I have now checked all the users in the system to find those that have incorrect ranks and found the following:

1. Users who had wrong levels did not have double levels by default as it seems. The double levels came since they reported to me that they have the wrong level and I then promoted them, which wrongly left the old level around and gave them the new level on top of that – which it should not. I need to find out why that is. This issue could be fixed by migrating to another permissions plugin.
2. There were a number of users (6 or so) which had the wrong level and I manually now set the right level and made sure they don’t have several. The big question now is if the problem reoccurs or not.

If we are lucky, then this was a one-off and simply was not properly fixed (see point 1). I have a hunch however that this will happen again. Please let me know if you see yourself not having the correct userlevel so I can investigate further on this.

Since we had issues with the userlevels since some time now, I had suspended the upgrades/downgrades for donator status (and other things like lot resets etc) for some time now (somewhere in November). Since I have now verified that at least the donator status is fixed, I have checked all active users and corrected their respective status. This has resulted in donator status fixes in 3 categories:

• People who donated recently but did not get the update immediately since the upgrade was suspended. Those have been made Donator now. Affected people are:
  • misterhelpfull
  • seasnailsplatoon
• People whose Donator status has expired in the meantime but kept their status. Those have lost their status. Affected people are:
  • linklux
  • emberstorms
  • shadowagentstorm
  • puttmutt
• People who donated in short succession in the past so that there was an overlap of the donations, but the system wrongly counted each donation from it’s respective start instead of stacking them. Those people have been made donator now. Affected people are:
  • greysquare
  • kidcodiwise
  • spaceidiot

I’m still having the issue that some few people have multiple user levels and are being assigned those automatically by the system. I hope I’ll find out why this happens soon so I can fix this.

As some of you might have experienced, we currently have a bug in the userlevel system. Some users have the wrong userlevel displayed in-game despite that they have the correct access rights. This is an issue with them having 2 userlevels at the same time, but since only one can be displayed (in the color of their username), it shows the lower one.

While I am able to fix this by removing one of the levels, the issue comes back because the system re-applies the double userlevel.

So I am right now working on debugging the whole userlevel system to find out where this happens. Since the userlevels are touched in various places (Donations, citizenship etc), I am doing this now step by step to make sure all of these are working properly.

As a first step, I have improved the donation level transparency. If you have ever had donation status, you will find now additional information on your user page such as this:

In this case, I discovered that, like shown above, donations given while an older donation was still active were not added to the end of the expiry of the previous donation but rather acted as if there was no donation previously. This has been fixed now and I will fix the status of the affected users as a next step.

Please note that you will see this ONLY for yourself, not for user users.

I will be going through more of these reports to fix the issues that we have in the hope that we will get to the bottom of the issue.

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• poke0523 (from masterdonator to ElderDonator)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

I have made some significant server updates today. I changed the protocol that is used between the website and the server, impacting most of the commands that we are executing. In this process I could eliminate an error with crossbows in the inventory breaking commands.

There will be more updates in the coming days where I will try to solve a couple of outstanding issues. Let me know if there are any broken items that you haven’t told me about in the recent weeks and I will do my best to fix them.

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• zedsterthemyuu (from designerdonator to MasterDonator)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

Ok so all the lots except emp_q18 have been restored and should have the right owners again. Regarding emp_q18, which should belong to arc_heart, I have contacted the user who claimed it in the meantime to resolve the matter.

Dear all,

First of all, Happy New Year and all the best for 2021!

unfortunately we had a software glitch on the 16th of December and some userlevels were reset. I only realized several days later that this has also caused some lots to be reset (I assumed earlier that I had disabled lot resets in time).

Further, I was not able to deal with the issue for the following days since I was very busy with family over the holidays. I have now found the list of the reset lots and will restore them ASAP. Since this is a long list, I will have to write a script to do this – after I re-upload the gigabytes of backup data to the server to actually restore the lots.

I will check that none of the lots were given to someone else in the meantime, in which case we will have to revert that as well.

Here is the list of affected users/lots. I will let you know once this is done so that you can check if everything is OK.

Hey all, Floored1585 and myself took a close look at the minecart plugin that he made for our server and updated a lot of the code. Floored managed to make black wool launches much faster. The plugin is now also much more future proof.

Enjoy!

There are 2 updates:

1. In case you have not seen it yet, the 3D Map is working again
2. I have re-written the plugin that made sure people do not get on top of the nether roof. In the old version, people were pushed back to the spawn area of the nether. This allowed users to cheaply return to the center of the nether when they were far out. Now, the system tries to find a safe place on the same spot starting around height 65 and teleports the player there.

So here are some update on stuff I have been working on:

1. Nether Portals work again! You should be able as before now to warp to the darklands through portals built in the nether. Yay!
2. The Aether: I have now removed all lot occupancy from the aether and removed the world. I have however also started to test alternative world generators. I could find only one so far which creates relatively boring floaty islands, on top of that all with “End” biome so only endermen spawn. This is not really what I envisioned so I am looking for alternatives. There are a couple of them out there, mostly still under development. I will let you know once I find something suitable. If we open this world again, I want it to be something really special.

Upgraded just now. Unfortunately, this broke dynmap (our 3D map). I will update Dynmap as soon as they release an update, until then we will have to work without the 3D map.

So as I reported in the past, I was worried that the aether world is corrupted beyond repair. When I tried to update it with Spigot (the server software we used to run) to 1.16.2, this was confirmed. When I then switched to Paper (another more advanced version of Spigot), it suddenly worked. Now that we have upgraded however, it shows that this was not true. Paper simply ignored some of the errors and other programs (such as the 2D map) still show them.

