April 2017

Your Help Needed!

Servers are more fun with more people on it. It’s that simple. Apart from donating which keeps the server up and running, there are also other ways you can help:

  1. Use the server banner as your signature on any of the many online Minecraft forums like PlanetMinecraft and Minecraft forum.
  2. Reply to posts on Minecraft forums with helpful comments while having the banner mentioned above.
  3. Vote for us! You can get a list of sites to vote at in game by using the /vote command.
  4. Invite your friends, family, colleagues and class members.

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Aeon Settlement by SonCaJun

Themed Buying And Selling
Having all of the shops in one area makes for boring gameplay, and for people without dedicated high-end graphics cards, it also means a serious drop in frames per second.

The original plan always was to have different shops for different regions, and now the server cities are nearing completing, we have started moving shops away from Sevendale. The first major one is a shop for nether related material. It is now to be found in the nether Sevendale station. The public nether portal is to be found up the stairs past the lumber mill.

New Shop Plugin
First we had QuickShops, which gave us nice floating icons above chests as well as signs on them. This was fine, however the plugin often lagged behind Minecraft releases, so we moved to Shopchests which was more up to date but did not feature signs on chests. In addition, we discovered last week that the chests would not work properly in the Nether.

While searching online for yet another alternative, we decided to grab a premium plugin, named ‘Shop.’ Yes, this was payed with our, already small, hosting budget but now we have a plugin that just works, is up to date, has all the features we want, and much more. Everyone can create shops that sell, buy, or barter items, and can choose how to display products between four display modes.

The 4 display modes for shops.

Staff can create gambling shops. the first one you will find is in Sevendale’s restaurant, ‘t’begijntje.’ For 150 in game dollars you can have a lucky draw which will randomly give you anything from dirt all the way to enchanted diamond armour, beacons, and that one thing you really want.

The lucky draw shop at t’begijntje restaurant in Sevendale.

The page with the shop plugin workings is available here.

Warp Plugin Has Been Replaced!
The outdated Pressure Warp plugin has been replaced with MyWarps, a newer plugin. There are no more pressure plates involved, unlike the old way of getting somewhere. Instead, people should now right-click on warp-signs to use them. The main ship at Sevendale has been redone, and other ships will follow this week.

Server Restarts
The PressureWarp plugin that is used by the warps in the spawn ships is very old. It hasn’t been updated since 2015 and while it was fine for a long time, it causes Java errors and crashes with the latest Minecraft server every other day. Same goes for Dynmap. Its up to date but these versions are always Dev versions, aka not finished products.

To combat this I’ve created a script that checks if the server is down every five minutes, so at the most anyone will see is five minutes of downtime.

I’m looking into an alternative to PressureWarp but I already know there isn’t one for Dynmap, as its a unique plugin.