Monthly Archives: December 2012

Animal Protection updated

In addition to the previous protections, now is no longer possible to shear sheep or mooshrooms on islands you’re not a member of.

And… only white sheep can be dyed. If that sheep has another color, re-dyeing it is not possible for *anyone* including island members. This is primarily to protect those that buy lapis with real money and want to keep them blue from anyone else.

Enjoy a safer skyblock! 🙂

Skyblock fixes and enhancements #2

Another round of fixes has been applied to the Skyblock Minecraft server. This time it’s related to the MobArena:

  • It is no longer possible to join one arena while you’re in another arena. This will prevent a nasty bug where players lost their inventory items.
  • Fixed an exploit that involved repeated spectating an arena while fighting in another, that eventually allowed players to keep their armor and weapons even after leaving the arenas.
  • Exploding sheep in pyramid MA are back in business. Exploding business that is.

Enjoy 🙂

Skyblock fixes and enhancements #1

A lot of changes and bugfixes have been applied to the Minecraft skyblock server yesterday and today.

First the bug fixes and exploits that once were, but that are no longer possible:

  • Using /back to return to MobArena and FFA PvP arena after you die in there is no longer possible. If you try to do so, it will teleport you to /spawn instead.
  • Trading was possible in the MA lobby before a game started, so players working in a team could give each other a lot of diamond armor, weapons and potions, practically becoming invincible in the arena. This is no longer possible.

Changes and additions to the game:

  • Snowballs now do 0 damage and do not push back players, animals or mobs. This behavior is server wide, so both at spawn and on player skyblock islands. They are purely for fun now, so fire away at will.
  • Many performance improvements allow more players online at the same time and optimize the playing experience with 0 lag as usual.
  • The Captcha plugin has been rewritten from scratch. It is now using a completely different technique to detect bots, and most players will never have to answer those pesky Captcha questions at login.
  • The anti-spam and chat filter plugin has also been rewritten from scratch. It’s now much more powerful, and more intelligent. Prior to this, it was only kicking players. As a result of the successful tests in last days, banning has also been enabled. So my advice is this: if you see a message from the spam protection to stop spamming or you’ll get banned, follow what it says. It does ban if needed! Most players will never see a message from it though, so chat with no fear.
  • Per players request coal has been added to the vote shop at spawn. This will be helpful especially to new players that lack the wood logs to make charcoal, so they can vote and immediately make a handful of torches.
  • Gravel has been added both to the vote and the spacecoins shops at spawn. This has been requested many times, and I’ve rewritten the sand dupe protection to also include gravel dupe protection.

Last but not least, I’ve been working on the “Nether” in the past days and it’s about 50% complete.

It will bring an incredible, adrenaline pumping, high risk but also high reward experience. A piece of advice: start working out teams in advance, as what happens in there will be tuned for teams of 10 or more players and might require some degree of coordination between team members.

The goal is to have Nether Portals working in about a week or so, just in time for Christmas.

Enjoy, and safe skyblocking 🙂

Hardware maintenance

Tomorrow night, Dec 9th at approximately 3 AM CST there is a scheduled hardware maintenance for both servers.

Both the website and the Skyblock server will be offline for up to 1 hour.

The start of maintenance will be announced in-game. I will update this post when the maintenance is over.

UPDATE1: 2:34 AM CST – The maintenance is nearly complete. The server will be back online in about 10 minutes.

The maintenance is now complete and the server is back online. Come and play! 🙂

Skyblock Safe Trade

The Safe Trade is back! And better!

No commands to remember, it’s all point & click. Here’s a brief tutorial on how to use it.

In this, B_B_A and myself want to trade safely. First, B_B_A right clicks on me to start the safe trade. I see his request:

To accept, I simply right click on him. Then the trade window shows up, like so:

The left side is where I put the items I’m offering. The right side is where I see what B_B_A is offering. So I’m adding the ladder I want to sell him to the left, like so:

He adds his items, and I see them on the right side of the trade window:

Then to accept the trade, we both press the GREEN wool, like this:

We finished the trade.

If you want to add SpaceCoins to the offer, see there are some gold nuggets, ingots and blocks below the area where you add your items.

The gold nugget is 1 SpaceCoin, the ingot is 10 SpaceCoins and the gold block is 50 SpaceCoins. So if I want to add 130 SpaceCoins to my offer, I press the gold block twice (50 x 2 = 100) and the ingot 3 times (3 x 10 = 30).

Important Note: No scam reports will be accepted anymore. It is everyone’s choice to not use the safe trade, but they do so at their own risk!