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Happy birthday to all of us!

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Dear all,

it’s my great pleasure to announce that by today, we are two years up and running, with very few exceptions! Sure, we had some smaller roll-backs, our share of jerks and annoyances of all shape and form, but history proves us right:

Over the 2 years, we managed NOT to build an ant hill of griefers and whiners, but rather we managed together to build a sustainable community that re-news and re-invents itself to grow and prosper. Thanks to the help of all users who actively contribute in builds, discussions, ideas, we tried many different plugins, worlds, rules, contests and so much more and kept what was successful and parted (sometimes with some pain) from what was not.

A huge thanks to all of you who kept my work on the server enjoyable, thanks to the masters and elders in their support getting rid of the jerks and alerting me of bugs and other issues. Also thanks of course to our resident coder Azkedar who made my life so much easier and without whose contribution I would have been forced to limit the server size.

To celebrate, we will continue with this progress and improve the server even further. For starters we already had the contest. To continue, we will introduce a new user level that shall bridge between Architect and Master: The “Designer” Level. The Designer level will pretty much fall in all aspects between those aforementioned levels, details still to come on the website.

Further, for celebration we will promote one user every day of the month to the respective next level, many of those to the new designer level. We will start with the lowest rank in no particular order and end on the top. I might not have time every day at the same time for the promotions since I am very busy in November, but I will catch up for sure!

So the promotion for today is Vixengold to the level of Architect! Congratz!

[UPDATE] FYI: If you think the list of people to be promoted is random, you are mistaken. The list was made more than a month ago and coordinated and voted on by all elders. [/UPDATE]

Donations disabled! Buy Donator status instead!

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Donations are (somehow) re-enabled. Somehow? Well here is the thing:

Paypal never offered donations for Asia-Pacific. I live in Hong Kong but Idid not know that. I simply installed a wordpress-widget that created a donation button and hooked it up to my paypal account. Paypal however does not know the regulations about donation legislation (taxes, declarations etc) for all countries in Asia (I guess for none). So they found out that some people have donation buttons and disabled them to save them from any legal claims – without telling me about it. So people who wanted to donate simply got an error message. After calling them 3 times where they told me that they are about to fix the issue I finally found out what the problem actually was. So donations are not possible anymore.

But guess what: You can still buy stuff. So instead of you donating money after which I give you donator status, you can now BUY the donator status. The difference is that there is no more an empty field in which you can enter any amount you like, but instead there is a drop down menu to choose from. I tried to make a reasonable selection of amounts to choose from.

All the same if you ask me. Happy to sell you some donator status :).

Contest Entry submission, deadline extended!

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Since we have the new contest entry system now online, where people build in a pre-defined lot, we have much more entries that were never finished. I have now created a new system where people can “submit” their entry and therefore declare it finished. Otherwise we will have to judge abstract art etc for people who did not build much more than a frame around their contest lot.

So you are required to actually put a name and a description of your contest entry on the website once you are certain that your contest entry is worth being judged. If you did not have time to finish (or even start it), just simply do not do anything.

So to submit the entry for the 2 year anniversary contest, please go to the contest manager website and enter a title and description for your contest entry, then press “submit”. Otherwise people cannot vote on it.

I extended the deadline because of this and the 1.4 release to November 4th!

1.4.2 is out! Temp server is running!

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Ok, so 1.4.2 is out. Here again what happens:

  • We have now a temp server with the 1.4.2 version running.
    • That temp server is reachable if you enter uncovery.me:25564 into your minecraft client
    • This normal world map of this temp server will become the new darklands in the future. So treat it nicely!
    • Everything that you build on this server will be transferred once we upgrade the main server. That includes normal chests and builds. That does NOT include your user inventory and enderchest inventories. Those will be LOST on upgrade.
    • There is no protection against griefing on the server except for the whitelist. Also, the whitelist there is currently not updated. Newly whitelisted users cannot join it. I will enable that later.
    • We know from experience that people will grief. It is still bannable. But you better hide your stuff since it is hard to detect.
    • If you are playing on the 1.4.2 and go voting, the voting rewards will pop out in the 1.3.2 server. You will be able to access them once we are upgrading or if you downgrade your client to play there.
  • We still keep the normal main server running as-is.
    • Once we can upgrade that server to 1.4.2, we will delete the currently existing darklands and all that is in there. That will not affect enderchests and player inventories but it WILL affect builds and normal chests in the darklands.
    • Everything else, your lots, your money etc will be transferred.
    • Regarding the nether in the current main server, There is no decision yet. One option might be to simply move the spawn to a different location.
      You can choose if you want to play 1.3.2 with all your current builds and protection OR on 1.4 with the new features, but w/o proper protection and in a new world. In order to stay on 1.3.2, it is important that you do NOT upgrade your minecraft client when asked to do so. Once you upgrade, you cannot re-download the 1.3.2 version from legal sources. You can however keep 1.3.2 on your computer with a tool and run 2 versions at the same time with a special tool. Use MC Jar switcher or Magic launcher. Also see this here.

