I have calculated that the server has a severe crash about every half a year. It normally results in people losing a lot of inventory or parts of the map being reset. If we have a crash about every six month, the next one is due around May. In order to prevent these crashes to come as a surprise, I will schedule the next crash for the coming weekend and thus prevent one in May.

So we will delete around 50% of all inventories, reset some random lots and wipe about 30% of the Unc accounts on the server come this weekend. The % chance of something happening to you will increase by the level of annoyance you showed during the last 30% of chat multiplied with the time you have spent on the server.

In order to give a better service to the users, you can already now ask for refunds, which I will of course refuse. I am sure that this will reduce the annoyance and shock for the users in case their stuff is gone, increase reliability and general satisfaction with the server.

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• chrispypancake (from DesignerDonatorPlus to MasterDonatorPlus)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

Minecart Mania started to spew hundreds of pages of error messages into the logfile on any interaction on the server. I disabled it now, I have to find out how to fix this and will enable it again then.

I have added a desert lot that was designed by TBrewda to the lot manager to be available for flatlands owners.
Thanks to tbrewda for the proposal and the design of the lot!

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• tarajlh (from CitizenDonatorPlus to ArchitectDonatorPlus)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• khyddinamaani (from CitizenDonatorPlus to ArchitectDonatorPlus)
• Akium (from ArchitectDonatorPlus to DesignerDonatorPlus)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

I have imported all the old courier emails now into the new system. If you have sent an email or read an incoming one, I put it into your trashcan, otherwise it would flood the inbox when opening it.

Please check if there are messages missing. I am not sure I got the most recent backup since the system went down.

I am still having issues re-enabling the courier system. It causes errors and I will have to track down the source of the issue by setting up a parallel server.

I am half tempted to write a custom messaging system, that one would then work via website and commands and give up the enderman delivery and reading it on maps. In case I go that far, I can still spawn a creeper next to people who send emails…

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• dueldragonoid (from CitizenDonatorPlus to ArchitectDonatorPlus)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

I created a new channel in the chat which is a Notifications channel for less important announcements. This will include the Voting Lottery announcements and also newly introduced announcements for new forum posts and replies. The new channel has the same chat color as the “off-topic” channel, yellow.New blog posts will be announced now in the Announcement channel by default.

As the title says… nothing spectacular but I thought I tell you guys.

I tried around how to best represent if a user is an active one or not and came to the solution to display a user’s average minute since he joined the server on the user list. Since we only record the online time since November 2013, any user who joined before that is only measured since that time of course. If you have been absent for the last week, this time is also counted so absence decreases your online time.

I found it quite interesting to see how active some of the new users are, and I think this number should also play a role in the promotions decisions.

I have just finished copying the larges builds in the city to the kingdom. The rest will be copied in the coming days, but I do not worry to find spots for them.
You can find now Rome, the underwater city, the castle, Egypt and the major portion of the spawn in the kingdom.

The generation of 1280 new lots in the kingdom is now finished. We have 320 new main lots and tons of space to do new stuff now. Since I still need some time to find good locations for the kingdom builds, please understand that I cannot give out any new lots in the kingdom for now. Once I identified the lots I need to take, the new lot function will be available again. For now, all maintenance functions of the lot manager for existing lots has been re-enabled.

You can see the expanded kingdom on the 2D and 3D map. The only concern is that the file for the 2D map is now more than 6MB large. I will see if there is anything to improve that. I am not sure if splitting the map into smaller files will make a big difference. I would speed up loading of parts, but in the end you still have to download 6MB.

This was a major headache by the way. While I did map enlargements in the past, I never enlarged a kingdom world with street lots before. I now have a fully functionint automated code for that, so that’s good. Once we expand the draftlands accordingly, this will come in handy.

First of all, I have made the first big step in the kingdom map expansion: I have more than doubled the lots. We have now instead of 16×16 24×24 lots. The old lots have been renamed, user access and flags have been transferred. If you find any error in the lots, please let me know ASAP.

Right now, the new lots are being shown on the 2D map, but the 2D image will not properly align with them.

Then current step is to expand the current kingdom to these dimensions. This happens just now with the current mapper (since it’s the current minecraft version). We need to do this since the lot reset only works if there is actually content in the target location. Once that is finished, I will reset the new lots to the mint-condition 1.3.1 lots and the breaks in the map between the new world structure and old structure will disappear.

Until everything is finished, the kingdom lots will not be available in the lot manager.

Once the reset is done, I will occupy the lots that are required for the city move and then release the remaining for purchase in the lot manager.

In unrelated news, the IRC service is down. The IRC server we are using had some issues and made the IRC client crash and took the minecraft server down with it… So I disabled that now until the IRC server is back to normal.

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• adonia8291 (from Citizen to Architect)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

I have enabled hats for all DonatorPlus users now. Hold a block and type /hat. It will put the block on your head!

I have created a code that displays the complete in-game help on the website. Please see the list of commands here.

With Azkedar’s help, the copying of a chunks in the world to a different location is now finally fixed! This means that we can (finally) copy flatlands lots over to other locations. The functions in the lot manager have now been re-enabled.

Also, as some of you might remember, when we created the kingdom, we discussed how we can make finished kingdom builds available in creative mode so people can see it.The solution proposed at the time was to create a new world with creative mode with a copy of the kingdom builds where users can fly around and look at stuff. The issue there was that it would be essentially the same as the city. We would have 2 worlds for exactly the same purpose. Why not just one? So the plan was to make a new world for the finished kingdom builds and copy the city over there as well, the “new city”.

So far, we always copied finished stuff to the city, but Rome was already a challenge since the copying was done in-game with WorldEdit, block by block. Copying even larger builds like the whole city somewhere else was impossible. Now with the working chunk copy tool, we can copy huge areas to new locations in the blink of an eye. This gives us the following possibility:

We can have a new creative world with all finished kingdom builds and all city builds in one world! The goal is to have a carbon copy of the kingdom and find free lots and locations to copy city builds into. The recently created draftlands is the perfect location for that.

So what will happen next?

The new city and the kingdom have to stay in sync. We cannot put something in the new city that might have to be overwritten later because someone built something amazing in the kingdom that we want to preserve. So for every place that we occupy in the new city, we also have to occupy in the kingdom.

First of all, I found a location for Rome on one of my kingdom lots and copied it to there. I will now find more places (free lots that I will occupy or those that I own already) for the remainder of the city builds in the kingdom and move them over, too. Then, I will copy them 1:1 to the draftlands so people can fly around there and see them. Once the city spawn and everything is in a good location, I will rename the draftlands to “city”, move all the spawn points, portals etc there and remove the old city world.

How will this affect the draftlands World-edit based building? Not at all. People will still be able to test their builds there – as long as they are not finished. Once a build is declared finished, I will take over the respective draftlands (=new city) and kingdom lots and thus disable further changes.

[Update]In that process, it is likely that I will expand the kingdom to accomodate all the city builds in an appropriate environment[/UPDATE]