Map Reset Event Video

Through together a kludgey video for the map reset, but I also posted Phil's idea on reddit and it's getting some decent exposure!

http://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/fbxe0/awesome_server_map_reset_event_video_link_inside/

Check it out. I have the Exploding Death Star video too, just need to upload it.

Oh Yes! Upgrades! Update: Done + Map

Hey everyone, just wanted to give you a heads up that the server will probably be down for a few hours either Friday or Saturday for some upgrades. I'll post here when I have a more exact time frame for you.

Oh, and check this out!! Awesome!!
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/2680-Minecraft


Update: The server will be down for a couple hours tonight (1/28) for installing upgrades.

Update 2: The updates are finally done!! I ran into some stability issues during the upgrade, so just a warning.

Oh, and since you were all so patient, here's a map!! :)

A Whole New World

The Old Home.... It all feels like only yesterday. The Bowl. The High Dive. The Plateau. The Ultimate Cactus. The Farm. All of it, gone.

The Creepers--fell creatures, if ever you might call a monster that--had begun to multiply. The silent stalkers of the night; they destroyed our crops, brought down our homes and laid waste to our creations. Their power was growing. With each Creeper that gave its life to bring us misery, the Creeper Queen grew in strength until her powers far exceeded those of her vile children. Soon, the creatures were blighting the ground on which they died, allowing the undead to rise from the earth. And at last, she had the power even to manipulate time itself, slowing our advances and giving her green spawn time to overtake us.

In our final hour, with the Queen at full power, Puremunky and Arways managed to flee outside of her sphere of influence to a distant beach, and there erected an Ark to shepherd us to a New Home, away from the Queen, her offspring, and the undead. We struck our final blow, our last insult against the Queen's Lair by toppling Mondihs' Great Bowl, sending it crashing into her black caverns. And then, Puremunky led us to freedom.

But our road to liberation was not free of peril. Enraged by our last act of defiance, the Queen slowed our advances, sending her armies our way. Many perished in our journey to the Ark, but at last our leader sealed us in our stasis pods and we escaped the horde.

It feels like only yesterday. Truly, the journey took countless thousand years, before finally the Ark crash landed into our New Home, waking us from our long slumber. Puremunky was the first to wake, and he expended the last of his magicks to bring us away from the site of the crash. We live!

And our New Home is in many ways better than the old. There is no sign of our great enemy, nor of the undead. Only harmless, peaceful animals wander the fields. And better yet, the atmosphere on this planet seems to have a rejuvenating quality--any injury will heal in minutes, rather than weeks! Welcome, friends; we've made it. Let us rebuild, and make our New Home just that--a home.

~~...Meanwhile...~~

The derelict ship sits abandoned in a distant forest. In an unused stasis pod, a green-speckled egg cracks open with a familiar sound.

"Ksssssssssssssssssssssssssssss....."

((So because of all of the ludicrous lag, a lot of people died on the way over, and when you got ported to the new server in the ship, you didn't have your items. Phil will restore these. For the next couple of days he's turned monsters off so that no one gets killed while he's trying to restore stuff and summon people back to the spawn point. As a side effect of turning off monsters, health regeneration is currently active. Live it up, because we won't have this luxury for long! Thanks everyone for attending the event and tolerating the abysmal lag. Feel free to explore and build, and see if you can make the trek back to the Derelict Ship!))

Survey Says?

The results of the survey are in and I'm going to admit that they make it a little hard to declare a true "winner". At the top of the list with 44% of the votes we've got a complete wipe of the server with inventory intact. My concern with it is that even though this is the winner, it means that less than 50% want this as the outcome. Of course if I include the "Wipe Everything" people we end up with 55% which sets my mind at ease a little. That being said, we will be wiping the world and starting anew, keeping player inventory. As a testament to the great creations we have on the server currently I'll be providing a downloadable copy of the world as it was before the "event" that you can download and play with in a single player setting if you choose, I'll be providing instructions on how do that if you like.

So, with a wipe on the horizon here's the timeline:

Monday, January 24th
(all times are GMT -5 or EST)

9:00 PM:
This is the cut off time for "packing your bags". You should gather as much as you want to take with you to the new world in your player's inventory. The transition does not include items located inside of chests or your home, but only those items that your character is currently carrying. At 9:00 PM, I will take a final backup of each of the characters on the server.

10:00 PM:
We will start the event for those who would like to participate. I can't guarantee much, but it should be a good time had by all where we go out with a bang and wave goodbye to the world which we've created.

11:00 PM:
The new world is online and live, fun gifts will be given to those that join us. Yay!!

World Reset Decision

Phil will be making the world reset decision soon. If he does end up resetting the map, we'll be doing the following things:

1) Phil will provide everyone with a download of the most recent uncorrupt backup of the world. You'll be able to move this to your single player world folder and return to it, if you want to preserve your projects.

