So I did some plugin updating today, which rules! Few good things, few bad things.

• Mob Spawning is FIXED! We can spawn slimes and endermen! Will we though...we'll see. Possible cheatarena game?
• We disabled a lot of commands that changed the gameplay a lot, for example, /weather. This will mostly effect admins, but it makes the game a bit more equitable. Check the command list to the side.
• rTriggers broke. That's our MOTD, and custom command plugin. So, until I figure it out, no more /fackel or /opfa. I AM working on it though.
• IF you're paying attention to the list of member commands....multiple homes are now supported. HOWEVER it's off for now, until we figure out how to limit it to some number we decide...for example, 3.
• Lockchest seems to be discontinued. We may move to lockette...but we can't just switch, since we'd lose current locks. I'm looking into if we can have them concurrently, then phase it out later. Dunno.

Tell me if you discover other issues, happy mining :D

QUESTION So I think LockChest is no longer being updated...the only other chest locking plugin updated for 1317 bukkit (our version) is Lockette. Problem is...it uses signs. A LOT of them. Watch this video:

Surf here, we updated bukkit and a bunch of our plugins today. Tell me if something broke, as always with updates stuff can break :( Thanks!

Man, 1.5 sure is awesome isn't it? Doesn't it suck that we're without commands though? There's several ways we have to handle updates, and now that bukkit has taken OVER a week to make a recommended build for 1.5, a conversation needs to be had.

First, a brief explanation. Bukkit edits and overwrites Minecraft's code, so a Minecraft update often means bukkit needs to be greatly re-written. They have 3 statuses for builds of bukkit: Failed, Stable, and Recommended. Here's the difference:

• Failed: They made code changes, the program basically doesn't load
• Stable: It works, and most plugins work, but it's not fully tested or there's a few bugs
• Recommended: The build is thoroughly tested and has no bugs

For the most part, a stable build works well and doesn't have many errors, you just typically download the .jar file and put it in your minecraft directory, and it works. The problem is, our host uses a service called "MCMyAdmin" which ONLY allows automated install of recommended builds. This is usually a good solution for a host; it's easy to use and you're not putting potentially broken code running on your server (imagine if some untested code goes into an infinite loop and uses a ton of resources...badness). This is why we've been running without commands or anything since 1.5_02.

In theory, we can submit a ticket to the people at our server host and ask them to install a stable build. They should be willing to do that, however the issues are that the stable build can get updated every few hours when they're working on it, and the turnaround for getting it installed may be half a day or more. It begs the question how often do we want to have to update bukkit AND all our plugins. Also...these are essentially testing versions, they could cause errors to make the game unplayable OR potentially even corrupt the world.

The other option is to not upgrade to new versions of minecraft AT ALL until a new recommended bukkit is out. We keep the server at the current version, keep the current bukkit...and users would NOT be able to update their clients or they wouldn't be able to connect. There's tutorials out there how to keep 2 versions of the minecraft client on your computer, but it's a bit of a pain...at least we'd have the tools to stop griefers and such.

With that explanation in mind...what would you prefer?

What a week folks! Obsidian died, we moved to a new hosting company, we got bukkit installed and painstakingly configured its setup, got our most recent backup restored, and are off and running! Here's a list of stuff you need to know:

We've officially committed to the new domain name, www.teh3l3m3nts.com, for this website and the server address (you still need to add the port to the server address in minecraft, so mc.teh3l3m3nts.com:1489).

We've set up the permission structure based on groups, and you can see the official list of commands per-group in the spreadsheet linked to on the sidebar. To see what group you're in, type /list.

Our map got uploaded, but we lost like 3 days of work from the last backup I downloaded. At this point it's been a week since any of us have worked on it, so hopefully it isn't too much of a shock :(

We'll be better about making backups public, you can see the link to the backup AND it's age on the sidebar. They're hosted to my (surf) dropbox in the public folder, so I'm not too concerned about data-loss. They're like 900MB, but whatev.

With the new control of the permissions and such, we're finally gonna list the server and see if we can't get some new players in. Hopefully we'll meet some cool people and get some epic structures going.

That's pretty much it, get the word out for the new address, if you haven't e-mailed us with contact info hit us up at minecraftpisspants@gmail.com and let's get back to some mining!