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All announcements from the discord #announcements channel.
All announcements from the discord #announcements channel. If you don't have Discord, this page will let you keep up to date.
Important announcement below. Please read. Starts from latest to oldest.
Important announcement below. Please read. Starts from latest to oldest.
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__TOC__
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==2025==
==2025==
===December===
===December===
Line 250: Line 252:
===June===
===June===
<b>12 June 2022 - [[ArynnPhrii|Frogofwar]]:</b> We're having a blast on the new patch! Join with 1.19 and type /joinq tmp in the lobby. ❤️ Same rules as regular SMP. If you get an error about "public profile keys" just log out and back in and it should fix things.
<b>12 June 2022 - [[ArynnPhrii|Frogofwar]]:</b> We're having a blast on the new patch! Join with 1.19 and type /joinq tmp in the lobby. ❤️ Same rules as regular SMP. If you get an error about "public profile keys" just log out and back in and it should fix things.

===February===
<b>18 February 2022 - [[Rbos]]:</b> server is no longer whitelisted. Open to the ravening hordes.


===January===
===January===
<b>26 January 2022 - [[Rbos]]:</b> After approximately two dozen very nice and helpful people offering to rewrite the perfectly-good plaintext webpage and make it more “modern” and “colourful” and “less stuck in 1997”, I’ve put back the WordPress page. HAPPY?! 😛

<b>21 January 2022 - [[Shut1tdown|Shutitdown (Mrepic)]]:</b> @here Good news everyone! With the <b>1.18 Update</b> comes a new spawn!
<b>21 January 2022 - [[Shut1tdown|Shutitdown (Mrepic)]]:</b> @here Good news everyone! With the <b>1.18 Update</b> comes a new spawn!


Line 298: Line 305:


<b>August 2021:</b> The server has been updated to 1.17.1. We are waiting on new hardware, and some plugin updates, before proceeding to 1.18. 1.18 clients can join the game, but not access any 1.18-exclusive mechanics. The new /spawn is 13spawn. The 1.18 temp-map has been taken down due to lack of demand.
<b>August 2021:</b> The server has been updated to 1.17.1. We are waiting on new hardware, and some plugin updates, before proceeding to 1.18. 1.18 clients can join the game, but not access any 1.18-exclusive mechanics. The new /spawn is 13spawn. The 1.18 temp-map has been taken down due to lack of demand.

==2018==
===April===
<b>12 April 2018 - [[Rbos]]:</b> Koo koo kachoo.


==2016==
==2016==
===March===
===March===
<b>7 March 2016:</b> Novylen now has a Discord. You can join at https://discord.gg/z7XkG83g. You can link your in-game Minecraft account with your Discord account by typing '/discord link' in game. Before joining, please take the time to read through the discord [[Rules]]. The old forums have been locked, but are still viewable at [HTTP://forum.minecraft.novylen.net this page].
<b>7 March 2016:</b> Novylen now has a Discord. You can join at https://discord.gg/z7XkG83g. You can link your in-game Minecraft account with your Discord account by typing '/discord link' in game. Before joining, please take the time to read through the discord [[Rules]]. The old forums have been locked, but are still viewable at [HTTP://forum.minecraft.novylen.net this page].

==2013==
===August===
<b>17 August 2013 - [[Rbos]]:</b> I am testing the Prism block logging addon in minecraft; it has more advanced rollback features, and records more events, more usefully. So far, so good. Bit of learning curve, but once we’re over it, it should allow us to do some very helpful things, like previewing rollbacks before committing them, and recording what player killed what, or picked up what. Hopefully it prevents some arguments. I’ll have to rewrite a couple of auditing scripts.

Today we also had an interesting WorldEdit accident, one of the mods set a pos2 but left the pos1 back at the previous location, and then did a //set 0. Server locked up, and intending to force a rollback, I hit ^C on console. Unfortunately, that saved the changes that did go through, so in hindsight, I should have suspended java and did a kill -9 to prevent it saving the changes, an approach that has worked well in the past.

Oh well. Restored the missing areas from backup. Sadly, WorldEdit does not in the current build restore sign contents, so some shops in the mall got messed up. The dev build evidently fixes that.

BungeePerms is updating to use MySQL, which should allow me to set up tab list colours pretty easily. The main problem was generating a permissions.yml from a database export of PermissionsEx data, and I didn’t really care enough to go to the effort. But if they’re both in the database, then porting the data over is a relatively simple procedure, I can just make it part of the BungeeCord startup script or something, and it’ll sync once a day.