2) Everyone will be given ample time to preserve their items prior to the map reset. If we go with resetting, you'll probably want to start tearing down your more resource-intensive structures (mine cart tracks, dyed wool, etc.). Any changes you make now likely won't be included in the provided Single player save file, anyway. Only player inventories (not chests) can be preserved, so choose what you want to carry over wisely. I'd recommend placing a priority on items which are finite in a given area of explored land (Diamonds, Gold, Iron, Redstone, Lapis Lazuli, Roses, Dandelions, and anything which use those as ingredients). If you have room leftover you could bring things like mob drops and wood, but remember that these are potentially infinite for a finite area of the map. If you're running out of space remember that 9 diamonds/iron/gold/lapis lazuli can be combined and stacked as blocks up to 64 (allowing up to 576 of a single resource in one inventory slot).

3) Some of the benefits to resetting the map include the following:

a) Terrain generation has been wonky since the biome update; if you look at the map now you'll see some messed-up looking square chunks all over the map. Mojang has acknowledged this as a bug and the fix might actually be in before Phil completes the reset. If the fix isn't in, there's a server mod we could use temporarily to keep all terrain generation smooth.

b) Everything within about 1200 blocks from the old spawn point was generated prior to the biome update. As such, there is no tundra, desert, forest, or anything beyond the vanilla Minecraft Alpha farmland for quite a distance from the spawn, which is unfortunate, because the spawn area is where most building occurs. By generating a new map we will get biomes immediately, as well as the new tree types added in the last update.

c) We can play around with world generation a little bit to get a cool looking, serviceable spawn point.

The World is a Corrupt Place (but you already knew that).

Here's the skinny fellows. We ran into a bit of a corrupt world on the server and I wanted to get some input from you guys as to what to do next. As of right now, the world remains intact with only a few chunks corrupted. I'd like you to take a little bit of time and wander around to take in the slightly modified world. Just let me know what would like to have happen in the world.

Server Down? - Not Anymore! - Oh Wait, It's Still Down

Hey everyone, sorry if the server is down. I guess there was a power outage at my place. I'll update this post as soon as I can confirm the server is back up and running.

Update: The server is back up and running sorry for the downtime!!

Update: hmmm...perhaps that was a bit premature...server isn't working very well at the moment...and it looks like we may have some bad data in the world... (another cataclysm? yep!!)

Update: Looks like minecraft.net is down and that's causing some login issues for the server. That's not good. :( As it stands the power outage corrupted the world on the server and I'm grabbing the most recent backup (01/17/2011 2:17 PM) and putting that up as the primary. Please feel free to try it out, but proceed with caution until I give the final "All's Well!!" Sorry guys, I know that this sucks.

Update: The server is up and running, but minecraft.net is down, so you might run into some problems. I posted a survey for everyone to take if you feel like it. :)

Playing with Cartograph - Updated

As a suggestion from Marstead I downloaded Cartograph for your viewing pleasure.

Have a look at the world around you in beautiful 2D!!

Updated: And for the detail oriented, here's a top-down of the entire explored world right now.

Server Updates - Done!

Just to give everyone a heads up, the server will be down tonight from 7:00 PM EST to 8:00 PM EST in order to update the software to the most recent Beta updates and do a little house cleaning. If everything is ready ahead of time I'll update this post so check back here to see when the server is back up and running.

Also, my apologies for the unexpected downtime yesterday Windows Updater took over without me knowing and decided a reboot was necessary.

Update: With my chronological magic I was able to hop on and update everything ahead of schedule. Have fun!!

Update 2: Just dropped the newest beta update (1.2_01) on the server.

Happy Belated Holidays

Happy Happy, Joy Joy

Happy (respective and culturally appropriate) Holidays to each of you!! With the new year ramping up (and my schedule getting busier and busier) I wanted to take a quick moment to let you know that I haven't forgotten about you and I wanted to talk a little bit about what's up with things on this end.

Welcome!


I've seen a bunch of new names online and while I haven't had the chance to talk with any of you "in person" I wanted to welcome atudar, kamifeng, and Mondihs to the server!

Twitter Feed


It does look like the twitter feed for calculating individual users isn't quite accurate all the time. I haven't figured out what's up with it, but when I do I'll be sure to make an update to it.

Server Lag


I've heard a little bit about the server being laggy. I honestly have no clue what is up with it. System resources are looking more than good, with the Server software taking up about 4% - 10% of CPU and about 40 - 100 MB of RAM. I did a little network investigation and it might have something to do with my crappy ISP (Insight) speeds. I've got their "High-End" internet and haven't really had much of a problem, but pings to google.com can take up to 800ms sometimes. I just checked it and it was only at 100ms, which is fairly common. I'm not really sure what I can do at the moment, but I'll keep an eye on it and hopefully it will clear up in a couple days.

Thanks guys/gals for hanging in there, hope to see everyone online soon.