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Hey guys, since were on the topic of nether portals I figured I'd bring up something else about rails. As far as I know the current plan is to do CARBON again next rev, which I am totally fine with. I just have a few minor issues with the current CARBON System I feel we should talk about. 1.) Current place of CARBON Spawn Station In my opinion I have a small problem with where the current CARBON station is at. It is located on the North side of spawn with no indication that it is even over there. If new players join and want to take a rail somewhere they have to ask where a station is and hope there is someone online willing to help them. On the current rev the spawn rail station is CLOSED and out of service. My suggestion for next rev is to have a rail station at spawn except have it be player run. We could even have players design the rail station to fit into the theme of spawn. We could also do a mix of CARBON and CARTS to allow everyone to connect. 2.) How long it took to set up CARBON For me it felt like it has taken a really long time to get CARBON actually up and running. And even so not all towns have CARBON. Next rev if we do something suggested that was suggested in the nether portal topic then rails are going to become even more important. How can we get CARBON up and running faster? What can we do to make the process go easier? Is there anything we can do besides "have more people help"? 3.) The complexity reputation of CARBON CARBON is known as this "vast and complex system" and people seem scared to get into it. I was one of the those people until TheRandomnatrix helped explain it to me and its really not that difficult to understand. I think this is part of the problem why it takes us so long to get the system up and running. To many people think that its a hard system to understand, especially when compared to CARTS. We need to find someway to make CARBON easily explainable and a easy way on how to set up the system. Maybe perhaps we can make the wiki page better? Right now one of the steps is just "make units every 100 blocks." What exactly are we building every 100 blocks? Or maybe even have a video tutorial? That's all I can think about for the moment. I will add more if I come up with anything else.

Since Sapphric isn't going to do it, I'll bite the bullet. These are some thoughts I've been having for a while now, and I'd like them to be seen. It seems getting portals has become something of an obsession for many towns at the start of the revision. Having one allows traffic flow to and from your city, allows nether access for material gathering, and is something of a trophy/sign of power as well. However, I also noticed that many of those towns just substitute their infrastructure with a portal. Their roads may be lacking, and in some cases their rails take a hit as well. It was definitely noticeable during the admin hunts that the map is not very horse friendly, due to poor road infrastructure across the map. Clearly towns don't need nether portals to be active or successful, as evident in Port80 and Rose City this rev. So I was thinking, what if in some future rev there was only one nether portal located at spawn. Now before everyone raises their pitchforks and torches, I'd like to some weighing of the pros and cons of having just a spawn portal. The second part is more of side suggestion. In all my time here, aside from one or two updates, the nether has remained largely the same: boring, red, and full of lava. With the addition of custom glowstone ore in the overworld(which I love), I found myself barely ever going a hundred blocks or so from a portal except to mine quartz. Each rev the nether is genned at 2k*2k, and only a very meager fraction of that is used up. Perhaps accommodations could even be made to actually make living or at least exploring in the nether worthwhile for once. I also came across a reddit post on /r/minecraft from the admin of the popular Reddit flatcore servers, in which he posted his server's own custom version of the nether. It attracted a lot of attention, and he was able to use it to bring people over to his servers. I feel that the same could be done for us.

Spleef Club III will take place tonight at 7:30 pm EST in Port 80. As usual, the entry fee is 5 iron blocks, payable to either myself or to TheRandomnatrix. We're shooting for 16 players this time around, so please try to arrive and pay around 7 EST so we can get organized. You can sign up with a partner, or as a free agent. Before play begins those without partners will be randomly assigned one. Looking forward to seeing everyone there!

