Its been a long time since I have posted a changelog update to the website, I post changelogs live to our Discord channel #changelogs so make sure you have discord and are part of PirateCrafts Discord server to get alerts on Announcements and changelogs!

August 2019 Changes

1. Updated Crew Guide to include tax information
2. Increased monsters activation range from 16 blocks to 24, hopefully you now get targeted by creepers more.
3. Enabled network compression on main survival server at 64, this takes more CPU but it should cut down on network overhead, this makes network connections faster at the expense of our CPU, not client side.
4. Moved to a different Java branch that will allow me to test newer versions of Java
5. I reset all crews fee status back to not enabled, you will have to re-enable your /crew fee set
6. Crew updates
   • Percentage of leaders online to demote another leader was added, at present its 75% leaders online to demote another leader.
   • You’ll need to pay a fee to set a crew fee /crew fee set of £500, you have to invest some money to try and make it back over a long period, be invested in your crew.
   • Crew fees should be shown in /crew profile now, I re-branded “fee” to tax in crew profile, but the command is still fee
   • Admins can now purge crews from players with a command (offline ones)
   • When a player is auto purged, a message is added to the crew BB
7. I built a micro website to show in-game polls live in a browser this evening (to keep track of if we should move hosts)
8. We moved hosts to Germany! This is a major change and a weeks of work.
   • Crazy dedicated server update in everything, Network, NVME SSD, RAM the speed!
   • Re-made the live map web-server with SSL and its back up
   • Fixed Voting
9. Added +1 map zoom level to see the whole of the live map, I added an extra zoom level to the map to see the whole map!
10. Re-rendered the entire map at 30 degrees angle instead of 60 for more detail to be shown on builds
11. Mods (Commodore) now have /vanish
12. @xeron Has moved /warp shop3 from the old shop location to a new location at the bottom of /warp shop2 and the new area is being built
13. Render distance on the server is now bumped to 4 (from 3) and the servers handling this perfectly fine, so we should be set to bump it again soon.
14. Re-factored my backup script, its one of the reasons I wanted to move to a better host as backups were taking 3-5 Hours to complete and taking up all the CPU resources making the server laggy every day, the backup now finishes in 6 minutes! God bless NVME.
15. Shops S81, S82, S83, S84 have been removed
16. Buycraft (store) do not auto change http traffic to https traffic, I have updated all links in https://piratemc.com/donate/ to link specifically to the https SSL because of BuyCrafts blunder.
17. New Added Ender pearl Cooldown (as requested 100 million times!) Currently set at 5 seconds.
18. Fixed language file missing for “not enough leaders online to vote on demotion” this now outputs text.
19. New crew feature Crews can now have descriptions!
    1. /crew description Your crew description
20. You can now buy a tame horse with a saddle at /warp south to travel once you get to the warp. £100 at present, see Hoofman for your sale!
21. Changed the maximum a crew leader can charge their members per day to £1 from £5
    ver, tri, isen, csn, cotij, rome and pse all have had their tax set to £1 a day from £5.
22. Removed /me from cross server chat
23. Brought the Creative server to the new host
24. Sea artist role now inherits Captain! Yo ho ho!
25. Website: Added competitions to forum menu bar, how did I miss this? removed server polls from menu, moved server chat in menu.
26. Competition created for creating a Creative pirate spawn on creative

September 2019 Changes

1. August BOTM Winners @Xeron, @MysticTitan, @RoMich02 awards given 10k, 7.5k and 5k claim blocks.
2. /auc 10 was added.
3. Added: /brew info – Information about your own drunkenness
4. Creative: Fixed VoxelSniper
5. Fixed live map for creative! With SSL!
6. Hovering over parts of the map now show the region filename, easy way to diagnose which region is which without having to overlay squares all over the map.
7. Privateer ( Helpers) will now receive /helpop messages.
8. Removed Missive about skeleton horses being removed every 30m as they are now handled by the entity manager
9. Adjusted position of /warp shop1 & 2 spawn locations and ‘huts’ to have a better and more fair layout. Shop2 was changed last week.
10. Deckhands and Cadets now have /kit claim can be used every 6 hours for
    1. 1 x Golden shovel (Claim tool) with lore/description
    2. 1 x Stick with lore/description
11. Live map The end Figured out the weird lighting for rendering the end, Changed the perspective to 30 degrees to match the main map & did a full render of the end.
12. PirateCraft ticket system (Help desk) is now live.
    I have opened up a Help desk system to open tickets in private between players and staff, this way reports can be auto assigned to the correct team and issues can be closed when they are solved. A helpdesk/ticket system is designed for reporting issues and requesting things, so lets trial this out as an alternative to the forums, you will need to sign up to create a ticket (Screw having anonymous tickets created!)
    What kind of things would I create a ticket for?
    1. Reporting Bugs & Glitches
    2. Reporting player(s) or Crews
    3. Reporting a build (A stone box ruining a view for screenshots)
    4. Requesting help in-game (For @Helper currently no helper agents are setup)
    5. Request land regeneration (Back to new land!)
    6. Request land restore (Restore an area from backup)
    7. Request to remove claims (Following the rules)
    8. Request a new feature/suggestion for the server in detail
       
