Horses, hardened clay, carpets, and leads — these are what I would call the highlights of this update, but you can read the details over at the wiki’s version history. Here’s some things you should know about the new stuff on this server.

Updated information below as of August 15th.

Horses

Horses are per-world. You cannot move horses from one world to the next (except through alpha nether portals, I think). This limitation is true for all servers. If you find a horse in the outworld, please don’t ask me to move it. I can’t. They will spawn very slowly in plains biome. They can only spawn when there’s room left on the animal cap for that world, which includes loaded animals and villagers. (not hostile mobs, bats, or squid) We currently have horse ranches on Delta and Gamma with plenty of untamed horses to go around. You can share horses with specific players using “/share horses” (use “/unshare” to remove that share) or give a horse to another player using “/transfer horse “.

Saddles

Normally saddles are found in dungeon chests or from villagers. If you don’t have a saddle and can’t find one, I have some in the coin shop. It’s cheaper than what you can get from villagers.

Nametags/HorseArmor

Like saddles, these cannot be crafted. They can only be found in new worlds, so you’ll have to search the outworld or outworld nether fortresses, which now have many loot chests.

Leads

They are not yet secured. Anyone can break them off of fence posts, and in fact they break on their own sometimes when chunks are loaded/unloaded. I’d recommend putting your horses in pens instead of just tying them to a fencepost. Only use leads tied to posts temporarily or to pull animals.

Minecarts/Boats

Don’t forget you have to sneak/shift to get out of them now. 😉

For those unaware, this week you can hunt spawn eggs on the outworld in grassy areas. While you’ll find some laying on the ground and some in the hands of zombies, the dangerously cute bunny-creepers can hold a few of them. Each hit with a sword or arrow has a good chance of dropping a spawn egg. April 1st will be your last chance to get some. Early on April 2nd, I’ll be disabling the Easter scripts and creating a new outworld. (Froggerooh defeated the enderdragon!) The upcoming outworld will be all nether, so it’ll be a great opportunity to find some nether quartz ore.

For those with spawn eggs, don’t forget that you can actually name them in an anvil. So when you spawn that creature, it’ll have the name you gave the egg. This is a new 1.5 feature.

To those without spawn eggs after April 1st, they can be sold in shops or traded. I know us moderators will probably put some of ours in the coin shop.

It’s the Redstone Update. My particular favorite addition is the comparator, but it’s a tough call between that and the hopper. With quartz block being a new thing, that’s saying something about the comparator. So, rather than list the whole ample changelog here, I’d like to point out some server-specific things that this update brings.

Better Snow Stacking

One particularly curious addition was snow stacking. Not a week after I hacked in snow stacking on our server, Mojang adds it into a snapshot. The snow layers are twice as expensive, but the new implementation comes with a hidden surprise: you can now walk on each layer of snow instead of full/half blocks heights. Nifty. There’s some clever uses for that, besides the obvious aesthetic. (On a related note: our old netherbrick recipe is removed too, to make way for the slightly more balanced one Mojang introduced)

Minecart Hopper: Robber on Rails

Anybody who has been following the previous post’s comments would know that I did some testing for bugs or exploits. While some good things came out of it (like a script that blocks people from placing hoppers under shop chests, another script that blocks new players from placing flint&steel in dispensers, and catching a bug that would have caused widespread fire destruction) I couldn’t determine a way to prevent exploitation of hopper minecarts. So I disabled them until there’s sufficient protections in place. This will probably depend on a Craftbukkit API implementation of an event that tracks hoppers, or at least minecart hoppers.

Deadbolt and the New Containers (band name?)

Deadbolt doesn’t support trapped chests, hoppers, or droppers yet, but it will block hoppers from being placed under a locked chests.

New Outworld: P15-006

We now have a new outworld to explore and mine. It’s the full deal with no modifications — overworld, nether and end. A particular interest to players will be the new quartz ore in the nether.

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Now some future stuff to look forward to:

Mob Names — Because We Weren’t Attached Enough When Our Dog Ran Into Lava

With the addition of being able to add names above mobs, I’ll soon implement some sort of feature that’ll allow you to name your current pets without the use of a spawn egg.

Sandstone and Stone DoubleSlabs

Since these are now a permanent fixture in Minecraft textures, I’ll be creating recipes for these, along with the other blocks that are otherwise unobtainable. This is assuming, of course, we can determine a good recipe for each of these.

Scoreboards and Custom PVP

Before you ask, yes, I’ll be using the new scoreboard for the PVP scripts… if I can. It’s possible it won’t fit in with a full server. I’ll have to do some testing. Still, it’s interesting stuff and there’s a couple features in it that I want to take advantage of.

Easter Eggs

We have something planned for this year’s Easter Egg hunt. It’s not fully balanced yet, but it’s working better than it did in 1.4.7. You’ll be able to get all sorts of mob eggs again soon.