Mojang today released one of the latest snaphots of 1.3 and will go into pre releases and then the final 1.3, likely this or next week. You will be asked to upgrade – what shall you do? When the upgrade comes, it will take us some time, sometimes weeks until the important plugins for protection etc are updated too so we can use them. Until then, we will keep the server running on 1.2.5.

Once 1.3 comes out, we will run a parallel, temporary, vanilla 1.3 server on a different port. That server will have a new map, and no protection. It will have a whitelist however to give at least some protection from griefers.

You have a choice then to upgrade and to play with the new features in an unprotected environment, and be griefed (it happens for sure, we have seen it before many times) or keep your copy of 1.2.5 and continue playing on the normal server.

The map of the temp server will become the new darklands map of the old server once it is updated. So what you build will be taken over, but also not protected from griefers in the new environment.

I will take the 1.3 server live as soon as basic protection and user rights are working. Other stuff like the shop etc might take a bit longer since many plugins have to be upgraded, and I don’t want to wait for the last of them.

TL;DR: Your stuff is safe. If you upgrade to 1.3, you cannot access it until we upgrade too. But you can play on a temp server that will become the new darklands later. If you do not upgrade, nothing changes for you.

We have a new guest spawn house now behind the portal house. When guests spawn, they will see a sign that asks them if they want to see the best builds or find a lot. They choose two other signs accordingly, one will tell them about the /warp command and the other will tell them how to warp to the portal house.

So we got rid of the issue that people cannot find a portal house and a generally better guidance for new users. If you see that new users have issues with that, please report it so we can make improvements.

We have a new twitter account now, @uncoveryme, and I have setup a plugin that will automatically post new posts & comments to that twitter account. So you can simply follow the twitter account to know what is going on on the server!

The old twitter account will be discontinued, so please follow the new one instead.

I have revamped the backup & restart process. In the past, the server would shutdown, make all the backups and restart. This would take about 10 minutes (its about 2GB of data). The backup includes the plugins, the server worlds, the website, the logfiles and all backend code written by me that runs all kind of stuff.

From today on, the process is different. The server now stops saving the world changes while running, can thus back up the world file & plugins w/o shutting down. During that, the system backs up the world files. When finished (after 10 minutes) it will save the not saved changes to the world file, resumes saving in general and then backs up all the rest. Then, the server will shut down, backup the logfiles only and then immediately restart. This shortens the downtime of the server to less than a minute.

The advantage is that the server downtime is influencing our ranking on the server list. We are listed there as having an uptime between 99.3% and 98.1%. Every percent higher is a higher ranking chance in the list. Also, it allows people to relogin w/o waiting for 10 minutes after a shutdown. The restarts are still needed to reclaim memory for the server that some plugins will not set free and therefore slowly slowing the server down over time.

The disadvantage is that during 10 minutes, in case the server would crash right then, the world changes done in those 10 minutes would be lost. Which is a really neglectable issue, specially since the downtime happens during the time when there are the fewest people on the server.

Because we have so many new users recently and start running out of a decent selection of lots for new users, I have today enlarged the empire world by 176 lots, so 2 full rows of lots all around. There are now plenty of new lots in all biome types.

Since the bottom-left corner should still be A1, I had to shift all lots by 2 letters/digits, so if you were K11, you are now M13. You access rights etc should not have changed of course. To my knowledge, all website documentation such as the maps, borders, the settlers questionnaire etc have been changed. If you still find something that is not correct on the website, please tell me.

Thanks to our very own programming guru Azkedar we have a new shop data webpage! Check it out to find who sells what etc!

Please see the voting page for details.

Elders can now temp-ban users. If that happens, the elder HAS to send an email to me stating who was banned, why, when and for how long.
Masters and above are exempt from this. Do not use this for fun. Do not use it lightly. Repeated abuse will get the elder demoted.

I have fixed the voting probabilities. You now get a message which number you drew. The relationship between numbers and winnings are listed on the voting page.

I finally finished to make all lot application 100% automated!

This means that all lot applications will be granted the moment you press the submit button on the form. No more waiting, no more need for me to press a button!

I have updated the server now also to 1.2.5. There should be no change for anybody except some of the patches in 1.2.5 finally coming to live. If you have any issues, please let me know. It seems that the plugins work the same with both 1.2.4 and 1.2.5

You can now carry your XP between all survival worlds properly, including the end.

Sorry, it still does not work. The plugin managing the inventories is too buggy. I had to revert the changes and inventories to what the status was about 14 hours ago.

I have now fixed the 2D maps. The old software that I was using was not supporting the 1.2.4 file format. So what I did is finally write a program that assembles all images from the flat 3D map into one picture… a bit around the corner but the advantage is that we depend on one less software now, achieving the same.

The display of the Worldguard regions in the 3D maps is now also OFF by default. You can still switch it on in the layer menu of the map however.

While the 3D map updates instantly. the 2D map will be created from the 3D map only once a day.

i have upgraded the server! What does not work?

• The end. There is a bug for sharing XP between the normal world and the end. You could go and fight the dragon, but not take XP home. So I blocked the entrance for now.
• The 2D Maps. The renderer that I used for the 2D maps has not been updated for 1.2.4. That means that all maps are outdated, specially the darklands. The 3D map however now shows the lots too. I am searching for a better solution. If you know a map render software that does 1.2.4 maps in 2D and in one single file, not a google map, please let me know.
• Check if your inventory is there, including armor. If not, I am unfortunately not able to do anything about it, but I hope there are no issues for most of the people
• Minecart Mania
• Towny

I installed basically all plugins now except for Towny and Minecart Mania. Please tell me if you see anything else missing.

The server is down now for upgrades. If you want to see what is happening, please join the IRC chat.

Ok, so some hours ago a new recommended build for 1.2.4 has been released. This means that the plugin authors now have a stable version to work with. Now we only need them to release the updated plugins.

In order to upgrade to 1.2.4 we need to have a certain minimum of plugins upgraded to 1.2.4 that enable griefer protection, world transportation and inventory-mangement between worlds. If we are lucky, we will be able to upgrade this weekend! A lot of the important plugins have beta versions out already and I would assume that final version should be quick to release. We might go live with some reduced functionality in the beginning and add other plugins as they are released.

We have now, thanks to azkedar’s help,  a new hunger game module! This means that anybody can start a hunger game, anyone can join, and the whole process is automated as much as possible! Please see the hunger game page for details!

We have not ugraded yet because here is still no recommended build for bukkit. While we could upgrade to a non-recommended build please be aware that the current version of bukkit still sports a number of bugs that the bukkit team describes themselves as critical or blockers. So I am checking several times a day on the progress, and while there is work being done fixing those bugs, it is still not very fast. So please stand by and wait until a recommended build is out.

Here is what’s happening with the 1.2 status: I am still waiting for craftbukkit to release a recommended build. While the developers of Craftbukkit are working hard on it, there is no say when it will be done. I will make a post here when a build is out. Then, I will have to make sure all the vital plugins are updated and work fine with the new version. Then, I will start the upgrade process to get it done ASAP. Hard to say when that will be though.

I have now implemented enchantments in the shop and the deposit function. To make sure no valuable stuff gets lost, I ask you to test it as much as you can. Enchant some wooden stuff or cheap armor, also damaged stuff etc and please tell me if something goes wrong!