       Do not use the ticket system for:
    9. Do NOT use this ticket system for unban requests, those have to remain public in the forum.
    10. Do NOT post drama between people/crews
13. !cross server chat are back with the bug fixed with people being able to use colors in the messages.
14. Got around to updating the script that updates the punishment tracker website, back up and live (Updated once a day)
    1. Direct https://bans.piratemc.com/
    2. Embedded https://piratemc.com/punishments/
15. You can Trust AccessTrust ContainerTrust PermissionTrust UnTrust an ENTIRE crew on your claims now! (Any crew!)
    This works with any crew not just your own! You can give another crew just button access if you wanted! or give another crew trust on a sub-claim!
    You have always have access to /trust public for public access for everybody.
    
    Remember, if you do a crew trust outside of your claim it will put it on ALL your claims, Triple check you are standing in your claim before you trust an entire crew on all of your claims, you use a stick for this by right clicking on the block you are standing on
    1. /Trust group. <crewtag> Build/break/explosion toggle etc (you are TRUSTING them)
    2. /AccessTrust group.<crewtag> Access to use buttons etc
    3. /ContainerTrust group.<crewtag> Not really used on PirateCraft as we do not lock chests, but this is to give access to chests.
    4. /PermissionTrust group.<crewtag> Allows every single person in that crew to set permissions for that claim, not advised.
    5. /UnTrust group.<crewtag> untrusts that crew.
16. Added us to a new vote websites, can you all go give us a vote please
    1. https://piratemc.com/vote10/
    2. https:///piratemc.com/vote11/
17. Website change, updated the vote widget. Fixed formatting, Changed the URLS and names to be like Vote Site #1 to be cleaner, added 2 new vote websites, updated the open all link, added some badges to pop and updated the paragraph on how to redeem keys.
    Updated this page to reflect the same changes.
    1. https://piratemc.com/information/vote/
18. Completely new anti-cheat system
    1. Disabled the global messages for people getting kicked
    2. Disabled the ghosts NPCs showing
19. Added a Raid Area 51 /kit area51_raid for 24 hours only
20. Added ender pearl cooldown to 5 seconds
21. Stopped the forced /motd being shown every hour
22. Crew update! You can now sort the global crew list! /crew list [name/size/kdr/founded/active] [asc/desc] For example to sort the list of all crews by player size, in ascending order (From 0 up) you would use /crew list size asc or it defaults to descending (highest to lowest). Other options are by name, KDR, founded date (to find new crews!) and most active!
23. Another crew update! There is now a crew rejoin cooldown of 6 hours, this figure isn’t definitive and can change to any this means you cannot leave a crew and re-join it within a 6 hour period
24. Update shop system (The ones you rent at /warp shop)
    1. Support for 1.13+ for when we upgrade
    2. Signs should hopefully restore better when a shop expires
    3. Loads of small background fixes
25. Updated jump pads at shops
26. Please welcome @AngelRow @TheAgentGamer and @Silverstone47 to the Helper team!
27. Temporary blocked spawning the dragon at the end as it was found out she plopped out an egg! We don’t want to have random eggs be used for economic purposes so have temporarily disabled the Ender dragon being spawn able until this glitch is figured out.
28. Ye scallywags did it! WE ARE NUMBER ONE (on minecraftserverlist.pro under the advert)
29. Fixed TopG and PlanetMinecraft votifier working, it was set to our old IP

October 2019 Changes

1. DOUBLED Maximum render distance From 4 to 8 This means twice the amount of chunks are loaded for EACH player online, a few things this will change:
   1. Mobs will activate sooner
   2. Crops will grow in those loaded chunks
   3. You can see pirates sooner
   4. Redstone contraptions will work in closer proximity
   5. This will double the entire servers load on CPU/RAM/Disk so this is quite a jump, If this is too much stress when there are a lot of users on I will have to decrease this back to 4 or try 6, this may not be a permanent change.
      
      Note: I used to use a Dynamic Render distance plugin, but it kept making people invisible (annoying).
      
      View distance are the chunks loaded in a radius around each player, each chunk is 16 blocks wide, so 8*16=128 blocks radius around each player.
      