Mail Courier is now a enderman

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I just learned that some people are exploiting the fact that the mailman is a villager in skyblock. They used the villager as a trading partner to get goods that are not in the initial package.

Please note that I consider that cheating. I urge everyone who got items through this trick to destroy those. If I catch anyone with goods that are not supposed to be there they will lose the skyblock w/o refunds.

I made the courier now a enderman to stop that.

Undid Toohee’s bug exploits

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I have now undone (almost) all of the transactions that Toohee executed when he abused a bug in the system. He did all over 80 transactions. I put the items back into the shop and took the money away from the sellers again – provided they had enough in their account. Those that did not have enough in their account were untouched.

Why did I do that?

This was a difficult decision. One might say on the one hand that the sellers did just do that: sell their stuff. Where the money comes from does not really matter. Also it cleans out the shop a bit, where it is debatable if it is good or not. However on the negative side, the items that were placed in the shop were lost. The user got banned and nobody could benefit from them. So there is a real damage to the market and the economy. This was the main reason why I finally undid the transactions.

Fixed Multiple Deposit withdrawals

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I have now fixed multiple deposit withdrawals. The home-made deposit plugin had a bug where it would once get the players inventory and check for space for the first item to be withdrawn, give him the item, then check for the second item and so on.

What we overlooked is that the inventory info is static in the code and does not update when when the user receives the first item. There is also no way of re-requesting the current inventory. So I had to write a process that would track the changes in the inventory manually when the user is given an item so that when he gets the second item, the system knows what space is remaining and bail if the inventory is full.

TL;DR: If you withdraw more from the deposit than your inventory can hold, you will now get as much as fits into your inventory and then the process will halt. You can make space and then start again for the rest of your deposit.

Shop Bug exploits

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There is a bug in the shop that gives out too much money. I already banned one user (Toohee) for exploiting this. Depending on the severity of other exploits, this will not be the only ban. I will go through the shop figures and try to find out what happened when.

In the meantime the shop will stay closed.

[Update] Found the issue. There was a bug when someone made a request for a 0 amount of items. You would not be charged then, but cancelling the item would refund the request. So the item is fixed. Also I found that toohee was the only user abusing the exploit. [/Update]

Urging users to empty deposits

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I have now implemented a check that should make users empty their deposits. Since the deposits are made so that people can vote while not online, they are still supposed to remove the deposits once they log back in. Those deposit slots are not meant for permanent storage but for a short-term convenience. I have seen users that have over 30 deposit slots filled with voting rewards.

I opted for the following solution:

You now cannot trade in the shop anymore as long as you occupy more deposit slots that you should have. Example: A Citizen has 1 deposit slot. If you vote 2x, you occupy 2 different deposit slots, one more than you should have. You will not be able to trade on the shop until you at least empty the one excessive deposit slot.

New help system!

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We have a new help system that integrates with the website and the game at the same time. There is a new command: /ticket to open and close tickets. I still have to make additional features and allow more people to answer tickets, but the system is there. It does not work on chat anymore but rather on email base. People who open a ticket in-game get a confirmation email and can reply to it also on the new website support page.

I removed the chat system since it did not really allow to contact players once they were offline. I hope to expand the functions of the new ticket system to be more powerful over the coming days.

Skyblock updates

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I have thought how to expand the skyblock experience. I saw that some commercial servers sell you blocks in the skyblock environment for real cash. While I will not charge real cash to people, I thought it would be interesting to let people buy certain things that allow for an expanded gameplay – at a price, and for Uncs of course. The question is what those could be. Ideas are:

  • redstone dust – 100 Unc/pcs
  • glowstone dust – 100 Uncs/pc
  • things for minecart systems like rails and ev. coloring that you cannot get otherwise currently for the minecart woolblocks – are there any?
  • what else? what prices? It should make it interesting but not much easier!

Also, the standard outfit seems to be missing a sandblock. I will probably be placing that in all new lots tomorrow and place one sandblock on each occupied lot, too.

Since we have warping to every lot, minecarts are maybe not very attractive. I wonder if warping should be limited a bit to make minecarts more interesting. We can limit warping to lots where you actually have buildrights. Not sure how to make that more dynamic.

Another thing that could be done is make a couple of lots hardcore lots with only one cube of ice and one bucket of lava on the island – nothing else.

Any other ideas like skyblock that we could put on the map to have a higher diversity are welcome! Since we have 400 lots we can do 4-6 different types of games!

Also BIG question: Should creepers do block damage in the skyblocks? Currently they do not, if we do a hardcore version they should definitely, but I think they also should do damage in the normal lots… finally we switched it off in the empire to allow nice builds. The skyblocks is a different matter though.

2 Years Anniversary Goodie No.1!

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I have just finished the first 2-year anniversary goodie! I release this one a bit ahead of time since I might be busy during November.

Skyblock!