So I came to the conclusion hat it’s easiest to scrap the aether as announced and look for a replacement as soon as possible.

So, sorry for back-and-forth. I will remove the world in the coming days and then we will see how we can create something new that isn’t broken.

Here’s the ToDo list of what’s still left to do over the coming days:

• Fix the minecraft assets so that they support the new blocks in the website shop. Done, except for some images that are also missing from the wiki. Change request to the wiki is submitted, Also done.
• Fix the discord server plugin from throwing errors. Seems to have fixed itself?
• We migrated to paper (from spigot) so we need a new mechanism to download the latest versions automatically.
• I need to merge the EssentialsX config file with the default config of the latest version. Done!
• Something on the website is very slow, need to investigate where this comes from. Maybe the playerlist in the sidebar. Seems to have fixed itself?
• Need to fix the 2D map for the empire and city Done!
• Fix the mouse-over of unenchanted items when depositing/withdrawing done!
• Fix nether-portals to teleport from the nether to the darklands: This is a confirmed bug so we need to wait until this is fixed. Otherwise I could make a custom warp command that would act like a portal where you would pay for warping from the nether to the darklands at the right location. This should be a last resort however. There is a chance that this might not be fixed in the near future, so let me know in the comments how urgent this issue is.
• Migrate our permissions plugin from PermissionsEX to LuckPerms.
• Fix “Not a String” error on the console. Checked with the paper support chat, this seems to be hard to find out where it comes from. So far no reproducible event found. Seems to come from invalid chunks
• There seems to be an issue with withdrawing items from the inventory, there is a console error “[RemoveItem] Invalid Inventory Slot!”
• Minecarts do not work in the Flatlands. Done!
• /who where stopped working Fixed!

I have upgraded the server and on the surface everything is fine. Please try and login and let me know if anything is broken.

There is still a list of things I have to do in the background which should not impact gameplay.

I have now shut down the server and will transfer / upgrade / send back the main worlds (empire/flatlands/kingdon). Once that is done, I will try to restart the server with 1.16.

ETA in about 4 hours if nothing else comes in-between.

I have upgraded the darklands now (took more than 8 hours on my PC at home….) and now I am doing the next “side-worlds”: Aether (yes! I might be able to fix it after all) draftlands, skyblock & the End

So those are now disabled. Feel free to use the server remaining worlds.

Uploading will take a couple of hours, the another couple of hours upgrading and then copying back. I assume to finish it this afternoon (in 6-8 hours ca.).

Stay tuned!

I disconnected the darklands now in order to upgrade it. The transfer to my home PC will take 5-7 hours, then we see how long it will take to upgrade it to 1.16 – and then copy it back to the server, which I think will be a bit faster.

So the darklands won’t be accessible anymore on 1.15. Once it’s updated, I will try to get the server under 1.16 up and running ASAP.

So please stay tuned.

[Update] Transfer finished, upgrading darklands now. Took 25 minutes only to count the chunks (17GB). I hope the upgrade will be done by tomorrow … [/Update]

I have now done one full round of testing and everything seems to work fine. So the next steps are:

• I am now upgrading all the “mint” worlds that we use to reset lots. This will take most of today.
• I will then stop the server (watch for a blog post) and backup all worlds to my PC at home nad upgrade them as well to 1.16.2. Copying all worlds (including the huge darklands) to my PC and then upgrading it there and copying it back is faster then doing it on the server directly.
• Along with this process, I will do a check that all our plugins are up to the latest version.
• Then I will copy all the worlds back to the server and we will try to launch the server with 1.16.2

One option that we have is to instead of shutting the server down for a longer time (likely a whole day or more) is to upgrade world-by-world. This would mean that the server is online most of the time but only with the worlds that are already upgraded. I would start with the server having city, empire and nether online, the rest would then come in as they are upgraded. I prefer this solution as it would take some of the pressure away to get everything done as soon as possible. Specially the huge darklands would take a long time and if we don’t have to wait for this it would be better for everyone.

If the server is online without some worlds it would mean that users who logged off in those worlds would revert to the city spawn. Portals and warps to those worlds would simply fail. There should be no risk of stuff getting lost.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments.

As mentioned earlier, 1.16.2 requires all the save files for worlds to be updated. Given that we have some quite big worlds, this takes a lot of time. It also can fail when small parts of the map become corrupted. Such corruption is the reason we are abandoning the aether.

I am currently doing the following:

• I am taking a recent backups and make an attempt to upgrade it on my PC at home to 1.16.2 and see where errors pop up. The upgrade console tells me which chunks have unrecoverable errors in them. Normally I have to do this several times since something might not work on the first round but strangely later works fine. This normally takes about a full day.
• I then go through the logfile and identify where the issue chunks are on the map and if the lot at that location is occupied or not. If it’s empty, I reset the lot on the server and hope this resolves it. I need then to go back to the step above and re-do the whole exercise. If the lot is occupied, I need to check what I can do. So far I did not have this case luckily.
• If the step above does not resolve the issue, I will need to go back and also re-generate the “mint” world that we use to reset lots and use that to fix this.

So far, I have gone through the process once a couple of days ago. I am right now going through it again. I hope that the problems will all be resolved ASAP. Once this is done we can basically update the server to 1.16.2 since all the plugins seem to be working fine.