After some difficulties I managed to re-install the 3D map. Please see the menu for the link. The maps are still rendered in a different mode than I was used to have, I will see if I can change that.

Also, the city is in creative mode now and shares inventory with the flatlands. I hope that nobody lost their inventory because of that. If that is the case, I unfortunately cannot do a lot. The goal of this is to make the city world accessible as creative mode to elders and to let them help me build the new city.

Also, there should be no more problem with EXP and enchantments when going from survival to creative and back.

Virtualshop is now enabled. Please note that you cannot use the shop in the flatlands!

I have now enabled the flatlands – a flat land (duh!) where you can use creative mode! This is however only available to people with a free lot! So if you are settler, you have to choose between EITHER an empire lot OR a flatlands lot. The number of maximum lots is not increased for anyone!

In order to get a flatlands lot, please look at this map here, choose a lot and then go the the “Become a settler” page to choose a lot!

Have fun!

I upgraded the server now. What works already and what does not?

Working:

• You should be able to login if you are whitelisted and get your username / userlevel
• you should be able to go to your homes etc.
• /spawn should bring you to the new (still small) city. There are portals to bring you to all the lots
• You should be able to build on the lots you own in “world” & “skylands”.
• You should be able to abandon your lot in “world”
• If you have free lots, you should be able to reserve a lot in “Empire”. The normal “get building rights” form should allow this.
• Voting – gives you one cake a 100uncs again
• skylands application works again
• nether is working too – w/o towny. Finally it is not possible to use towny there since it would create issues with reaching places if you cannot build. So it is just as it was before.
• Server is now set to difficulty level 3 instead of 1
• experience drops are ON. We will have to see if that causes massive lag. ATTENTION: If you teleport to another world, your experience shows as zero. This is however only what is shown. if you relogin, you see all of your XP again.
• Kingdom plots are fine & working – on a old version of towny though. The upgrade to a newer version seems to fail. I will have to talk with the devs to see what it wrong so we can upgrade.

NOT Working:

• Mine carts are not working yet properly.
• The directions North ,South etc are still the old ones on the maps. Your minimaps might show differently.
• several plugins like the shop etc are not installed yet.
• the creative map is not there yet
• the kingdom cannot be expanded yet. I found a tool that allows me to have smooth map transitions, but it does not work onmy server for some reason. working on a fix there, too.

If you have any other bugs, please post them into the comments here.

I have found now decent seeds for the city, empire and also the kingdom. There is so far no recommended build for bukkit, but I have seen servers running on the dev builds and so far what I have seen everything seems to be working nicely. I will TRY to get the server up and running with the minimal (=security) plugins working.

I will try to upgrade the server tomorrow (10 hours or so after you read this). This will require that I actually shut down the temp server, the 1.8 server and try to build a new 1.0 main server with all plugins, maps, backends, datafiles etc. During this time, you are welcome to be on the server and help me test it as far as possible. There will be frequent restarts and some downtime here and there. As a minimum you can help me building a temp spawn area in the “city” map. We can also create a collaborative document that lists everything that has to be updated on the website.

Once 1.0 is running and people can use their “world” lots, I will fix the page to abandon lots and enable the lot reservation for the empire.

After trying a few seeds I now also found and created a city map. I am not sure exactly where we place what, but the balance of water/land made me decide for this one. Please take a look here.

Ok, I am working since some 2-3 hours on the update now and here is the fist visible progress: The Empire, the new map where everyone can get their lots is not officially generated. You cannot reserve lots yet. Please see the map here.

As mentioned below, we will move to a new map soon, called the “Empire” that will replace the “world” map. You only have a limited amount of lots that you can reserve on the world & empire maps. If you used up all your lots on the “world” map, you need to abandon those first in order to reserve a lot on the “Empire” map. This will be only useful once you can actually reserve a lot on the “Empire” map. If you abandon a lot, your user status will obviously NOT change.

So I wrote a code now that enables you to abandon lots in the “world” map if you want to do so already.Please also note that this will DELETE the lot from the map and will not be available for anyone after that anymore.

Also: There are no “Cancel”, “Undo” or “OMG I fucked up and cannot access my stuff anymore, PLS PLS PLS Uncovery help me” buttons – or acceptable help requests.

Go to abandon your lots!

Ok, as you might have heard (cough) – Minecraft 1.0 is finally finished – no more beta. So what does that mean for Uncovery Minecraft?

