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.

I have just now updated our custom plugins to 1.16.2 and also tested all the other plugins that we are currently using and the good news is that they all seem to work with 1.16.2 – at least they start properly without errors.

Yay!

More news to come.

Since Mojang is working on a 1.16.2 release (release candidate 2 just dropped yesterday), I have paused any work into the update so we do not want to do the upgrade twice. I would assume that the final release should be out in the coming days (latest in a week) and then observe how the spigot updates come along and make further decisions on the upgrade then.

I hope we can do it before September.

The discord linking was unfortunately broken for a while. I have fixed that now and you should now be able to re-link in game according to the website instructions.

There are the first beta-versions for 1.16 of plugins out. Given that these plugins do not release a final version yet, I conclude that the 1.16 minecraft version is giving more headaches to developers than previous versions. Previously the jump to final versions happened faster.

Further, looking at the support chat for the incoming spigot version and the issues reported there, I do not think it’s a good idea to update to 1.16 yet. I’ll continue to monitor the progress and try to find the best time to update to 1.6 according to that.

I want to avoid that we either have a massively unstable situation or even worse, have people buildin in 1.16 for a while and then having to reset this progress later.

Thanks for your patience!

Dear all,

as 1.16.x is out now since a couple of days, I just wanted to let you where we are with the upgrade. The primary software that needs to be updated is Spigot. They have released 1.16.1 versions, but I have no idea how stable/reliable those are. They do not really release final products but rather daily updates. The best sign that their current 1.16.x version is stable is when they make it the default version in their updating mechanism. Until then, updating spigot will give you 1.15.2 unless you manually specify otherwise. This is not the case yet.

Next issue is that the way how a world is stored has changed. This means that our 2D and 3D maps will stop working until the people maintaining those software will release 1.16. compatible versions. There might be other plugins that break with 1.16.2, but I am not aware about any issues at the moment.

The change of world storage also means that we need to go through a lengthy upgrading process since all worlds need to be processed for the new format. I will try to do that on my PC at home since it’s faster, but that also means I will have to transfer a couple of Gigabytes of data back and forth, and the server will be down during that time.

So in summary: I do not think we are ready to upgrade just yet. I probably will wait until early next week and then check which plugins released 1.16.x versions and check that everything works before we dive into the actual upgrade. So please be patient and stick to 1.15.2 until we are ready.

Thanks!

I have upgraded several parts of our chat infrastructure today. There is one remaining bug outstanding, which is that when a user chats in the game, the world is not properly displayed to discord users. Right now there is still the placeholder %world% in the chat. I have posted a question with the devs to resolve this and we have to see how and how fast this gets resolved.

[Update] This issue is now resolved [/Update]

This was more of a maintenance update, no special new features are available now.

Last week Mojang released 2 pre-release versions of 1.16. I would think that we can expect the final version within the next 1-2 weeks and then us upgrading within another week or so… hold on tight, a massive nether update is coming!!!

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.

• Issues Opened:
  • Issue No. 335, City spawn area misaligned on 2D Map (bug;)

Mobs will now drop heads on a certain probability when killed. Those are actually player heads with custom textures that look like the respective animal. They can be traded and deposited.

I have just made the following changes to the infinite supply of items in my shop:

• I have removed all the special stone bricks (mossy etc) since those are craftable now
• I have removed podzol since that’s much more common now.
• I have removed the saplings since people should go out and get them from the darklands.
• I have added fox, donkey, llama, panda and ocelot eggs to the shop (FYI I did not add the polar bear since they can become aggressive without direct attacks)
• I have added the enchanted golden apple

Please note that the following will happen once we upgrade to 1.16 (date yet unknown):

• The nether will be reset (i.e. completely wiped and re-generated). This won’t affect anything except for items you have stored there.
• The aether will be deleted (i.e. completely wiped and NOT re-generated). This won’t affect anything except for items you have stored there.

Until we find a new world generator (or Mojang makes one) that works fine as a replacement for the aether, we will have to do without one.

Update: FYI, Mojang is releasing daily new pre-releases now:

There is supposed to be a final release before the 26th. We will have to see if the spigot release will take a long time, but I would think this will be quick since they were able to work with the snapshots already.

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.

• Issues Opened:
  • Issue No. 334, Warn Donators before their status expires. (feature request;)
  • Issue No. 333, umc_broadcast needs to be updated to be compatible with umc_text_format (code upgrade;)
  • Issue No. 332, Cleanup the item text out types in shop_common (code upgrade;)
• Issues Closed:
  • Issue No. 331, Erroneous enchantments displayed in the [broadcast] when items are purchased from the shop and obtained via the lottery (bug;)

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• zedsterthemyuu (from architectdonator to DesignerDonator)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

Thanks to a note from Kidcodiwise, I found a bug in the system that kept donators longer at their donator status than intended. I originally made it so that a user’s donator level is being checked and downgraded (if applicable) when the user logs in. This would however keep users forever a donator in case they just never come back after being upgraded.

I now included that check in the lot reset process that runs every night, so your lot will reset properly if your donator status has expired. Tonight a couple of lots will reset accordingly.