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1.13: Bubble columns

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In 1.13, we will be able to breath under water by placing Lava blocks & Soul sand which create bubble columns in 2+ block deep water. While this is nonsense in real life (steam is not breathable), it seems like a cool option to have. I am not sure what I will do with it to breathe, but it could be a great addition to the floating items so that we can easily transport things in water downward. Soul sand will push items upwards, I am not sure how this compares to normal water that has items floating.

Since the “air meter” of you character will not recover instantly when you get to the surface, previous ways of working underwater will have to be changed anyhow, so using the lava and soul sand blocks will be useful.

 

1.13: Items floating!

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As you know by now, 1.13 is around the corner with some quite drastic changes to the way a lot of base game mechanics are working. Specifically, Items will float: This means that you can transport items vertically upwards in a water column. Interestingly, stuff dropped into 1-block high water with air below still falls through. It seems that a transport is best done with a dropper at the base of the water.

Anyone has a better way to insert items into a water column? Will you change your mob farms?

Today’s development updates

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This is a daily update on the status of the work done behind the scenes.
Our webserver is completely open source, hosted on GitHub. You can help improve the server by fixing issues here.

Today’s development updates

Posted on by

This is a daily update on the status of the work done behind the scenes.
Our webserver is completely open source, hosted on GitHub. You can help improve the server by fixing issues here.

Bug reporting / Bug bounty

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I have just discovered that there are several things broken on the server and nobody told me about it. I doubt that nobody has realized those so far, so I have to assume that the people who saw the issue either assumed I know about them or made the decisions not to tell me for one or the other reason.

I would like to put a message out there regarding those bugs:

PLEASE TELL ME WHEN SOMETHING BREAKS!

Please do not think that I am busy and should not be bothered! I can manage my time myself. If you tell me about a bug, I will make my own decision when to fix it.

In order to encourage bug reporting, I want to introduce a bug bounty program. Essentially I will put all bugs that are known into the GitHub issues page and if someone reports something that is not in there yet, I will give an award. There might be several tiers, depending on the severeness of the bug.

Please tell me what you think can be good rewards for bug reporting that encourage people to report stuff but are not so generous that they break the in-game economy.

Lot regeneration decision

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So I just now ventured into a snapshot of the 1.13 version and generated a world with the same seed as our Empire. The world looks pretty much identical to ours. I think the main differences are only the ones which are already introduced before 1.13. There are however some upcoming changes that are planned in 1.13 which are not active in the snapshots yet, such as Magma blocks in underwater ravines and coral reefs in ocean biomes.

So since the 1.13 is generally quite similar but introduces some changes, I made the decision to wait with the regeneration of the empty empire lots until the 1.13 release so that we get those changes as well, specially because the rest of the world will most likely fit in 100%.

If the edges between occupied lots (which will stay the same) and empty lots (which I will then re-generate with 1.13 version) will be seamless, I will consider to do the same for the kingdom, possibly also Aether.

We can consider regenerating the darklands as well, specially to have the corals more accessible, but I am not 100% decided on that one yet. I will first do the general server upgrade, then the empty lot reset and then we can decide if it’s worth it to regenerate the darklands as well with some time to prepare for it to salvage existing structures such as rails etc.

Hope that is fine with everyone.

Version upgrade preparations

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Dear all,

as you have seen in one of my previous posts, there were worries about the next version “breaking everything”. The issue was that a change to the way blocks are named (which has been implemented already a long time ago) would be enforced and the old naming scheme removed from the code. The worry was that a lot of plugins might break then because they were not updated at the time.

It turns out now that the spigot team (who make the adaption of the vanilla minecraft server that we use) have implemented already a mitigation to the changes that were done in minecraft to keep old plugins working. While I did not test anything yet, I think we can stay reasonably calm and looking forward for the new version to not have too many issues.

Further, as you might have read on Mojang’s news, they delayed the next update to roll it together with the one coming after that. The new update will then include new water mobs and more. So there is something to look forward to! Unfortunately, as usual, there is no confirmed release date for the next version, I am assuming something like April/May or similar. Let’s see.

However, there is the question when we will change the empty lots in the empire (and possibly also in the Kingdom). To remind you what this is about: Normally, we only re-generate the Empire lots when there are REALLY significant biome/block changes. The kingdom was on top of that never meant to be re-generated since it’s purely for building, mining and landscape there is secondary. However in the last updates that introduced Andesite, Diorite etc, the underground environment changed, but the landscape did not change too much – if at all. There is therefore now the opportunity to re-generate the empty lots in those worlds so that the underground generated according to the current minecraft version, without creating nasty breaks in the surface, landscape and biomes above ground. We could also give the opportunity to lot owners to reset their lots as a one-off feature.

The choice there is to do that now, once, or to wait for the next version to be released. We can then check if the new version generates a completely different landscape, in which case we have different decisions to make.

So what is your opinion? In general, we can always wait for the next version – and then therefore never change anything. On the other hand, we want to avoid excessive changes and workload if it’s not needed or wanted.

Elder voting process changed!

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Ok, so I changed the Elder voting process now. There won’t be a possibility to propose a Master for upgrade anymore if there is another Master already in the queue. As for the current ones in the queue, it seems that there are some vetoes coming in, so we might not need to do anything about them after all. Should there be more than one candidate to promote, I will take the first submitted one only and cancel the others. They will have to be re-submitted then.

Thanks everyone who contributed to the discussion!