Making a forum post as per request. Situation: It was brought up on Mumble when Wondrland was asking if autoclickers were allowed on P(presumably to exploit the new fishing mechanics introduced in 1.7 based on previous discussion with him), and was promptly shot down by tompreuss under the argument of "No use of hacked clients to change or modify gameplay that gives an unfair advantage." However, I feel this argument is ultimately unjust for 2 primary reasons. The first being that it does not in fact change or modify gameplay, only sends a right/left click signal at a constant rate which could be achieved by a normal player without the client. If the rate of clicking were to reach a level higher than what a normal player could achieve then I feel it would be against the rules, however the rate would be so high that the effects would not be useful in survival mode and therefore not give a noticeable advantage. The second being that if such a modification is not allowed, then why the use of say rei's minimap, which allow players information that gives them an advantage over other players by showing an overhead map. There is also a level of automation on Rei's in the deathpoint feature, in which it automatically saves coordinates of where you die at a speed no player could. Moreso, why is the client used most famously by the afk account brews_wane which relogs at grinders upon restarts which the PAdmins are well aware of, not banned for doing the automated task of relogging? Clearly they seem to lie within acceptable bounds, but not autoclickers, which in my opinion conform to the rules equally if not more than the two above examples.

The plugin SafeBuckets, the one that makes our water still by default, I feel has become more and more useless lately, and I think its future needs a serious discussion. I feel that SafeBuckets needs to be unplugged, and here is why: First of all SafeBuckets is very un-vanilla as a plugin, since it's not normal to see still liquid in Vanilla Minecraft, and thus goes against the server's theme. Secondly the still water it gives is rather useless. While it does make water elevators and some lava killing machines easier to build, it does not really add anything irreplaceable to the game: some signs surrounding flowing liquids will accomplish the same thing still water gives to us now. And while some water elevators arguably look prettier without signs in between water blocks, I would not consider water elevators pretty to begin with. Some may disagree. But most importantly I feel that SafeBuckets's primary function as a grief-prevention plugin is so unimportant that it practically does not matter. Griefers, as far as I can tell, are not persistent enough to acquire a bucket just to knock someone's flowers or torches over. And even if they were, the loss is hardly meaningful. As for more serious griefing like murdering with lava or making derpy lava walls around, those are easily traceable nowadays. At worst a griefer may attack someone's rails or redstone, which is actually quite severe, but that they can do with natural liquid sources even now. A much better option would be to write a plugin that makes rails and redstone waterproof. A plugin like that at least would not encumber the staff day and night, like SafeBuckets does. SafeBuckets also makes a few things if no impossible, at least very hard: It is impossible to dispense flowing liquids and this must be worked around with silly piston gates. Making ponds is tough because of the glitchy interaction with still and flowing water that makes some parts of the potential pond not fill up like it is supposed to. Nowadays you'd need constant mod surveillance just to make an artificial lake. The absence of SafeBuckets would obviously be beneficial for everyday building, but it would be particularly useful for making grinders. For example in a skeleton grinder getting the water to flow immediately would make building much less dangerous much faster. In an Ender grinder the benefit of getting immediate water cover is obvious. In summary, SafeBuckets is un-vanilla, seriously hinders everyday building, encumbers staff, and is irrelevant against griefing. If I was king, I'd replace it with another plugin like the one described above. But, all of the above was only what I think. I may be right, I may be wrong, some may even disagree. What I want here is a serious discussion on this matter. The server's interests are largely also my interests, and that's why I'd want a thorough investigation about this matter so at the end of the day we can be sure we're making the right decision.

As you can tell, I'm pretty new to the server. I noticed it stated that the ores are "plumped" this revision. The thing is, I can't seem to find any valuable ones. When they said plumped, I assumed it meant they added more to the world. So what does plumped mean? Thanks!

This is derpy. I do not understand why people do this. Yes I live in a desert, no you should not destroy it. Players would get upset if I came in their forest and destroyed all the trees without replanting, or if I went next to their city and removed all the grass and dirt. Why is this allowed? It is not that hard to put in a cobble layer and place sand to make the desert look normal. More Images.

Make a selection and run /region-intersects. It will give you a list of all the other regions, (and their owners) that intersect the selection. An example use case would be when creating a large town protection, to check for regions owned by non town members. Limitations: Poly regions are not supported. Cuboid is always assumed. CommandHelper or possibly WorldGuard remember the most recently selected corners even after //desel, so this command will probably always think there is some kind of selection.

