Rebuilding Our Rails

Hyde's Tower Rail Depot, otherwise known as Hyde Park, has been upgraded with booster rails, meaning manual launch from the station is not required, and the line is now electrified as far north as Government Center Station, although that station has not been converted. The increasingly large Portal Network is our primary means of travel north of Hyde's Tower at this time.

In the Nether, a new greenhouse was erected near Hyde's Tower Prime, the base growing up around Portal N-0. Portal N-3 (Wells' Inn) now has a safehouse constructed over it, although one still needs to run across open terrain to reach that safehouse.

In other news, the server is now running 1.6.6.

Taming the Nether

The hilariously large industrial output of Hyde's Tower continues to bend the Nether to its will. Today I walked from Hyde's Tower to Hyde's Wall in two minutes, a trip that normally takes 20 on the Causeway. Portals are now popping up faster than we can number them, and new roads are cutting through the Nether. Tantalizingly, near the Portal of Hyde's Walls there is a continuation of the Nether Causeway that continues North, out of sight, and has a railroad. There's a sign asking people not to enter, but the passage intrigues -- few expeditions have ventured north of The Wall -- Hyde's original expedition on 30 January, and Xyvaz and Caffienix's expedition in March are the only well-known voyages beyond the current location of The Wall. Is there something North of the Wall, or is somebody building a Nether Fortress? Questions abound, but exploration continues.

Emergency Rollback

Last night, shortly before 0000 hours, there was a catastrophic crash of the Minecraft server process on WHEATLEY. A large percentage of the region files both in DIM-1 (the Nether) and DIM-0 (Prime Material Plane) were corrupted. At 1245 today I initiated rollback to 2300 last night. Server is now stable and running on 1.6.5.

I am eternally grateful for my hourly backup script.

The Dark Side of the Duct Tape

Portal constructs goes unbated in the Nether. Fort Beta and the Wall both have Portals constructed, although the shorter route through the Nether is proving extremely hazardous. Hyde's Tower Prime, the base camp around Portal N-0, is rapidly growing into a safe zone from the many hazards of the Nether.

The Second Age of Hyde's Tower

As many of you are undoubtably already aware, 1.6 has launched. The server has been upgraded, and the Portal-0 has been established as the prime Nether Portal.

A few observations from the New World:

• The Hyde's Tower Rail Depot and Government Center Station are, indeed, off-line. Manually launching a cart on the golden rails from Hyde's Tower will get you to GCS, but the line to Arcology was never electrified. That must be walked.
• The server is exhibiting some very strange network behavior. Message to the server arrive immediately, but it seems to be spending a long time before sending messages back to the client, creating some kind of artificial lag. I experienced this while Awells, who was logged on at the same time, did not. I expect the netcode needs a bit of tightening up.
• I've been to the Nether and back. Portal-0 (Hyde's Tower), Portal-1 (Arcology) and Portal-3 (Wells' Inn) at least all link to the same portal netherside, and that Portal takes you back to Portal-0. So getting to Hyde's Tower is easier than ever. Getting elsewhere might be a problem, especially with large swaths of the rail system offline

That said, the server is up. Go nuts. I expect patches to deal with the netcode soon. When I patched the server at 0800 ET this morning, we were already up to 1.6.2.

What Was New Is Now Old

Yesterday I pushed the repaired -1/-2 region back onto the server. So far there have been no complaints of crashing performance, so it appears Jonored was successful at repairing the region. We still wait with bated breath for the 1.6 release, and work has begun on securing the world against the sudden burst of flammable objects. It it not believed at this time that wooden half-blocks will become flammable, but if they do we'll know soon enough. If the lava dock suddenly bursts into flames, nobody can say we weren't warned.

Also, soon the Nether will open up. At this time, there are four known Portals in the world:

• PORTAL-0: Hyde's Tower
• PORTAL-1: Arcology (sealed)
• PORTAL-2: Castle Caineach
• PORTAL-3: Wells' Inn

If there are any others, now might be a good time to sing out. Very shortly after the patch linking portals in the Nether will commence, and extraneous or unknown portals might confuse construction efforts on the farside.

Prelude to 1.6

Notch has released the 1.6 change list, scheduled to come out later this week. I am optimistic it will help fix many of the issues we've been having with the server's lag and corruption issues. Over the weekend a new rollercoaster started construction just west of Well's Inn. Also, a new, bright red building has been erected in Hyde's Tower.

Be on alert for the 1.6 upgrade being launched, and be sure to post when you notice it goes. I'll update the server as soon as possible.

Field Trip!

WHEATLEY is moving today, so there will be a few hours of downtime this afternoon as things get reorganized. You can probably expect the IP to be updated and the server back online by 1900 ET tonight.

Pending Downtime

WHEATLEY is taking a field trip on Friday. There will be a few hours of downtime.