<b>14 August 2013 - [[Rbos]]:</b> I was having a conversation with someone, and the question of the server stats came up. Here we go:

The server hardware is actually two Dell R420 servers. From that beginning, I added a hardware RAID card, three rotary hard drives (1TB each), and one solid state drive (128GiB), 16GiB of RAM, and Intel Xeon E2430 CPUs, six cores each, 2.3GHz.

Two of the drives are RAID-1 (mirrored) with the third as a spare that will kick in automatically. I chose that configuration because a 3-disk RAID5 and a 2-disk RAID1 have very similar performance and reliability characteristics: they both have 2x read I/O and 1x write I/O, and can both tolerate one failed drive. With mirrored/spare, however, I trade off some space for automatic failover and rebuild onto the spare drive. I use the SSD as a block cache for the RAID1; that is, writes to the disk first go onto the SSD, and then get written out more efficiently, sequentially, to the rotary storage in batches, getting the best of both worlds. I use Bcache for that part.

The two servers both run Debian, a lightweight Linux distribution particularly well suited for servers. They are mostly identically configured; one is named ‘node1’ and the other is named ‘node2’. Installed on both servers is a piece of software named Ganeti, which manages KVM, a hypervisor; it’s used to run “virtual” machines, that is, machines that run virtually, separately from one another and can share a single physical computer. Ganeti lets me run VMs in a master-slave configuration, mirroring a VM between both node servers in such a way that if one server fails, the other server can take over. VMs can be migrated between the servers without people logged into the VM even noticing that it happened. For instance, I can move all the VMs onto node2, reboot node1, and then move all the VMs to node1 and reboot node2. Users don’t even notice, in theory. So, it’s pretty cool technology.

Right now, minecraft pretty much gets a node to itself. It’s extremely overpowered for the task, but I’ve specced things out to hopefully last me five or six years, so I’m pretty comfortable with the investment.

<b>3 August 2013 - [[Rbos]]:</b> Hard drive latency graphs for the last week on my two node servers. Notice how disk response time goes from ~100ms to ~10 on both servers.

aio=native on KVM. Pretty great. Had to patch it into Ganeti.

==2012==
===February===
<b>10 February 2012 - [[Rbos]]:</b> The map is now being regenerated with DynMap. Should take a few weeks to process.

Also if you hadn’t noticed, we’re on a new physical server now, and I’ve been profoundly lazy with some things, so the website’s been kind of spotty of late. Most things are running though.

Need to fix the paypal link at some point, I have to set up accounts manually right now.

==2011==
===December===
<b>18 December 2011 - [[Rbos]]:</b> https://minecraft.novylen.net/stats/econ.html

===November===
<b>17 November 2011 - [[Rbos]]:</b> http://minecraftservers.net/server.php?id=9309 http://minecraft-server-list.com/server/13768/

===September===
<b>5 September 2011 - [[Rbos]]:</b> Hey, for funsies I’m trying out [http://forums.bukkit.org/threads/mech-fun-rpg-supernatural-players-v2-5-2-vampires-werewolves-ghouls-priests-and-more-1000.27564/ Supernatural Players] in pvpland, which adds player classes (ghouls, priests, hunters, and vampires). Give it a try. It’s complicated, so read up on it.

===August===
<b>25 August 2011 - [[Rbos]]:</b> I added a sky biome area. Permanent day, separate world inventory.

Gate to ‘aether’.

<b>19 August 2011 - [[Rbos]]:</b> gate to ‘creative’, give it a try. /i for stuff.

This is a BETA so don’t get too attached to it.

<b>15 August 2011 - [[Rbos]]:</b> http://wiki.minecraft.novylen.net

<b>15 August 2011 - [[Rbos]]:</b> Updates:

Citizens.jar
PlugMan.jar
MapMarkers.jar
Spout.jar
LogBlockQuestioner.jar
LogBlock.jar
BaseBukkitPlugin.jar
LongGrass.jar
LogOres.jar
NoCheat.jar
properTime.jar
SimpleSignEdit.jar
ecoCreature.jar
CraftBukkitUpToDate.jar
LWC.jar
runecraft.jar
WorldBorder.jar
Achievements.jar
Stats.jar

* Moved Stats and Achievements to a mysql database on rollup (the database server).
* Moved LogBlock datebase to rollup.

* Teleporting (/home, /warp, /wxgo) is much faster now.

<b>15 August 2011 - [[Rbos]]:</b> Wild pumpkins now grow back.

