As of now, I cannot upgrade to 1.4.4 since one of the main plugins (Websend) is incompatible with 1.4.4. I posted a bug report for the plugin and hope that it will be taken care of soon. Please downgrade to 1.4.2 if you have upgraded already.

Congratz!

Congratz! On a side-note, I upgraded a LOT of people to citizen that had the right to be citizen since a LONG time but simply never logged in on the homepage to get the upgrade.

I am thinking about upgrading people on game login in the future instead of web login.

Since item frames were destroyable with arrows, I installed another protection. Now it’s impossible for anyone to destroy an item frame. To remove it, destroy the block the item frame is on instead. The frame will pop off and the item in the frame will drop, too.

Congratz!

Here is a list of bugs that I have found since the upgrade. I will expand this as I find more:

• Netherportals from the Nether to the darklands are broken. Made a bug report. Bug was confirmed by someone else.
• Old letters do not work anymore. I guess we cannot change that. Please write new ones :D

changes I made:

• potions are now disabled in the city and flatlands
• it’s impossible to make iron golem farms now. If you have one, please try if it still works and tell me if it does.
• there is now a limit on breeding animals of 50 per lot. check /headcount please

I just upgraded the server to 1.4.2!
The upgrade includes SEVERAL beta/dev version plugins.
I will be updating everything continuously as new versions of the components come out, but from my testing all should be fine.
If you find a bug or exploit that you can reproduce, please post here.

Regarding building the wither, I now disabled that in all worlds. The question is where to enable it so that beacons can be made.
I can enable/disable the wither only per world, not per lot. Shall I just enable it in the nether?

I will update the server most likely today (HKG time). So please empty your inventories and enderchests on the temp server, since the stuff in there will be gone!

Ok, so 1.4.2 is out. Here again what happens:

• We have now a temp server with the 1.4.2 version running.
  • That temp server is reachable if you enter uncovery.me:25564 into your minecraft client
  • This normal world map of this temp server will become the new darklands in the future. So treat it nicely!
  • Everything that you build on this server will be transferred once we upgrade the main server. That includes normal chests and builds. That does NOT include your user inventory and enderchest inventories. Those will be LOST on upgrade.
  • There is no protection against griefing on the server except for the whitelist. Also, the whitelist there is currently not updated. Newly whitelisted users cannot join it. I will enable that later.
  • We know from experience that people will grief. It is still bannable. But you better hide your stuff since it is hard to detect.
  • If you are playing on the 1.4.2 and go voting, the voting rewards will pop out in the 1.3.2 server. You will be able to access them once we are upgrading or if you downgrade your client to play there.
• We still keep the normal main server running as-is.
  • Once we can upgrade that server to 1.4.2, we will delete the currently existing darklands and all that is in there. That will not affect enderchests and player inventories but it WILL affect builds and normal chests in the darklands.
  • Everything else, your lots, your money etc will be transferred.
  • Regarding the nether in the current main server, There is no decision yet. One option might be to simply move the spawn to a different location.
    You can choose if you want to play 1.3.2 with all your current builds and protection OR on 1.4 with the new features, but w/o proper protection and in a new world. In order to stay on 1.3.2, it is important that you do NOT upgrade your minecraft client when asked to do so. Once you upgrade, you cannot re-download the 1.3.2 version from legal sources. You can however keep 1.3.2 on your computer with a tool and run 2 versions at the same time with a special tool. Use MC Jar switcher or Magic launcher. Also see this here.

I have now fixed multiple deposit withdrawals. The home-made deposit plugin had a bug where it would once get the players inventory and check for space for the first item to be withdrawn, give him the item, then check for the second item and so on.

What we overlooked is that the inventory info is static in the code and does not update when when the user receives the first item. There is also no way of re-requesting the current inventory. So I had to write a process that would track the changes in the inventory manually when the user is given an item so that when he gets the second item, the system knows what space is remaining and bail if the inventory is full.

TL;DR: If you withdraw more from the deposit than your inventory can hold, you will now get as much as fits into your inventory and then the process will halt. You can make space and then start again for the rest of your deposit.

We will deal with the 1.4 update (we are currently on version 1.3.2) just the same way we dealt with former updates. Here a short wrap-up for those who do not know:

• All the new cool features of 1.4 (anvils, beacons etc) will not work until we have 1.4 installed.
• In order to install 1.4, we need to make sure that the server software we are using (bukkit) and all the important plugins are upgraded and work fine with it. Until all the plugins are updated, it can take any time from 3 days until 4 weeks. We do not know.
• Once we will move to 1.4, all your possessions and lots will be transferred along. You will not lose anything.
• In the meantime, while we wait for everything to be 1.4 ready, I will start a parallel temp 1.4 server on a different port. Anyone will be able to play on the temp server, but there will be no protection (it will be similar to the darklands). The temp server will have a new map with only one world (+nether & end) and with only limited plugins (no shop etc), if any at all.
• You can choose if you want to play 1.3.2 with all your current builds and protection OR on 1.4 with the new features, but w/o proper protection and in a new world. In order to stay on 1.3.2, it is important that you do NOT upgrade your minecraft client when asked to do so. Once you upgrade, you cannot re-download the 1.3.2 version from legal sources. You can however keep 1.3.2 on your computer with a tool and run 2 versions at the same time with a special tool. I recommend to install those BEFORE 1.4 comes out: Use MC Jar switcher or Magic launcher.
• The world that we create for the temp 1.4 will likely become the new darklands in the future – as announced. The current darklands might be removed. Since there will be new features in the 1.4 version (such as silverfish spawning in the hills biomes along with a higher frequency of emeralds), we want to make a use of that. I also think that it would be good to reset the nether which looks more like a minefield by now.
• Inventory of your player that you carried while playing on the 1.4 temp server will be lost when we upgrade the 1.3.2 server to 1.4. If you stashed stuff on the map, it will be in the upgraded server as the new darklands. Whatever you had on the (current) old darklands will be gone. Same for the nether.
• Regarding the new control blocks, it is unlikely that those will be available since they allow admin-only functions.

If you have questions, please ask them ASAP so that there are no regrets for lost stuff once we upgrade.

I have now upgraded to the latest version of the plugin that does the interfacing between the game and the webserver as well most of the custom functions we are having such as the webshop, stories, karma etc.

It should all work fine but there are MANY small changes to the code so please have a lookout if everything works fine and if all messages and texts display properly. If you have a command that does not give you the usual output, please post here so I can fix it. Thanks!

Users from level architect on upwards have now more homes. Check the “userlevels & commands” for details.

You can now add/rem several users at once to a lot. Type /lot or /helpme in-game for further info.

I have just now finished the creation of the kingdom lots. You can see them already on the 2D map. What’s left to do now?

• create a new world with less water and in the proper size.
• write a function to buy lots
• write a logic that allows you to buy street lots only when you own the normal lots.
• update the website with instructions etc

I have now finished fixing the broken commands for lot manangement. We had a temporary solution for adding members, but the command for snow fall and ice formation was still broken. I now made a new command with the all-new plugin-like code structure this was even easier.

How does it work? Well, check the userlevels & commands section or use the not yet finished but working brand-new help system: Type /helpme (new, also known as /shophelp) and find out!

As it says in the title. Check the shop data website.

Again with the great help from our Arch Coder, Azkedar, we are now able to do 100% automated lot resets! Yay! I am SUPER excited about this. What does it do?

I wrote a script that runs once a day – when the server shuts down for the daily restart – which basically does the same as my map-code: It goes through all the worlds, lot by lot, and checks if the owner is banned or absent for a certain time, matches that with the world name and the user group to find out if the lot is up for reset or not. Then, it will tell an external program (the one Azkedar wrote), to take the lot from a new, untouched world (same seed however) and copy it over the current world. Sounds easy, is complicated to do, since the it has to take a part of one file and the same part of another file. Once that is done, the server will restart, and the 2D map will be regenerated to show the changes.

The results:

• No more (zero) work for anyone (me) on lot resets anymore (ever). Yay! This is the only leftover non-automated regular task I had on the server. I could go on holiday for a year now and the server would be still fine (except for software updates).
• No more discrepancy how a lot looks on the 2D map and in reality since I won’t manually reset lots 15 hours before the map updates.
• We will always have the maximum amount of lots free for new users, there would be never more than today’s expired lots marked red on the map.
• No more broken trees, mineshafts, etc. Everyone will always have a mint new lot in perfect condition, no matter what world, biome etc.
• Less broken mountains. If the world generator changes but not the ores, we can stick with the old world and avoid broken mountains. If the ores change, we can re-generate a new source world to copy from and reset lots will get new ores (and maybe broken mountains).

Those who have been around for longer know that this list of solved issues is summing up some of the biggest topics we had since the beginning of the server. The fact that after all this time messing around with those issues we finally came to a sustainable solution is truly amazing. We are basically entering a new phase for the server together with the recent hardware upgrade. Uncovery 2.0!

I will be testing lot resets for the 2+ months old lots from today on and start the 1+ months lots next week. Just to make sure everything works fine and to give the people who did not know about the shortening of the expiry until I sent them an email the promised time to login.

[UPDATE] Success! I did a test first on the banned users (6 or so), then on all the users that are absent since 2+ months. That was a bunch of 60+ lots in all 3 worlds combined! It worked like a charm, and all lots are in perfect condition, with trees and everything else! It is setup to run during server restarts. So since this works perfectly, it will continue to reset lots at every restart. This weekend I will switch to the shorter restart cycle and reset the majority of the other lots that are already now red[/UPDATE]

I put the normal server up again with JRE 1.7 instead of 1.6. It’s even quicker now. We will see if that does the trick.