I would like to announce that live maps are now available for both Creative and PvE! Creative - Live, Cartograph, Snapshots1 PvE - Live, Cartograph, Snapshots1 PvE has players hidden by default, to enable simply run: "/dynmap show", to hide yourself again "/dynmap hide" The regular isometric cartography will still be generated nightly, along with the snapshot images. 1 Apparently the program c10t, used to render the snapshots, doesn't like clay? Subreddit Post

As per the results of last week's poll, we have run Hard mode on PvE for a week to see how it goes before taking a vote again now. At time of writing, PvE is still on Hard difficulty, though that should be toned down to Normal shortly after this is posted. So with the last week's trial period in mind, decide: would you like to see PvE switch to Hard mode (what has been running on the server for the last week), some sort of partial Hard mode where some aspects of Hard mode are implemented while others are not (for example, higher attack damage from mobs but no starving) or stay on the usual Normal difficulty that has historically been the norm on PvE? If you choose partial Hard mode (the second choice), please leave your thoughts about it in the comments below: what features of Hard mode do you want to see implemented, and what features of Hard mode do you want to leave out? If this becomes the most popular option, we'll be sure to get some particular discussion or a poll going about the specifics of this unique mode; once that's been decided on, then we can see if it's possible for us to implement it. Please note that we make no guarantees about the implementation of partial Hard mode, and failing to find a way to implement it and balance it with lag reduction (more plugins will lead to more lag), we will fall back onto Normal difficulty. That said, you have our assurances that we will make every attempt to implement it should that be the most popular option. EDIT: Forgot to mention, we will end the poll on Sunday 23:59:59 EDT. The topic should close at that time, but discussion of the results will likely continue elsewhere past that time. Stay tuned!

I have noticed people on PvE who switch into the #trade ClanChat so often, that when someone in #port_aperture for example asks a question, they end up responding in the trade ClanChat forgetting to switch channels afterwards. What I had in mind to attempt to solve this issue is a command like /ctrade [Message] or /cslpeef [Message] which would send a message to those ClanChat's without the need to have to change default channels. As a permanent solution, to avoid problems with those commands on other servers, we could create a /ctemp command, for example /ctemp will send a message to a specified ClanChat without changing your default one, like "/ctemp #trade [message here] would send your message to #trade without affecting /c"

I've been on the server for quite a while but am only just now diving into PVE. There's so much going on that after a week I still don't feel like I've seen more than 10% of what it contains. I would like to collect descriptions of the various groups that are springing up on the new revision into this forum to give anyone new, like me, an idea of what this community contains. So this is my invite for you to describe your town/city/group/cesspool/home below to help users like me figure out where we might fit in!

What's the url for it again? I can't seem to find it.

As can be pretty easily guessed, I plan to build a CARBON network next rev in my quest to create an organized, easily accessible rail network for everyone. My goal this rev is to make it as easy as possible for towns to link into the network, where they can access a wide variety of destinations and further explore the map and all that the community has to offer. How to get involved: I'm going to need as much help as possible for this server-wide project. If you're interested in helping out or showing support from your town, contact me via ingame mail, on Reddit, the forums, or in this post. Even something as trivial as a donation of a stack of iron at the start of the rev can go a long way if even a few people do it. If you have rail plans of your own, feel free to mention them. CARBON Hubs: I'm going to be building several CARBON hubs located across the map, particularly at the cardinals. These stations will allow towns to connect to them via normal rail lines, without having to rely on a specific town and ensuring the process be as neutral as possible. These stations will be located at cardinals of roughly 800 out from spawn There will also be a station located at spawn run by UMC, which is planned to be CARBON compatible. Connecting in and the number of destinations: IDs will be limited mainly to towns and "significant builds". However, there is no limit to the number of towns that can build rails going into hubs, so I encourage anyone and everyone to build rails going in to them. The number of ID numbers is planned to be 32, but the units will be built in such a way that there will be support for 64 if need be. The Network: It's going to be a bidirectional loop at about 600 blocks out from spawn. Additional smart lines will be built later on connecting to the UMC station. But there's an added twist: I am going to try making the lines above ground. The redstone will be covered up with dirt/sand to make it less ugly. My goal with this is to bring back those above ground rails we've come to miss while retaining all the function of a rail network. The Nether: I plan to do what I can in the nether alongside UMC in a timely manner to get nether rails(carbon) up and running. Please do me a favor and make your portal as accessible as possible so I can get to work on it ASAP and avoid repeating the issues I faced rev 11. The rails in the nether will be covered in either glass or slabs to reduce collisions with the pigmen populace. If there is a particular aesthetic design you want to bring up, I'm open to suggestions. Overall, I'm hoping to make this the best rail network yet, and I wish you all luck in the coming revision. Also, forgive the horrible formatting. Tried to highlight as many important pieces of info as possible :P