Most of the new region has been explored at this point, but development has been holding off on speculation that jonored's recovery attempt will be successful. Otherwise, server traffic has been low the past few days, likely due to stability issues.

And Yet The Ground Still Trembles

Since we dropped the bomb on the Quarantine zone, addition errors of the same type have been emerging, suggesting the problem is not as solved as we might like. It is unclear at this time if the problems are with the new region, or if the same issue has developed elsewhere in the world. If anybody has found a region of the map that seems to cause excessive server lag or End of stream errors, please let me know.

Slowly Refilling

Jonored has taken custody of the lost region to see if it cannot be repaired, but in the meantime only a small section of the replacement region has been explored. It is now clear it is generating from either a different seed or using a different algorithm than the rest of the world. I am unclear on how that happened, but I'm wondering if something changed in the way the seed was interpreted when the server moved from its original Windows Vista temporary server to HAL9000's Ubuntu environment.

Otherwise, the server has been pretty quiet for the last day.

Situation Dealt With

The very ill-timed corruption of server data has finally been resolved -- we identified the offending region and neutralized it. Testing on HAL9000 has shown the newly generated region to be free of the server-crippling issues that the original region caused. My apologies to anybody who had interests in the affected region. In good news, the Quarantine Beacon has been turned off.

In other news, new, highly dangerous lava art has been added to Hyde's Tower, and the Hyde-Government Central rail line is being reconstructed with a newer, nicer bridge. The exact magnitude of the expansion is not clear at this time. The Pixel Art fields have been expanded upon, and other changes seem to be underway across the world.

The snow drift north has ended, and now there seems to be some backfill to the south.

The Quarantine Zone

As anybody whose logged on in the last day or so know, the server now has a Quarantine Zone. Apparently an entire region of the server where the Glass Path leads will bring the server process to its knees if somebody enters there. Apparently the .mcr file is badly corrupted. I've been working with MCEdit, but the situation doesn't look good -- we may be rerolling that section of the world, and with the seed behaving differently than it did when we initially spawned the world, there may be cliffs. I'll be attempting repairs in a test environment before we do anything drastic to the server of record, but in case you still haven't heard, don't go down the Causeway east of Wells Inn. Please.

Winter is Coming

There can be no doubt anymore; the snows are moving north. The two major formations of snow coverage in the south, the one from Fort Beta, and the one from Fort Void, have joined together, and now the snow is as far north as the Sky Castle over Lake Wells. Both small islands in the lake are now completely snow-covered. Some projects suggest that the snow coverage will stop where it is, but we will continuing monitoring the situation.

Work at Caffeinix's base continues, but the commercial district of Hyde's Tower continues to expand. A new Wool Works now stands next to the Obsidian Works, and the much-blown-up Earthen Shoppe is now complete. A few Causeways have been expanded, and a new bridge has been built across the river northeast of Hyde's Tower.

Phoning It In

I'm on the road this week and next, with barely enough connectivity to post to this blog, so there's not a whole lot of actually playing Minecraft in my life right now. There was a server error last night that required a restart, but that's about the only news at the moment. So more than usual, sound off and give a report on what you've been doing. Otherwise this is going to be a short entry.

90 Days in Hyde's Tower

Yesterday marked a milestone for my imaging efforts. It has been 90 days since the cameras started rolling, and about 100 since the server first came up. To commemorate the occasion, I produced this short video detailing the construction of Hyde's Tower from shortly after the first city wall was erected.

Also, recent research has shown the snowfront is, in fact, drifting northeast from Fort Void. The exact cause is unknown, but we will continue monitoring the situation as it develops.

Coming Not Soon

Two headlines today, because I'm on a very slow Internet connection and don't have the time to get on-server.

First, according to Notch's most recent blog post, the Nether is coming to SMP with 1.6. If nobody has done so by the end of the week, I will be securing the Hyde's Tower portal. There are two other known portals in game, one at Acropolis (sealed) and one at Castle Munn (sufficiently far away as not to be scary.) 1.6's release date has not been announced, but it is not expected until June at the earliest.

Second, Caffeinix has issued another video. Message follows:

Bada-Boom

We've had a few new additions to the server this weekend, who are getting into their groove. This weekend a number of interesting things happened. Caffeinix built a new house on a mountain near Station Boston, now known as the House on Creeper Hill due to its constant stream of kamikaze shrub friends coming out of the woodwork. The base has been reinforced with Obsidian to help contain the issue.

In Hyde's Tower, the unexplained explosions continue, with one creeper exploding in the civic building, and another explosion tearing the floor of the Earthen Shoppe out and exposing part of the Hyde/GCS line. Exactly where these creepers are still spawning, and how weather is impacting their spawn rate is clearly not fully understood at this point.

Finally, a team of players confirmed that the default spawn point has, indeed, moved south by 30-60 meters. The new location has been lit, but no major improvements have been made yet. A new facility may be put there as a welcoming center, but until then, respawning is now slightly safer.