Skyblock is a game where you start off on a small island in the air. You have very limited resources and you need to survive as long as possible. You can buy a skyblock for 5000 Uncs on the website and warp there with a command. If you think you cannot progress further (if you lost too much stuff etc), you can abandon it with another in-game command – but be careful!

  • Once you abandon your lot, you can only get a new lot after waiting for the next reboot AND paying 5000 Uncs again!
  • Everyone can have only one skyblock at a time.
  • But you can as always add other people to your lot!
  • 2D and 3D maps have been updated, too!
  • Inventory is of course seperate
  • XP is shared between the worlds
  • Shops & deposit are not accessible
  • We have 400 skyblocks so there should be enough for everyone.
  • You can die as often as you want and warp back to your lot.
  • In case your tree does not drop saplings there is a kit with one sapling and a timeout of 6 hours: /kit skyblock

Use the /skyblock command in-game for warping and abandoning!

 

IMPORTANT: 1.4 Coming – What will happen?

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We will deal with the 1.4 update (we are currently on version 1.3.2) just the same way we dealt with former updates. Here a short wrap-up for those who do not know:

  • All the new cool features of 1.4 (anvils, beacons etc) will not work until we have 1.4 installed.
  • In order to install 1.4, we need to make sure that the server software we are using (bukkit) and all the important plugins are upgraded and work fine with it. Until all the plugins are updated, it can take any time from 3 days until 4 weeks. We do not know.
  • Once we will move to 1.4, all your possessions and lots will be transferred along. You will not lose anything.
  • In the meantime, while we wait for everything to be 1.4 ready, I will start a parallel temp 1.4 server on a different port. Anyone will be able to play on the temp server, but there will be no protection (it will be similar to the darklands). The temp server will have a new map with only one world (+nether & end) and with only limited plugins (no shop etc), if any at all.
  • You can choose if you want to play 1.3.2 with all your current builds and protection OR on 1.4 with the new features, but w/o proper protection and in a new world. In order to stay on 1.3.2, it is important that you do NOT upgrade your minecraft client when asked to do so. Once you upgrade, you cannot re-download the 1.3.2 version from legal sources. You can however keep 1.3.2 on your computer with a tool and run 2 versions at the same time with a special tool. I recommend to install those BEFORE 1.4 comes out: Use MC Jar switcher or Magic launcher.
  • The world that we create for the temp 1.4 will likely become the new darklands in the future – as announced. The current darklands might be removed. Since there will be new features in the 1.4 version (such as silverfish spawning in the hills biomes along with a higher frequency of emeralds), we want to make a use of that. I also think that it would be good to reset the nether which looks more like a minefield by now.
  • Inventory of your player that you carried while playing on the 1.4 temp server will be lost when we upgrade the 1.3.2 server to 1.4. If you stashed stuff on the map, it will be in the upgraded server as the new darklands. Whatever you had on the (current) old darklands will be gone. Same for the nether.
  • Regarding the new control blocks, it is unlikely that those will be available since they allow admin-only functions.

If you have questions, please ask them ASAP so that there are no regrets for lost stuff once we upgrade.

New breeding limits!

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Instead of running around searching for large farms, we have now hardcoded breeding limits. This means that any attempt to breed more animals than configured will fail. That includes the use of spawn eggs. If you use a spawn egg to create an animal despite having reached the limit, the egg will be gone, but you will NOT get an additional animal. So please be careful what you do.

How do you know if you reached your limit? Use the /headcount command. In worlds with lots, the count goes per lot. In worlds w/o lots (darklands, nether), it goes per chunk (16×16 blocks). Here are the limits for sheep, cows, chicken & pigs:

  • Lot worlds: 10 each per lot
  • Other worlds: 5 each per chunk

That means that you can have maximal 40 animals per lot or 20 per chunk depending on the world. If there are animals spawning by themselves in your lot, they will count into that number. PLEASE do not take this as an encouragement to always have minimum 40 animals on your lot. The more animals, the more lag! If you had more animals already, they will not be automatically killed, but please reduce the animals to the limit.

Azkedar helped to modify an existing plugin to enable this, so thanks a lot to our C0dr!

Law enforcement

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Today I banned a guy called rizzoli for Xraying, another called shadyxcop for building a death trap (with invitation signs) on his lot.

I also removed the walls and fences from lots B4, C4, B8 & A8. Please note that I will remove EVERY BLOCK a fence is made off from the surface of the lot in case there are no doors or gates in the walls/fences. No refunds!

Cheat detection installed

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I have since some days a cheat detection installed. It sends me warnings about people trying to use all kings of tricks to kill or mine faster, and all kinds of other stuff.

I observed the results for a few days and talked to a couple of users that showed up on the alerts. Some of the users admitted to using some form of cheat, such as a gamer mouse that clicks faster than normal. Most however said that they do not use that or do not even know what a hacked client was. Interestingly, ALL of those that said they had no idea, stopped showing up on the alerts – magically as it seems.

So I want to give now a warning to all users that I will be enforcing bans on such cheating. So you better get a vanilla client and switch off the speed features on your mouse or it’s been the longest time you have been on the server.