The PAdmins plan to make mumble meetings a regular thing. Notes and recording can be found here. The next meeting is TBA

I often find that what scares off players from survival isn't the restriction of playing in the first hour by other armored players but this aspect in general when trying to carry out life minning and building continuously. I think it is important for players to be able to prepare themselves minning for and building with supplies without a constant fear of in-game death. I always wished that I could get competitive with other players on S but there are so many scenarios that can occur within the vast world and I think arena based fighting along with safe living help to promote an orderly and not so hostile experience. I think the true PvP experience comes from the arena battles. Fighting under your own will with certain promise of benefits seems to be a good way of living in my opinion. I would like an experience in PVE where you can have a clash with other cities' inhabbitants in a designated area like that of the wilderness in RuneScape ( Though I do not wish to advertise or even endorse the stupidity that Jagex created). The area wouldn't have to be huge but one that could include a chase and hiding so that confrontation can be secondary to fleeing. I find that the whole 'Everything is a struggle to live in this world" mentality of S intense and thrilling but what I find to distract from this is players reluctance to play due to the dominating pressence of combat (and therefore spite and rivalry) that occurs with activity they clearly don't want it included in. There is practically no reason to armor up in Pve as you only really fight mobs. The difficulty in PVE is not very punishing and I love to fight with my diamonds but I can't find anything worth using them on! :( I in no way want to turn S into P or vis versa but I do wish that there was some kind of combat in PVE that people could find rewarding. I apologize if this is a post concerning only my interests and not that of others in the community which I estimated to be in favour of this also ( I could be the only one in favor of this and if so disregard it entirely). And if there is an arena like so in PVE and I am completely unaware of such a thing, please fill free to downvote this post to hell or even delete it as it will have been a waste of time for me to write and for you to read. Thanks guys, - Darkelmo

AMA time! Guys, You have the wonderful oppurtunity to learn how the "Dark Knight" Dex started. Now. AMA!

I'v noticed that the PvE server is feeling quite abandoned. I know that for a lot of users, my self included, are starting school again and that makes it difficult to find time to play. My point is why do this if only to check and see what the people think. It may not be the best time to start rev 12, but if the servers live on numbers a peak of 13 players is a good enough reason to restart for me. In addition the abandon cities that people took the effort to make just seem to be a waste of space and resources. If there is a way to re-purpose these buildings, it would be fantastic. For example, a player is off line for 2 or 3 months and their house has been completed and all project closed. Wouldn't it be fair to take down their now waste of space and give the supplies to newer and more active players? Just some thoughts I've had for a while.

You can now untame your pets by typing /untame and right clicking on the animal. It will work for dogs, cats and horses. This is useful if you want to give or sell a pet to another player. That player can then tame the animal in the normal way. Please note that the /unlock-horse command does not change the ownership of an animal. It's simply a way for the owner to allow any player to ride the horse, exactly the way Mojang intended the game to behave.

