In addition to having costumes for you and your pets, there’s a few other treats on the server this Halloween.

We now have pumpkin mobs running around. They might not be tougher, but they stick around during daylight hours. So watch out! If you kill any mobs during the next week, you might be treated with a head drop. (1-5% drop rate for most mobs) This will include PLAYER HEADS! Yes, player heads will drop 50% of the time from PVP deaths in survival worlds. You just need to fight in a pvp enabled region. If you don’t know where one is, you can use the Colosseum in the West of Final City.

Lastly, any horses spawned (including natural spawns, breeding, and spawn eggs) during the next week will be skeleton or zombie horses! This is your only chance this year to make your own spooky horse and the first opportunity ever on this server. Remember, you can transfer or share ownership of horses.

From the windy spire on the mountain-top, to the spider infested cabin deep in the woods; from the moaning in the swampland graveyard, to the dripping in the dark dungeon below. What are some of the spookiest places on the server? Share the location in the comments. If you’re unsure whether it’s spookiness level qualifies or if it requires a certain perspective, post it anyway! I wouldn’t be playing Minecraft if I didn’t have imagination. I’ll pick some, take some spooky photos, and share those in a follow-up post. If you fancy some photography of your own, share those too!

This year we’re using LibsDisguises, which gives us a broader range of options. Above you can see me using “/d player Dinnerbone setskin PseudoKnight”. You can disguise as almost all entities with a wide variety of options. It’s enabled in all worlds but Frog Park. You can even disguise other mobs! This is especially fun with horses and dogs.

Commands:
“/d <entity> [options]” (disguise yourself)
“/u” (undisguise yourself)
“/dentity <entity> [options]” (disguise another mob)
“/undentity” (undisguise another mob)
“/dhelp [entity]” (get available options for an entity type)

Examples:
“/d irongolem setviewselfdisguise false” (don’t display the irongolem disguise to yourself, so you can go in first person)
“/dentity cow setcustomname Dinnerbone” (set another mob as an upside down cow)
“/dentity player PseudoKnight” (set another mob disguised as me)
“/d horse setbaby true setstyle whitefield setcolor black” (set yourself as a black and white baby horse)

Have a happy Halloween!

UPDATE 2014-11-05: Disguises have now been disabled.

You know how in the last post I said “Calm down. Everything’s going to be fine.” Well, it turns out that may not be true.

A week ago someone with enough leverage decided they didn’t want everything to be fine. As I previously mentioned, a few of the major Bukkit developers decided to tear everything down, but failed. Mojang came and saved the day. There’s only one problem. There are code contributions from countless authors in Bukkit. One of the major contributors, upon learning that Bukkit was owned by Mojang, decided to legally enforce his copyright. So he sent a DMCA notice to any sites that distributed his code. The only comment I’ve found from Mojang on this issue was this post explaining their point of view and claiming the “allegations are therefore wholly unfounded”. There has been nothing since then, so clearly it’s not so cut and dry. In the mean time no one can access or update Bukkit. Everything’s in limbo.

So, the community stepped up, leveraging many developers growing distrust of Mojang and years of frustration with Bukkit’s organization, to work together on a new API for servers. It is called Sponge. This would take a LOT of work to accomplish, but would avoid some> of the legal issues with Bukkit as well as learn from some of the more fundamental issues with Bukkit’s API. Obviously the situation isn’t ideal, but the community is trying to adapt as fast as it can in a difficult situation.

This brings me to yesterday’s rumor that Microsoft is in talks to buy Mojang/Minecraft for $2 billion. At first I dismissed it outright. Notch has consistently shown resistance to this kind of buy out, as well as a distrust of large corporations like Facebook and Microsoft’s influence on the PC gaming space. However, this rumor isn’t going away and there was no response from Mojang. And as more small details trickled in, I began to doubt my intuition. I hope this isn’t the case, but if Microsoft controls the future of Minecraft, we have a problem. The mod community in part depends on Mojang’s good intentions. If Microsoft decided to enforce their copyright and EULA more strictly, this would nearly destroy the modding and possibly server community. Even if they didn’t, the mere threat of such litigation would be enough to stifle much of the work that has already been done. The golden days of Minecraft on PC could be over.

