Minecraft 1.7.6 will be officially published tomorrow, 10:00 CET. It contains the new skin and name systems (required for name-changing).

— Jens Bergensten (@jeb_) April 8, 2014

This is one of those updates a server admin absolutely loaths, Jeb, the genius he is, has decided to change the username system in the core of minecraft as well as the skins system.

Why is this a ridiculously stupid move? Every single plugin ever made for Bukkit/spigot will break, Those legacy plugins that have stood the test of time and haven’t been updated in years that still work will finally break, good job jeb.

Im not sure how this will effect ranking/banning/donations but im sure as hell this is going to open up new methods to game the server, so new rules will have to be implemented as soon as people are able to change their usernames, I know that each player gets a Unique ID to track whos who, so each player should be unique even if they change their username.

This is only speculation at present, I may (and hope) to be wrong.

I highly suggest creating a new minecraft launcher profile that stays on 1.7.5 to continue to play PirateCraft, I cannot update until all the core plugins we use are updated.

Im afraid this update will stop new players joining due to the client auto updating minecraft and the hassle to create a 1.7.5 profile, In a sensible world the server browser would auto-detect the server version and apply the correct minecraft version, but no, we have Jebs thinking 🙁

I was browsing the web, as you do, when I came across these plugins that add NPC’s to multiplayer. But unlike existing NPC’s, such as villagers, these plugin based NPC’s look like minecraft players, can be named, bought, given gear, armour, follow paths, engage in conversation, etc. Ii was wondering if such a plugin would be possible for PirateCraft. This will enable players to increase a crew size, the longer they play, without the need to recruit other players. So, instead of having two ships with ten crew members, making the 20 player limit, there can be 20 players acting as captains, with crews of sizes thatr they can afford. These NPC’s can be used as guards, or pirates round the world, or travellers that you can kill. They can look like the British, redcoats, or the Spanish, or French, or pirates, dotted in and around forts. This will enable players to build thriving towns, much like the towns of the 17th centaury, with guards patrolling the streets, and gangs of pirates in street corners. By no means the server should be thriving with them, but they could be £500 each, so that they don’t clutter the server, but enable Pirates to have a decent crew that won’t disappear, and will be there when players log on. I’ll include a link, to the site that I found, but there are others, such as a citizens plugin! Hope that I didn’t waste your time, and that you think this may benefit the server! 🙂

http://www.npcwarehouse.net/

And the other one:

http://dev.bukkit.org/bukkit-plugins/citizens/

Btw, we can also create Famous YouTubers, that will look like real players, great for server advertising! 🙂 🙂

This is the list of different ships we could have, altough did not come up with the config yet.

Frigate: In the 17th century, the term was used for any warship built for speed and maneuverability, the description often used being “frigate-built”. So this would be having a size limit though it would be fast, this all could be changed from the config.
You should make it so a frigate can only be from a certain size to a certain size like 300-600 for example(dont take this number just giving examples). maybe it can carry only a few cannons?

Galleon: This is one of the bigger ships, and would have a minimum size of let’s say 1200? I don’t know you make the numbers not me, and with the Galleon you can carry more cannons as a perk I guess, cant think of perks atm.

Galley: This is a kinda medium sized ship, and normally wont carry cannons but is really fast because it uses oars more than sails, pros can be that it doesn’t need sails and is fast but for cons cannot carry any cannons aboard. so it would be more like a get away ship.

Man-of-War: This is may be the biggest could be around 2300 blocks maybe more, again you make the number, maybe have a debate about the pros and cons and sizes with the donators and trusted players, idk, this could have around 20-40 cannons however is a bit slow in sailing but it’s size is gives it more durability so it wont get shot down easily and that it has numerous cannons to hold

That is all, thank you for taking the time to read this.

(More ship types will be added soon, and current ship types might be edited.)

(btw I just copied and pasted my mail to gods, if your asking why it seems like Im talking to someone :P)

THESE NUMBERS ARE JUST EXAMPLES, DIFFERENT NUMBERS MIGHT BE TAKEN!!!

You can add your ideas over here! All ideas are welcome, but no guarantee in taking the idea for it is not up to me to decide it’s up to GodsDead.

PirateCraft is back and open to everyone!

• What happened
• 48 Hours, claims thread

All claims were lost, all visible builds were re-claimed as admin claims to protect from looting/griefing.
Me and Reaper havent set a timelimit till these expire yet, ask either Iamthereaper89 or GodsDead in-game to calim an admin claim as your own.

Gameplay as normal, no extra special rules 🙂

At the moment piratecraft is currently whitelisted for maintenance.

At 5:18am this morning (23/02/2014) the server crashed because our hosting HDD storge got completly filled up, we run on SSD for maximum performance, This is due to sharing a node with other servers, a few of these children running servers used third party backup solutions, didnt configure them properly and filled up the shared node/server.
Now this is where it gets bad, It took me about 4 hours to diagnose and figure out what had happened, what was affected, get a hosting responce, get a responce from plugin developers, thankfully I have such amazing community to help me get through stresful situations like this.

When the server rebooted, it booted without any configs for Griefprevetnion, Wordborder, GroupManager, Autorank and a few other vital plugins. These configs were overwritten by completly blank data, keeping the files but clearing out the content inside them.
The reason for this was explained to me in a developer responce:

If you run out of space, every plugin that writes data on shutdown will erase its own data, it is a terrible flaw. This is why I keep backups of essentials, and switched to SQL for GP. The data you need is absolutely lost in its current state.

What this means is that it gets worse, GriefPrevetnion claim data for everybodies claims is lost, The Hosting company does not keep backups, I do not have backups of this specific data, which Im kicking myself for, since its not exactly practical to FTP into a server every day and manually take backups of everything.
With no griefprevention protecting anything, this left the server exposed to any player that joined in the 2 hour period it took me to notice anything was strange with the server on a sunday morning.

Now, We caught this just in time, The world isnt damaged, I have automatic worldbackups, Stats are not damaged, So I can get Autorank working again, Worldborder is a 1 command fix, But Claims are lost, Player data seems to not be wiped, but the claims themselfs are all gone.

This strange and uniqie problem has left me and reaper in a very, very sticky situation, Our hosting provider didnt come back with anything helpful at all (Surprise, Surprise) and im furious at myself for not considering this could have been a problem.

I don’t think this was caused by hackers, just poor execution of hosting providers (For the third time) and my ignorance for trusting a minecraft hosting company to keep backups.

What will happen then?
We have to re-claim the land, Thankfully we have such an amazing admin, Iamtherepaer89 has spent countless hours scouring the map for visable buildings and admin claiming them, but there is no way we will be able to even make a dent in the 380+ claims that were made on the server.

I will move griefprevention data to a new database system which I can make automatic backups from to external hosting providers.

But what I want now, from PirateCraft players are ideas on how we handle opening the server back up with hundreads of un-claimed buildings, its a pirates paradice for looting and griefing, and there will be a lot of drama which I am not looking forward to.

You can see the current protected buildings that reaper has claimed on the live map.