• Well first of all we have to wait until the Bukkit software releases a stable build. Since there were no code changes in the last 15 days, but some in the last hours, we might not have to wait too long for that.
• Then we have to wait until the most important plugins are updated, too. This includes WorldEdit, WorldGuard, Whitelist, Towny, XCraftGate etc etc. If there are some crucial plugins which are abandoned or take too long, I will look for alternatives. Currently, all the plugins needed seem to be quite active however.
• Once the stuff is ready, I will create the following new maps:
• (immediately) A new city map where we will have different biomes for different parts of the city such as a desert for the egyptian map. This map will be only to copy-paste stuff there from contests and the best builds overall. We will have to build spawn buildings/towns for the different levels.
• (immediately) A new lot map called “The Empire” where all new lots are given out on. If people have available lots to register on the “world”, they can get one there. There will be no more central city there, and no more railway system.
• (later) A creative map. Everyone will be able to get a creative lot with separate inventories if they give up one lot on the empire/world map. If you are settler, and have only one lot free, you have to choose between creative and survival. The overall sum of lots between the world/empire & creative worlds will not increase per user.
• This is what will happen with the existing worlds:
• The “world” map will be phased out. No more new lots will be given out. It will be accessible until all lots are deserted, and people can continue building there. The city will be copied over to the new “city” world.
• The Skylands will be copied over as-is. No changes
• The nether will be re-created. Most probably I will be enabling towny there.
• The Kingdom map will be copied over as-is. I will run a tool that creates smooth borders for the expansion with the new biomes. so that it looks good.
• Other stuff to do:
• Finally fix the contest entry system and rank the tree house entries
• Some smaller fixes

As you can imagine, this will all take some time to finish. I just came back from another business trip, and I have one more this week, and then another one in December. So please be patient with questions & requests. The top priority will be to get the “empire” and old worlds up and running with sufficient security ASAP. All in all I hope that the most important stuff can be done until next weekend.

The temp server is now running 1.9Pre5!

see here: https://twitter.com/#!/uncoverynet/status/119419138383937536

If anyone of you can tell me why, please do!

Please vote this one here up in reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/kvaxp/19_pre2_server_crashes_during_world_creation_just/

You can now set 4 homes, no matter which world. You use

/sethome whatever

to set a home called ‘whatever’. You can set them in any world.

Then /home whatever to get there.

Or /delhome whatever to remove the home again.

I have been working on the upgrade today for some hours and debugged a pile of stuff together with a plugin author. Basically everything works. The most critical thing seems to be the towny plugin. Also there are some differences how home/spawn works.

I will have to make a final test tomorrow and see where the last issues with the towny plugin are. It seems that some of the plots have been removed. Anyhow, I am going to bed now and see if I can sort this out tomorrow and then upgrade finally.

I am working again on the upgrade process. While the most needed plugins now work fine w/o showing any errors in the console, there are still issues with the plugins and how they work themselves.

I first have to find out if all the commands are still working and then re-create the permissions for them. I ran into some issues already trying to get the /spawn command to work. So please be patient…

While some plugins released a 1.8.1 version, some of the most important are not finalized yet. their nightly builds also do not offer the stability I need to run a 1.8.1 server. 1.9 still crashes on me on world creation and therefore we stick with the 1.7.3 & 1.8.1 temp server setup for now. We will see if this improves over the weekend. I can see that many plugins are being worked on, so hopefully this does not take too long.

https://twitter.com/#!/uncoverynet/status/116894809830064129

Will try out the single player until there is a working server version. Temp server will stay @1.8.1 until I have time to upgrade it.

I will be taking down the temp map and making the first protection tests with worldguard and the original world map. All changes on the 1.8 server from now on will be reset once I know everything works.

If you want to help: go to the 25565 server and fool around. Portals and other worlds should not work. The normal world however should. Plugins are not installed however except worldguard lot protection. Tell me if something breaks.

I have now, after working on that repeatedly since 2 month, managed to manually compile the latest source of the 2D mapping software on the linux server. This means we can now keep up with new blocks. For example, grass does not render as black spots on the maps anymore but rather green as they are supposed to. The 1.8 blocks should be available also some time from now

There is also, finally a recommended build of Bukkit available. This means that the plugin authors have something stable to work with. Some of the more important plugins have been worked on already over the last couple of days, so I expect a fairly soon update here to the new bukkit version. I will upgrade the server as soon as the most important plugins are released officially. Those include Worldguard, Worldedit, Towny, PermissionsEX, XCraftgate and iConomy and Virtualshop. Not all of those have to be released to move the old map over so I will make sure that the map is available on 1.8 as soon as possible, even if the shop for example is not available yet.