keep everyone’s balance (should be possible)
• Some functionality like the shops will come a bit later so I have time to test them AFTER we upgrade the server.

So I still recommend to downgrade your client if you have not done so and continue playing on the server until I can make sure that the full server protection is available.