I’ve been waiting to see how things play out before I made this post. But while I know you may have missed the Bukkit fiasco, it’s doubtful you haven’t heard of the rumor of the Mojang purchase. All of this is following one of the longest development times for a Minecraft update (over 10 months), making you wonder: when will we ever see 1.8? I really don’t know. It’s frustrating and sad, but as always I remain hopeful when there is doubt.

In the last few hours there’s been some “going-ons” that are causing a lot of bad speculation, misinformation, and doomsaying regarding the future of Minecraft and CraftBukkit, which is what most servers run. Kindly ignore these overreactions, which are not uncommon. The drama started when the core Bukkit team decided to halt development, due to some misguided fear of Mojang enforcing the EULA despite their close cooperation and mutual benefit. But since Bukkit was bought by Mojang some time ago and in fact contains much of their code anyway, Dinnerbone of Mojang promptly announced that he’s going to continue Bukkit’s development. He’s already started updating it for 1.8, which will be no small feat. It’s too early to tell if this will mean we’ll get 1.8 earlier or later than we would have otherwise, but I’m hopeful that Dinnerbone’s familiarity with 1.8 as well as Craftbukkit will help the process along.

Notable changes in 1.7.6, 1.7.7, 1.7.8, 1.7.9, and 1.7.10:

• I’ve got nothing.

These updates only really add support for features that we can’t use (yet), and the switch to UUIDs (for the forthcoming name-changing) have caused headaches for both admins and programmers. For example, before I was able to add an offline player to the whitelist with “/perm player setgroup PseudoKnight Everyone”. Now I need to get a player’s UUID and use “/perm player setgroup 617a67e5-7988-4645-af56-42c770a6dda5 Everyone”.

So why did I update? Eventually I had to take the plunge to take advantage of plugin updates as well as 1.8. So I waited for Forge support and for plugin authors to fix some major issues caused by the UUID changes. It took me a few hours to sort out some unpredictable bugs, it seems to be running smoothly now (minus an extension). We’re technically on 1.7.9, but we’ll be on 1.7.10 shortly and the clients are compatible.

Our server costs are modest — about $40/month — and they’ve been largely funded by supporters. However, when those funds fall short, ScottyD covers the bills. Our supporters get some things in return, but nothing major. But now a few things are changing. First, ScottyD is going through a work transition, and while he can cover the costs for the next billing cycle, it would be nice if he didn’t have to. Secondly, Mojang made some clarifications on what is and isn’t acceptable for server funding. While I don’t believe our current system violates the spirit of what they’re trying to do, I want to respectfully adhere to the strictest interpretation of their rules. So, moving forward we will no longer give supporters some of our own materials through Frog Park coins, and we can no longer call them donations since we want to give something back.

Instead, when you help pay for server costs, you also get cosmetic “perks” according to the cumulative amount you have paid. This is to be compatible with our previous donation system, so all previous donations are being converted to the appropriate tier. Currently I’ve only created two tier perks, but more are forthcoming and will be retroactively applied. Accordingly with Mojang rules, all current and future perks will be cosmetic.

• $5+ tier
  You get a green name and icon showing that you’ve supported the server.
• $10+ tier
  You can shoot off randomly generated fireworks in Frog Park.
• $15+ tier
  You leave a trail and death locations on the live map in survival.

There will soon be a new page called “Support Our Server” in the above menu where you can see the current tiers, perks, server costs, and payment methods (and maybe a progress indicator of some kind, though that might be challenging), but we wanted to make a post to note the changes and so that people know that it’s a good time to contribute. Until I can setup a more appropriate payment method on the page, you can pay through this link.

If you have any questions, concerns or suggestions, please comment below.

[Update #1] Scotty informed me that only 14 hours after sending out his email to past donators, we’re already set for another six months, thanks to two generous contributors.
[Update #2] Apparently we’re up to nine months now. Wow, guys!

This small but dense course is comprised of many subtle height changes that contribute to a unique course challenge. This is mostly due to the prevalent use of cocoa beans in various configurations. It’s enjoyable, but fairly hard.