I'm discussing this in MCP for now due to the sensitive nature of the Zombie AI bug and its potential to be used to induce crippling lag. Here's what has changed and will change technically over the next day or two on PvE: With 40+ players we experienced a very low tick rate - around 3.5. Other data points: 20 players - 10 tps, 11 players - 13 tps, 8 players - 15 tps. I've experimentally modified MobLimiter to enforce the configured per-chunk, per-mob-type caps when the specific listed mob types spawn. It's currently configured with a cap of 0 Zombies per chunk when spawned naturally because of the path finding AI bug (https://mojang.atlassian.net/browse/MC-17630). Reading that bug again, it occurs to me that since it mainly concerns path finding when the player is unreachable, perhaps mob-spawner zombies should be disabled too. The change I've made (not yet checked into GitHub) has the option to enforce the same cap for mob spawner zombies too, but I have not enabled it yet. I've set a cap on squids of 1 per chunk, enforced when spawning, simply because I can and I don't think anyone will even miss them. They tend to be over-represented. I'm tempted to add a cap of 1 PigZombie per chunk, enforced when spawning. What do you think? LadyCailin fixed a bug in CommandHelper to do with getting entities within a certain radius, and consequently my /count-entities command is now working properly. You can use it to get a better handle on the number of each type of mob. A player lost his horse when pushing it through the portal at spawn. I tested an untamed horse in the same manner and it too disappeared. I intend to write an admin command in CH: /find-pets [ []] to list the coordinates of mobs of specified types (comma-separated list) with optional owner and name tag so we can substantiate similar claims more easily in the future. It's a server glitch, but I would be inclined to refund this one anyway and warn people in future that horses and portals don't mix. What do you think? Note that as currently conceived, that command could also be used to locate hostile mobs and mobs without an owner. I don't think we've adequately communicated the temporary nature of /unlock-horse. People have used it for horse sales. I intend to add a /give-pet command tomorrow to fix that. In the meantime, I've changed one of the alerts to underscore the temporary nature of /unlock-horse. And finally, in the background I'll investigate the viability of switching P over to Spigot and see what configuration options that would give us for dealing with lag. Looks promising. I want to experiment on my test server first before switching P over though.

Perhaps a little discussion about becoming a "portal city?" Nether portals are limited on P. There are normally 7: 1 at Spawn; 4 located generally symmetrical in each of the 4 quadrants (though they were a little less symmetrical in Rev11); and 2 "secret" portals, which are randomly placed a bit more difficult to find than the 4 quadrant portals. Portals allow easy access to the nether, and so are useful for that purpose alone. But portals are also used as shortcuts for traveling, using the 8:1 travel between the nether and overworld. In my view, portals are limited but useful resources, to be shared by all, for the benefit of all. In that vein, I'd like to propose minimum standards, if you will, that all portal cities should strive to achieve. 1. Overworld rail station (e.g. CARTS or CARBON), with direct line to Spawn, with slots for at least a minimum number of regional cities (4 or 5?). 2. Nether rail lines directly to 6 other portals. 3. Clear signage and/or easy transit between the portal and rail stations in the Overworld and the Nether. 4. Road system for others to link to portal in the overworld. The purposes of these standards are three-fold. First, to ensure that portals are fully utilized for the benefit of all. Second, to put those desiring a portal on notice that they'll need to provide this infrastructure. Third, to provide objective(-ish) criteria to help admins resolve early-rev portal disputes (e.g. cities or groups of players who have in the past shown the ability to quickly meet the minimum standards of a portal city might be given preference over new groups, should a dispute arise). For reference, this thread on the subreddit is discussing which cities desire portals: http://www.reddit.com/r/mcpublic/comments/1jjq75/rev_12_portals/ -sp