      Very important, Larger render distance means more data being sent from server <-> client. More data on bad internet connections creates client side network lag, if people start saying “Lag*” this is because they need to reduce their client render distance and is out of my control. It’s up to the player to set their own render distance, we were set on 4, so if you were smooth on 4 and this bump to 8 now lags for you, reduce your client to 4. This is one of the major reasons I had the server set on 4, if people cannot set this themselves and blame the server, I will set it back to 4 again. Please tell people this if they complain, this wont be the server lagging.
2. Added Bazurka as forum moderator, added Admin badge, updated LazyDog11’s forum badge to admin.
3. Made a new forum badge for Super Admin and set it for max on the forums
4. Re-created the staff application from scratch, now all staff applications will go through this one form as its dynamic (This took way way longer to do than expected)
   If you have already submitted a staff application you do not need to do it again <3
   1. https://piratemc.com/information/staff-application/
   2. Changed website navigation to only have 1 staff link under “information” & also fixed some links on the homepage that were backwards via a report.
5. Updated the Team page to reflect the more active staff & add all the new team members! I have also Added boxes to show which roles we need more staff in (Nearly all of them) The positions with no team members are priority (Like media and developer)
   1. https://piratemc.com/information/team/
6. Server side block connections will be active for 1.13+ clients now were on this new host
7. Website: Added Ticket link in main menu under “information” as “Request staff support” and updated footer of website, replaced the blog link with a support link and changed the “Ask for support” button to link to the ticket website.
8. Entire vote plugin has been fully replaced.
   1. There are now monthly prizes for the top voters
   2. Visit /warp cove and visit the vote room for more information
9. Massive update to the Ship plugin which gives us much smoother sailing, faster ships and mobs move on (some) ships.
10. Renamed the animation discord channel to #video to also be available for any video ideas you have for when we get a videographer.
11. Please welcome @Taulov to Commodore (Moderator) on his 2 week trial period!
12. Disabled the Anti Cheats Chat spam filter as we have our own.
13. 15min cool down for /afk You afk auto after 15 mins inactivity, so this cooldown matches this automatic setting, If you afk, play for 14 mins then afk again, you are using it too much.
14. Added WorldBorder Support for Ships to stop ships at the world border
15. Brewing Reapply Potion Effects even if the player has got them already
16. Removed the broadcast for every single vote people make, instead it only broadcasts when a user votes on ALL vote websites in that day
    1. You can toggle all broadcasts from the vote plugin yourself with /vote ToggleBroadcast This is ALL vote broadcasts mind, so you may miss important messages. Hopefully the new messages only showed via people voting on all websites will resolve the spam
17. New website online pirate widget! I re-made our online pirates widget from scratch for the website! I actually made this about 8 months ago and just needed to polish off a few things! Its now live!
    1. Live updating! Leave a page open and it’ll auto refresh itself with whos online!
    2. Dynamically loaded, so if the website cant connect to the main server for any reason it wont slow down loading the website pages.
    3. Sort users by alphabetical A-Z or Z-A.
    4. Sort by rank (put staff at top/bottom)
    5. Search for an online user or search by staff rank in the online list!
    6. Now says staff rank next to their username
    7. Added/removed staff as needed & slightly changed colours.
18. Sadly I had to allow people to say “yes” in chat again, instead of replacing it with “aye” due to the crew plugin needing a “yes” to leave a crew
19. Entities can now move on Brigs & Brigs are 2.5x faster in Cruise and 2x in maneuver. (Villagers, Cows, pigs, horses etc)
    1. I have only updated brigs for now as a small trial/test just incase something bad happens!
20. I’m looking for #help_wanted on Discord for people to build some pirate themed 1vs1 arenas, this will be a very easy arena to get us started and testing on a PVP server without having to make something massive and we can get testing quickly. Please read the #help_wanted channel on discord.
21. @CallieMav is back! With a vengeance already starting on some custom mobs! (for the Halloween event)
22. Halloween crate CalypsosCoffer was dropped
23. Fixed an issue with shop owners being offline and not getting money
24. Halloween donation sale happened
25. CalypsosCoffer added to vote crate
26. CalypsosCoffer keys auto dropped for the Halloween event period every hour.

