As many of you noticed, when the server gets close to full capacity, everything slows down noticeably. The amount of players online plays a role, obviously, and yet our current setup should be able to support an heavier load without issues. Some investigation told me that the core of the problem are the automated farms that have been built in Laurasia and Gondwana, in the core cities of each world (Central and Keystone City, respectively).

As such, I'm officially banning grinders, automated farms and large amount of animals around the spawn area of each world. While I can see the value of those elements, the problem comes from their location: the spawn areas of each world is constantly loaded, which means that any device placed in those locations is constantly loaded and active. The server's performance is thus directly affected.

This means that, in the area defined by a radius of about 150 blocks around each world's spawn point, no potentially laggy devices can be built. This includes gold and iron farms, chicken cookers, mob grinders (automated or not) and any related builds. You are free to do these anywhere else, just not around each world spawn area. The existing devices have been moved or will be in the coming days.


I'd also like to take this opportunity to remind all players to keep their automated farms under control. Most notably, we've had several chicken farms go out of control lately, slowing down the entire server for all players. Please be mindful of the impact of your actions toward others. The smoother the gameplay is, the better for all of us!

The Creeper's Lab resource pack has been updated tonight. Those who accepted it through the server will be automatically updated when you next join; others will have to download it from the resource pack page. Read on for the details, from pack maintainer Sphenicus!


Hey how's it goin, it's the crazy guy again. I made some changes to that resource pack doohickey you guys seem to like so much for some reason. The standard pack is still the same, with all it's taters and musics and whatnot. What was changed is how you change the standard pack. Before the way you would get a different pack was by downloading a full resource pack that included everything in the standard pack plus whatever was changed. This was largely due to the old system of resource pack management. With the new system allowing multiple packs to be active at once, I can now put together smaller "mini-packs" that only have a few files in them. This keeps file size down which is good for you guys cuz it wastes less space, and good for the website because it potential saves money on data transfer rates! To celebrate this update I've put together a highly demanded Classic Rock record pack. This pack includes 12 different classic rock songs from the good ol' 1960's and 70's on the records. The best part is since it doesn't have everything else with it that it's half the size of a full pack! (No seriously, the records alone are at least half the file size) Notato Edition has also been revamped as a Notato Add-On, containing only the rain graphic and the rain sound, which brings it down from around 40MB to 92KB. In the future I can easily prepare more mini-packs for records, ambient music, paintings, etc. if enough people want them. The possibilities are endless! So enjoy the new shizzle and remember to check out the FAQ whether you have questions or not because you still might learn something.


Founder and President of the Shiny Hats Club
Chairman of the Board of the Time-Space Travel Committee
Sphenicus

I'm introducting today a new map render for the main world, Laurasia. Instead of the previous 60 degrees angle, the Surface (3D) mode will use an angle of 30 degrees. This view looks more natural and makes most player structures, especially the tall ones, stand out much better. To allow a full world view to finally be available once again, a level of zoom-in has been sacrified.

Gondwana and Avalonia, due to their more extreme geography, will keep their current look. Switching the view would hide most player structures behind mountains, rendering the map useless in most situations.

The map is currently rendering and will take at least a few hours to complete due to the large size of the world.

I've reconfigured part of the server's settings so that the End can be reset without requiring an entire server restart. This will allow me to reset the End every few days as needed instead of every week or two, which will be useful now that we have more players interested in facing that challenge.

As a reminder, the End on the server gets periodically reset to give all players a chance to face the Ender Dragon, earn an egg and score the related achievement. Go forth, brave adventurers!