Server updates

ok, server is up and running. The map is old... at the point where the forge small version was almost done... but we have a working map

Here is the new IP... now lets bring this thing backto what it was, and better!!!
95.143.206.140:25765

Here's what the north half of the farm cave looked like 3 months ago, before I dug it down a few more layers yet:


Here's what it looks like now, after the revert to an older map:


Gentlemen, we have a CRAPLOAD of work to do, just to get back to where we were.

Remember that rail tunnel between the city and the farm cave dig site? It's also gone, completely gone as far as I can tell.

I'll get pictures of the forge to compare too when I get a chance

I suppose now is the time to discuss where to go from here? Everything we've done this entire year is now undone, and other than the farmcave digging, farmcave rail line and work on the forge I don't think anyone can mention anything from the top of their heads that we have done this year and now lost. Compared to all the stuff we did last year this shows a big decline in productivity, and quite the halt to the progress of the city.

A lot of this can be blamed on the farmcaves and lack of focus on other projects, making people less motivated to play and more eager to bide their time until a project that isn't 100% digging comes into play. Now with a ton of work in the caves lost, people are even less likely to want to play. I'm sure SW will continue his digging routine and I'm more of a digger myself so I can do some great work in there too when feeling motivated. But unfortunately I doubt many others will pull off miracles in there, so I'm thinking we need to get started on the future projects that we've been putting aside for later. If the farmcaves end up being the last thing to get finished in the entire city I don't see how that's a bad thing. It's bound to take a very long time and it will be glorious when it's done but I don't think we should let it kill the city. We could do so much more than this, so what are we waiting for?

Perhaps we should loosen up the restrictions and allow the usage of diamond picks in the farmcaves to speed up the digging, especially after all the work we've lost. If we enchant a bunch of them with unbreaking they can be a great help and motivater. I don't think our diamond collection will suffer a lot and losing a small piece of it is worth saving an entire year of our time, so maybe we can one day finish this majestic city. Perhaps we could make it a goal to replace every diamond used on a pick in the caves, so some people less willing to do mindless digging can raid for diamonds while crazy people like me and SW do the grinding in the caves.


On a sidenote, I just logged on the server and saw very little difference in the progress of the forge.

I completely agree with you sret... We have lost a LOT of work, and whatever it takes to keep things going, we should do. I would also like to give a mention to trainman in the digging of the farm caves. Although he doesn't look at the forums often, I saw him regularly digging away in the cave.

The forge is about 4 times smaller now than it was before we lost the city. Have a look at the pictures, that's the small version that looks crappy, not the dwarves city scale one that I'd put so much work into

Maybe we can redo the forge, not as a mere wall-o-furnaces project, but with one or more "industrial forge" modules. That's where you use chests, furnaces, and hoppers to create a machine that takes fuel from one chest, smeltables from another, distributes them over multiple furnaces, then gathers the resulting smelted products and puts them all into a third chest. The benefit is that you can smelt a lot of stuff very quickly with little effort, and by automating the process to move items into and out of a furnace, the greater efficiency of coal blocks can be utilized more reliably. The downside is that when an item is taken out of a furnace with a hopper, the XP produced by smelting it is lost.

It's a good idea, but there's two problems with it.

The first is that, even with build craft, those kind of systems are rather bulky, especially in large quantities. We have the ability to do it in vanilla now, but it's still a very clunky way of doing things.

The second is how it would look. I'm not sure that it would look big and epic like the rest of the city. I agree we want a slightly more industrial feel, however, we don't want to make it detract from the rest of the city

Well, yes it's a bit clunky, but we can hide the redstone and hopper mechanism inside a wall, with just the feed in/feed out chests exposed on the wall surface. Make that part of the forge design, with the rest of the forge still the wall-o-furnaces design, and you get the best of both worlds, form AND function. A bunch of furnaces we can smelt a little or a lot in, depending on how many furnaces we want to feed at one time, plus an autofurnace we can smelt a crapload of stuff really quickly if need be, albeit at the cost of not getting XP in the bargain. I'm sure one of the less-active members who's bored of stone-pick digging in the farm cave could be persuaded to come back online for the chance to build a nice big autofurnace.

I'm kinda having trouble visualising it... Obviously I've been out of action far too long

We should update the server to 1.6.4 some time soon.

Yeah Spec, that'd be a good idea.

On the topic of the forge, I think doing Spec's idea with a highly decorative room.
What comes to mind was my idea for a forge a while back, which then was a wall of furnaces and lava falls in the walls. It never was finished, but that basic idea could be brought to use for this one.

Server's been updated.

I don't follow the news much lately but last time I checked I heard 1.7 is gonna feature some nice terrain updates

sret wrote:Server's been updated.

I don't follow the news much lately but last time I checked I heard 1.7 is gonna feature some nice terrain updates

Which will not integrate with pre-existing chunks, including having generated structures like netherforts, strongholds, and dungeons disappear, unless we visit those areas and get those chunks to load AFTER updating to the new 1.6.4 version we just updated to. So someone needs to go exploring between now and then.

spectrumwars wrote:
Which will not integrate with pre-existing chunks, including having generated structures like netherforts, strongholds, and dungeons disappear, unless we visit those areas and get those chunks to load AFTER updating to the new 1.6.4 version we just updated to.  So someone needs to go exploring between now and then.  

I'm not sure I'm following, are you saying unless we go load the chunks with our stronghold etc between 1.6.4 and 1.7 they will all vanish? What will be in their place? The new terrain will only be in unexplored chunks like always, no?

Apparently the chunks will be there, but the generated structures won't be. Not entirely sure how that works, but that seems to be the main point of the entire 1.6.4 update, to fix this particular bug.

So if the update is there to fix it, why do we have to load the chunks?

sret wrote:So if the update is there to fix it, why do we have to load the chunks?

Because if we don't load the chunks, the save file doesn't overwrite the chunks with the new version of the savefile that will seamlessly integrate with the new biome/chunk system in 1.7 once that comes along.

Alright, sounds like this is something we need to plan out

Update 1.7.2 has been out for a while. We should probably update the server.

What about the chunk issues?

sret wrote:What about the chunk issues?

I've been through the stronghold. Dunno about any netherfortress, but now that we can smelt netherrack to make netherbrick, there's little in a netherfortress we need to keep. But yeah. someone should probably go out and wander about the netherfort for a few minutes before we update.

spectrumwars wrote:

sret wrote:What about the chunk issues?

I've been through the stronghold.  Dunno about any netherfortress, but now that we can smelt netherrack to make netherbrick, there's little in a netherfortress we need to keep.  But yeah. someone should probably go out and wander about the netherfort for a few minutes before we update.  

Well, I've wandered about the netherfort for a bit. Got a ghast tear, even. I would have stuck around longer looking for wither skeletons but the lag was pretty bad. I stomped out a LOT of netherfires trying to reduce the lag, but it didn't seem to help much. And I didn't have a Looting sword anyways.

Unless there's a netherfort someone knows how to find other than the one with the blaze grinder, I'd say we're safe to go for the update.

Alright. It should be updated now, just let me know if it isn't.

sret wrote:Alright. It should be updated now, just let me know if it isn't.

1.7.2 features such as stained glass and server-specific achievements work. Who wants to make us a server icon?