November 2019 Changes

1. PvP tag Pirates now get untagged when their enemy dies
2. Updated WorldEdit and asynchronous plugins on both survival and creative to stop the oddities
3. Halloween event went live at /wrap halloween! with PvP off in the arena There are 7 Custom mobs and 2 Custom Bosses! Make sure you come prepared!
   1. Please check the blog post for the crazy amount of effort put in by @CallieMav for this Halloween 2019 event.
4. Website – Added Halloween logo and banner!
5. I have fully retired our old Dedicated servers from Canada, these have served us amazingly over the years, so F’s in chat to these machines that will actually be removed from the data center now as they were legacy machines.
6. Teamspeak server was hosted on our old main Dedi recently, I’ve not seen any activity on it so will not be creating a new TS server unless there is a request from a lot of players to keep it, most people that were active on it have just moved to using Discord Voice Chat, F’s in Chat for Teamspeak.
7. Major Wiki Update I did a mammoth update to the Wiki, I updated the entire core MediaWiki 2 whole versions, which means I had to update ALL the plugins for it, Emptied the cache (You will have to log in again) but most importantly by doing all the upgrades I was able to add a WYSIWYG Editor, this means you edit the Wiki pages like you are using word! No need to deal with code! (Code is still available to edit manually) This will make editing 90% of pages 100% easier being able to just select and format text/images! This means anyone can easily edit Wiki pages now!
   1. The old WikiEditor will still be shown
   2. When editing a page, give it a few seconds to load the new editor
   3. Pages with complex templates will not display these templates nice at all, you will need to edit these as code still (use the code button)
8. Wiki Update – Player Templates I’ve spent the last few days learning how to make custom templates for MediaWiki (holy hell what a learning curve) There is a terrible copy/paste “Info box” that people use, that doesn’t work in the editor, doesn’t work on mobile and displays weird. I created a player template that auto gets your skin from UUID and Auto fills out Punishment & Stats URLS, and its simpler, works on mobile and in the editor.
   1. Example 1 (Info box on the right)
   2. Example 2 (Without a custom image)
      
      If people use this to update their profiles/the wiki about players I will create one for crews too!
      
      Your Skin will be pulled automatically and displayed if you fill in the UUID section, OR you can set your own image.
9. Please welcome @Taulov as full time commodore! Trail is up!
10. Wiki got some navigation! I figured out how to add some navigation to special pages on the wiki to find things easier!
11. Wiki FAQ Updated please make sure to add any frequently asked questions/answers to this page
12. Creative plots plugin updated
13. Added Ships to creative
14. Added ships plot plugin to creative (Keep ships in plots)
15. Removed the creative custom generated creative world, it didn’t get used at all!
16. Gave everyone /gm 1 and /gm 0 on Creative to toggle if you are for some reason put into survival (or to test things as survival)
17. Fixed a ton of Craftsman perm issues that was still set to the hub server instead of creative
18. New sea world on Creative! its a flatland but its sea with a proper sea bed (to create islands and test ships, and with gm 0 now you can test a lot more!)
19. Fixed forums after an update broke them loading
20. Fixed forum CSS to not have writing for ants
21. Removed Books opening via NPC’s the developer accidentally built in a kill switch to auto stop 100’s of servers and stop any of them coming up again!
22. Changed the formatting for Crew/Ally chat for those people that were spamming with &k in their ranks, it should only display their Crew Ranks in that format now. Since there is no filter/perms for this formatting these (yet) people that use this will have their crew rank removed/removed from the crew they are in. Feel free to blame these people for the formatting that will be removed from your custom ranks for crews.
23. Removing everything Halloween
24. Added new banner to website about the Discord Giveaway
25. Renewed all SSL certs for maps and other sub domains. (Maps back up)
26. Created all the kits, script & permissions for PirateCraft advent calendar 2019

December 2019 Changes

1. Added Citizens opening books again (No auto updater!)
2. Updated our custom made Pirate Utilities.
3. PvP tag plugin added /newbie command to check time left and /newbie disable to disable protection before time.
4. Enabled anti-caps filter in Ally chat/Crew chat/Msg/Me/mail
5. Some progress on new /server play (whitelisted)
6. Started color coordinating the /motd on each server to the same colors I have in the server list for each server, Test server & Play server now have updated /motd
7. Removed the terrible tab formatting on Test/Play servers
8. Been working with @Creeper to get bugs ironed out on the Custom Crew score plugin I teased ages ago so we can get that live! Were close to release! Been testing that today too, this is based on an algorithm by @Xeron to give each crew its own score.
9. The Discord #giveaway ended and I gave out the Captain rank to the winners
10. Removed Discord Giveaway banner from website
11. Survival /motd re-formatted.
    1. Changed color scheme to match the server list Yellow/Orange, Fixed overlapping arrow at bottom, Added Forum/News (for blogs) instead of just an arrow to show where the contents coming from (discord later), Made clicking the crew profile button instant instead of “suggesting” the command.
    2. Un-stickied a ton of old forum posts so they are no longer in motd.
12. Changed /me just white italics, I have the option to have different formatted /me in the future based on permission (Maybe a VIP custom me) to stop the spam from the purple as it were. Also hovering over /me messages tells the user what/how these messages are.
13. PMs /msg /m /tell /pm /t /w /whisper is now fixed
14. Updated 1.13-1.15 Roadmap
15. Added 1.15 Protocol hack to Survival/Creative/Test 1.12.2 servers so 1.15 clients can connect to the 1.12.2 server.
16. Updated bungee server for 1.15