tl;dr - perhaps a future rev should only have one portal? Hello Everyone, I'll begin by saying how great I think PvE is (I'm sure Creative and Survival are just as great, but I hardly ever go there!). I lurk on every rev, but I'm planning on actually getting involved in the new one. The people are friendly and helpful, and the builds are always impressive in some way. That having been said - and please bear in mind I'm somewhat new to the Reddit Public way of doing things - I had a query about new rev creation, or maybe even a suggestion for the future. There's been a lot of discussion recently about new PvE terrain, and the subject of portals comes up often. Essentially, from what I can gather, there's a mad initial dash for the portals and then cities grow up around them. This is reasonable: using the Nether cuts down on transit time; and it's useful having easy access to the Nether to obtain the goodies that are only found there (quartz, blaze rods, &c). Portals, then, are prime assets to have. My thought is this: maybe PvE could take a stab at only having one portal, based centrally on the map at Spawn or in some other suitably impressive building. I know this seems to contradict the benefits of many portals that I've touched on above. However, I think it would introduce some interesting social dynamics to the rev: For one thing, it would encourage the development of the Overworld's infrastructure. Cities would have to construct roads, rails, boat canals &c to Spawn and to each other and these would be used frequently - right now, for example, the Overworld has some impressive rail infrastructure but with apparently little use. PvE is, I think, full of amazing builds like tower blocks and residences, but often these just stand empty and without use... infrastructure would be a creative thing and useful. Additionally, needing to build rails might make things like iron and gold more scarce, valuable resources (farms notwithstanding) - this might encourage trade and other interesting activity. Also in terms of trade, neighbouring cities might find it more convenient to exchange nether stuff with each other rather than obtain it themselves through the one portal. There would be more community interaction. If there were only one portal, "publically administered", it would perhaps also remove some of the uncertainty and debate about who's-got-what-portal, and perhaps give smaller, "non-portalled" cities a more even footing with much larger ones. So, that's my idea. Does anyone have any experience with a situation like this? I've outlined some of the ways I think things on PvE might be made a bit more fun and interesting, but it's all supposition - it'd be great to have an informed voice give an opinion! Thanks for your time, All best wishes, ~Sasch

I was thinking about the PvE experience recently, especially after the creeper spawner was found. Hordes of would-be grinder builders descended on the area, eager to help. There was far more people there than were actually useful, but still people hung out there. People gravitated to the activity. What if a lot of cities decided to build next to each other? Instead of a 'city' it would be a neighbourhood in a city. Cities would lose a little independence, in terms of their location and biome, but the draw would be building in an area that always has people walking around and projects going down. It would be giving up the small-town perfection feel for the active, chaotic vibe of a big city. If one district went dead (and you know that's going to happen), then the survivors wouldn't be out of luck. No one would be 'selling out their city' by working with others since we'd all be citizens of MegaCity (name to be decided!) There are some big downsides to this though. We'd need a LOT of land. What if one district ran out of space against a mountain? What if we started encountering other small builds as we expanded out? And of course there's the inevitable drama that comes with land disputes -- the districts would have to work at being good neighbours. Whatever the hurdles, I think it would be a worthwhile experiment. And it's going to happen at some level anyway, with Seneca, Shady Oaks, and possibly Endor and Argoth joining forces. Of course the point of some towns is the idyllic small town setting, so I wouldn't expect everyone to join. I'd love to hear everyone's reaction, including staff, who would have to deal with any BS generated by this.

Putting this in Mod Chat because it's important for the players to be aware of where we all stand, but it's not really something we have the time to leave up to thorough discussion - what are each of the servers doing when the 1.6 update comes out? Survival's transitioning between revisions, and we'll be looking to start Revision 22 only after our CraftBukkit setup and essential plugins are updated for 1.6 (to players: i'm working on an update/announcement post at current for more stuff related to this, stay tuned!). We're planning to perhaps hold our end of revision chaos the day prior to the release of 1.6 (not confirmed yet, need to speak with the other S admins still), but after that we're at a bit of a standstill on planning what's available for players in that plugin-update limbo that will exist between the end of our Revision 21 and the beginning of 22. Usually we'd get chaos.nerd.nu set up, but i'm of the understanding that neither PvE nor Creative are as close to a new revision as Survival is, so this might not be something we go with this time? We can work on getting some kind of 1.5-based events going on s.nerd.nu in that inbetween period, but I don't want to go ahead on formally developing or announcing such plans without seeing where the other two servers stand on the approach to 1.6. So, to the PvE and Creative admins, please think about your plans for the upcoming update and get back to us here (not in IRC, please!) to help us Survival staff out a bit. Thank you in advance