The server is now running on a new DNS & IP address successfully. I also made all the changes at the server lists etc. Also all contents of the website have been updated.
I also made some changes to the way the different parts of the page access the database. There might be still a couple of glitches. If you find something does not work, please tell me ASAP.

I will move the server to the domain uncovery.me this weekend. If you cannot connect, please try the new address. The move should take only a couple of minutes. The website and the minecraft server should then both run on that domain name. So there will be no more confusion between uncovery.net and minecraft.uncovery.net.

I enabled now a field that lets you warp places in a story. Specifically, it lets you warp to one of the /warp points. The nice thing is that I can create warp points for you that are otherwise not visible in the /warp list. To prevent abuse, I made it so you cannot warp to one of the pre-made warp points, only to one that I created for you. To achieve this, all warp names have to start with “story_”. Talk to me if you want to have a warp point for your story. Also, this works only in the city – since it’s a story tool, not a taxi service.

See the story admin for details.

After much discussion has been done in various places, I came to the following conclusion:

In order to allow flatlands users to rank up & be recognized for their work, we will start contests exclusively for the flatlands. Winners of the contests however will NOT immediately recieve a level upgrade like the survival players since there is MUCH less work in creative builds than in survival builds. We will create a ladder system where someone has to win a set of contests (2+) to get a level upgrade.

The builds from the creative contests will be copied to a different part of the city so users know if things have been built creative or survival and creative builds will not make survival builds look worse.

However, this requires that we keep up the same standards of living for the flatlands as for the empire and other places. This has as it’s main consequence that pixelart is now not anymore tolerated in the flatlands.

So all flatlands users, you have until 10th of June to remove all your pixels art, writing etc!

I am wondering how to make it possible for flatlands users to advance in levels. I created a card on our issue tracker. Please discuss there about possible solutions.

I added a new tower to my castle. It has a spiral of many side-towers that circle the building. There a 3 starting on each floor, reaching to the next floor. 1 of them houses the staircase to the next floor, the 2 others are empty. I would like to invite all Master and Elder level users to come and decorate one of them. Here are the building guidelines:

• You can make the entrance smaller and fit a door.  Otherwise please do not make too dramatic changes to the structure. If in doubt, ask me. If it looks cool and fits the overall tower, I am happy to discuss.
• Please do not use glow stone
• You can put anything inside. Redstone machinery, living quarters, a safebox – anything goes
• Please put your name on a sign outside located similar to the floor number sign.
• Do not use the ground floor or top floor rooms.

There is a new snapshot for MC out, that features a new world type with  “large biomes”. Here is a picture of what that means. I wonder if that would be a good idea for the daklands, if we expand the borders accordingly. Currently the darklands are about 2500×2500 blocks large, maybe 3k or 4k would be better in that case.

Of course this would come only in effect after the next version of minecraft is released.

Comments?

I wanted to share with you today that we had an all-time visitors high two days ago with more than 700 people on the website in a single day. The visit statistics on the website has been continuously increasing since January (graph from Jan 2012-today):

We might be reaching the 1000 visitors mark if things continue like that. So a big thanks to all who have been contributing in any way to the server, be it builds, friendliness to others, coding, reporting errors, etc etc etc, every little bit helps to make this server a better place!

So a ‘yay’ for the Uncovery community!