You can now buy spiderwebs in the shop. Do a /list uncovery to see it.

I now opened the shop officially for enchanted stuff (same for deposits). However there seem to be some rare bugs with damaged goods so I decided to block those from the shop for now. But I think this is not such a big loss. Specially if we can enable enchantments instead. Please be aware that sometimes you might get a message that an item is damaged while it should not be. That is the bug that I am talking about.

If you have an item that is new or does not show a damage-bar but is rejected from the shop system, please do not use it, keep it and tell me about it. I need to investigate to find a solution to the issue.

With the great help of azkedar I managed to regenerate new, mint, island-in-the-sky lookalike skylands lots! And it seems that this is a method that is supported by the very internals of bukkit, so it’s to stay around!

All that is left to do regenerate some 50-70 lots in the skylands…. which will take some time. But at least it works now. Thanks Azkedar!

I will be on another business trip this week so probably I will have only little to no time to connect to the server. The good news are that there is a first beta build for 1.2 bukkit out, and that the major plugins also are running to be ready. So if all goes well I will upgrade the server to 1.2.3 coming weekend.

I will be reachable via email and lot applications and other issues can be addressed quite well however. So if you have any issues, please post to the blog and I should get an email (which is not the case with forum updates).

Have a great week!

I installed a TEMPORARY 1.2 server on port 25564.

There was a bug with the server. I reinstalled it, please check if it works now and comment if it crashes. Please note that I am running the Carftbukkit developer releases. There are bound to be bugs. As of this writing for example, plants do not grow and mobs do not spawn except for mob spawners. I will try to update it as new versions come out.

Here are the rules:

• Once I upgrade the main server to 1.2, the map will be deleted. I am not kidding. Do not ask for it or parts to me kept. Depending on how long it takes until I can upgrade, I might delete the map earlier and create a new one. Specially if there are relevant bug fixes for 1.2 out.
• PvP is off, protection is off. I do not want to hear complaints about griefing. I cannot prevent it. If you don’t like griefers, play on the 1.1 server.
• Whitelist is ON. If you just registered, you cannot join however, since the whitelist only updates on a server restart (1.2 issue). And the server does not automatically restart either.

Stories can now clear inventories & give items! All works of course only in the flatlands and the city. Read the Story admin page for further instructions!

If you write a story now, you can enforce that a user is switched to survival mode. This is specially important in flatlands and city stories where you do not want to user to fly or be invincible. Now you can build traps! Of course, for the obvious reasons, you cannot enforce creative mode however.

Also, if you do not want users to jump into your story somewhere in the middle or skip parts of it, simply tell them the last 2-3 letters of the NEXT code in any part of the story. On the next sign, you replace those 2-3 letters with “?”. If a user uses a code with a ? in it, the program will ask him to find the previous story to get the missing code pieces.

I just finished the first epic story called “Sand Storms”! It spans 23 different stations and is a true adventure – not for the faint hearted!

Check it out in the old portal building!

If you want to write a story, please go to the Story Admin page and start writing!

Note: Since some people apparently refuse to read through the text below, prefer to panic and then ask me for a solution of a problem they only assumed despite the fact that it is written below that there is no reason to worry about anything, and then come running to me with fatalistic comments about their stuff in the skylands and start planning for the apocalypse, here is the TL:DR for you:

I will NOT delete the skylands.

You will NOT loose your stuff if you have a lot there.

There is no reason to worry.

We all liked and used the skylands as they were created some months ago. They were created to allow a bigger space for larger constructions. There should be little land or nothing in them. There are several issues with the skylands now however:

• I cannot regenerate them when they are abandoned. Regenerating them creates a normal word. Same if I would simply delete the save files on the server.
• It is troublesome to delete them once a lot is abandoned. I need to “delete” the contents so that it becomes a void at least. However doing so lags the server so much that all users are disconnected for some 30-60 seconds.
• When 1.2 comes out, all lots will have a 256+ building height, meaning twice as much as now.

The only solution is to simply let it ‘die’ by not giving out additional lots there and hoping that someday we will have an alternative. I have a similar issue with the flatlands by the way, but the lots are much smaller so there is no issue with deleting them. It just takes much longer for me to do it since I have to first select & delete the land above 64 blocks and then do set to soil for below 64 blocks instead of just typing //regen.

Since 1.2 will be out hopefully this or next month, I will not do anything to see what happens. However it is likely that I will in the long run deprecate the skylands just as the ‘old world’.