I have just implemented a new process to download larger amount of files from the same source. Before we used to simply loop through single download processes. This was not ideal in terms of performance and also I would get spammed with tons of errors if something went wrong.

We use these for the user icons and for the block icons in the shop manager. Now we start one process, pipe all the the urls into it and then process them in one go.

Advantages?

• It’s closer to best-practice coding standards
• it’s friendlier to the server where we pull the data from
• we know get 100% of our user icons from our own server once the user sees them, so it’s faster and more reliable. We used to pull them partly from external server
• I found some other bugs along the way and fixed those
• I get less but more meaningful errors from the system in case the external source of the data fails.

By the way, I won’t be online for the coming 3 days a lot, so if you need something, please submit a ticket or send an email.

I have just completed our own custom forum widget (the elements on the sidebar). The issue with those that are offered with the forum are that they either show new posts or new replies to posts, but not both. In the past, users posted something and then immediately replied to their own post in order to make it visible on the frontpage since I was showing only the replies widget in the past. Showing both was also not really ideal since posts and their replies would have been shown in 2 different sections then.

So I have created one that shows both posts and their replies together. I hope this makes everyone’s life a bit easier.

I have now enabled the command

/lot warp <lot>

for guests. The command cannot be used by settlers of course. It teleports guest exactly into the center of the chosen lot. The idea of course is to make it easier and less frustrating for new users to become settlers.

It seems the minecart system is causing crashes when mobs using it. So we now disabled the functionality when mobs are riding it. This means that a mob entering a minecart will not be able to use any of the woolblock functions.

Sorry about this, but it seems to be a major complicator to safely enable mobs for now. We will let you know if there is any change to that.

There is an issue somewhere around (World: kingdom X: 2443 Y: 12 Z: -425) with the minecart system. I tried to reset some of the area to the most recent backup but it did not help. So either the issue is older than that or there is a fundamental issue with the minecart plugin. Unfortunately it’s very late for me (1:15 am) so I do not have the energy to now unpack an older backup and test (it’s gigabytes large and takes a while) so I resorted to disable the plugin for now.

We will see if we can either revert the area or fix the plugin to not crash the server over the weekend. Please stand by until then.

Thanks to the blazing support from floored, nether spawners now will be reset to spawn blazes. If you have any spawners left now that actively spawn passive mobs, please let me know the world and it’s coordinates.

If someone has troubles getting their password, they can now change their website password in-game with the command:

/info setpass <password> <password>

This is a daily update on the status of the work done behind the scenes. You can see the complete status here.

• Issues Opened:
  • Issue No. 84, E_NOTICE: Undefined offset: 3 (  bug  )
• Issues Closed:
  • Issue No. 65, Standardized Tab & content CSS and HTML for the website (  code upgrade  )

Floored put again his great work into the code and wrote a new tap layout for the server website. You can see it’s first implementation on the Development status page. We will rollout this design step by step to all other webpages where we use tabs.

Please note that the mob spawners only revert to aggressive mobs once a passive mob tries to spawn from the spawner. If you had a spawner that never spawned any of the mobs you selected with a spawn egg, there is a chance that it will stay like that until you create the conditions that this passive mob would actually spawn, and then it will revert to aggressive mobs.

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• hylandquidclan (from ArchitectDonatorPlus to DesignerDonatorPlus)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

I improved the FAQ layout to a collapsible one. There is still work to be done on the layout to make it look a bit nicer, and there is a potential to group things by category which also still needs to be finalized, but in principle it’s done.

Also, there I added a new rule to make it even more explicit why I was not happy about the whole spawner eggs incident:

Do not circumvent rules or game limitations. There are several things we limit in the game, such as deposit boxes, amount of lots, headcount per lot etc. However, there will be always some bugs, oversights or new game features that will allow to circumvent those limits. Do not exploit those. Instead submit a bug report that there is a way to circumvent the limits.

My kingdom lot has snow on the ground, but it never snows! How can I make it snow?
The kingdom was created a long time ago. Since then, biome definitions have changed. The snow might be still around from the time when the old biome had snow on it. The new one might not have snow at all. Please go to the location in question and press F3. Check what the name of the biome is and then check if it’s on the list of Snowy Biomes.

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• kingofthepigs_ (from Citizen to Architect)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

All spawners that do not spawn regular mobs are now being set to a random mob from this list: Zombie, Spider, Skeleton, Cave spider

No more spawner alterations should be possible.

I will add the spawn eggs back to the shop sometime today.

• We will soon disable the spawners that spawn friendly mobs
• We will then add the eggs again to the shop.
• We will either make the spawners spawn a random mob or give out hostile mob eggs for people to make the spawners productive again
• Everyone will have to reduce the amount of mobs on their lot to fit the headcount
• nobody will have to return any other goods, pay money back or destroy something.
• Whoever feels that they want to leave the server, please go ahead. ASAP. I rather have a server with 3 people who like it than 300 who only sit around and complain without providing a solution or even want to have a constructive discussion. IF you are undecided, I am happy to build a command such as /ragequit you can use to ban yourself automatically. Just ask. Takes only 5 minutes. Much less than this whole discussion.

So there seem to have been some misunderstandings regarding the last post and what the actual issue is. You can put things together while reading all the comments on the previous post, but for ease of access and clarity, let me summarize things here.

So first of all, spawn eggs are not meant to be in Survival mode. Survival mode is about not having unlimited things of everything. While vanilla provides for some unlimited items when you work out how to do it (like using a mob spawner as a resource once you made sure that the mobs cannot attack you), I do not think that those are good in a multi-player scenario. While it’s very hard to get all the resources one wants in single player, multi player can provide for these things through separation of labor. The only reason we offered spawn eggs in the shop at a reasonably cheap price was that you could bread most of these animals afterwards anyhow. But you still had to breed them. They did not jump in unlimited numbers out of a magic box. This whole scenario is by the way also in gross violation of one of our biggest rules:  “No handouts”. To be honest I am a bit disappointed that nobody ever thought that this whole situation is not how we have been running the server for the last years and asked me if I was aware about this. Well, lessons learned, I will have to take more time with the next update and make sure I understand all the repercussions of the new features.

So following this, the option that you can essentially gather unlimited resources and those even in unlimited variations (think horse types, cat colors etc) is something that you can expect in creative mode, but not in survival. There is a clear conflict between easy accessible spawn eggs and having the spawner option at the same time.

So my conclusion is that one of them has to go. Either we prevent the spawners to be altered by spawn eggs, or the spawn eggs disappear. Since I do not have a ready-made solution to revert what has been done to the spawners, I removed the eggs from the shop. If we find a practicable solution for the spawners, the eggs will be back in the shop.

So, as I only found out today, you can convert any spawner to spawn any animal as long as you have the corresponding egg to do so. This is a standard 1.8 feature.

Now this is an issue on several levels:

• I am still selling eggs in the shop. How much sense does it make to sell a horse egg for 1000 Uncs when someone buys it and then sells live horses off his lot?
• The whole value of any animal where a spawn egg exists is practically zero because of this. I am a bit disappointed on this possibility because I felt that there are already too many things that are too easy to get.
• Changing this behavior is quite tricky. Everyone who used this so far will have an advantage beyond everyone who comes afterwards.

So I basically now removed all my spawn eggs from the shop. People will have to get looking again or work together to get the animals.

If anyone has an alternative solution, please let me know.

This is a daily update on the status of the work done behind the scenes. You can see the complete status here.

• Issues Opened:
  • Issue No. 77, E_NOTICE: Undefined variable: newstatus (  bug  )
  • Issue No. 76, Users with Vanity don’t get ++ when donating (  enhancement  )
  • Issue No. 75, Bonemeal can grow grass in other lots (  wontfix  )
• Issues Closed:
  • Issue No. 74, E_NOTICE: Array to string conversion (  bug  )
  • Issue No. 73, E_NOTICE: Undefined index: sleeping_owl (  bug  )
  • Issue No. 72, E_NOTICE: Undefined offset: 1 (  bug  )
  • Issue No. 66, Enable Deathlands world reset (  bug   Priority 1  )
  • Issue No. 19, Registered days is wrong for some users (  bug  )
  • Issue No. 15, Check_lot_owner gets called after lot manager process finished, causes error (  bug  )
  • Issue No. 11, Add automated process for donations including gifts (  enhancement  )

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• jonno (from MasterDonatorPlus to ElderDonatorPlus)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!