<b>15 August 2011 - [[Rbos]]:</b> LogOres: a more sophisticated x-ray hack detector. Some neat features. It does some basic crunching on ore finds, figuring out average distance between finds, average time between finds, and some other things. Legit ore finds tend to be on the same plane, fairly widely spaced in time and space. Xray hackers tend to be closely placed, and on more varying Y axis.

http://forums.bukkit.org/threads/sec-admin-logores-v0-7-log-ores-to-look-for-cheaters-1000.25432/

Interesting stuff.

<b>10 August 2011 - [[Rbos]]:</b> Some things I’d like to do over the next few months:

1) Moar NPC shops. Probably will keep /shop, because it’s better for bulk items, but maybe we shouldn’t do bulk item transfers. It’s too magicky.
2) Blacksmith NPCs to replace /repair.
3) A “creative” mode has been on my list for a while. It’s sort of, kind of there already (gate to ‘creative’, it’s perma-day and no player damage), but there’s no infinite supplies because of trouble restricting /item to that world. Notch is allegedly introducing creative mode, so I’ll wait to see how that turns out.
4) Review and update addons. iConomy is like four months old. Wormhole XTreme revamped entirely.
5) Possibly introduce [http://forums.bukkit.org/threads/mech-fun-rpg-supernatural-players-v2-5-1-vampires-werewolves-ghouls-priests-and-more-1000.27564/ player classes].

<b>10 August 2011 - [[Rbos]]:</b> I recently checked up on the status of the iAuction plugin.

(seriously guys if you want a plugin, see if it exists or has been updated to work with the latest craftbukkit, anyone could have noticed that iAuction had been updated recently).

I won’t be installing it, because:

1) I like local shops. They give players something to build in their towns, and give people a reason to go to those towns. NPC shops are even better (once cough I make them work).

2) Spams chat. Mostly that’s fine, but the vast majority of auctions, people don’t care about.

3) Magic. It’s FAR too easy to transport tons and tons of stuff across the entire map. Your pockets are full of mountain, and you can just whiz it over to another person with a /auction command? It’s boring, it’s not “game”y. Some things SHOULD be hard. Even a little bit.

==2010==
===November===
<b>23 November 2010 - [[Rbos]]:</b> Bunch of updates today.

The main thing is, I installed WorldGuard – which replaces SessionProtect, GriefAlert, Llamacraft, and BlockIt. It allows us to block fire, tnt, and optionally ban/kick people who do so. It prevents multiple sessions, and warns people when certain griefs happen. It’s verranice. It’s quite configurable, and can warn/block/kick by rank. Elegant solution to some annoying problems.

It also fixes the “block lag” bug Notch introduced last patch.

Since GriefAlert is now gone, so is the grieferstick, so I’m using WorldEdit’s “super pickaxe”. Toggle it with “//”, available to mods+.

I added the ability for members+ to spawn their own NPCs.  Nothing fancy, just warm bodies to populate towns and make them look more lived-in. Pretty fun. Eventually we could use this to implement quests, and if someone comes to the admins with a compelling pitch, we may allow certain people to play with it. For now, read up on it and if you have an awesome idea, let us know.

Also updated to hMod126 (beta), which means we no longer have to have a custom patch for the Stats plugin.

<b>14 November 2010 - [[Rbos]]:</b>

What was at first a trivial “move the server to a new location” turned into hijinks today as it refused to boot up. We’ve fixed the problem, but because we were offline for about 40 minutes, the IP address lease ran out, and we were assigned a new one.

Dammit. 🙁

So use the hostname or memorize the new IP. Sorry!

<b>13 November 2010 - [[Rbos]]:</b>

You can set up player shops now (thanks be to the authour of iConomy).

See /warp mntc for an example of a working shop, or /spawn for a non-working but valid shop.

From the instructions:

<b>Creating shop sign</b>

In-game create a sign, on the second line you must but only “buy” or “sell” without the parenthesis. On the third line you put the itemID and the amount for every transaction. On the fourth line you put the price of each transaction.

It will look like so:

buy
1 10
10

Click “Done”, and it should create the shop, you will now be buying 10 (stone) at 10 coin per transaction. Replace “buy” with “sell” for a selling sign.

To show users how much you currently have in stock, place a sign anywhere around the base sign. must be touching the base sign however and it will update that sign with stock information.

<b>Using shop sign</b>

Go up to the sign, if you are the owner you can add stock by clicking the “sell” sign with the item in your inventory to add to the stock. Make sure that you have nothing in your hand, click the sign (left) and it will either a) tell you an error or b) give you the item or sell it depending on the sign you are clicking.

<b>12 November 2010 - [[Rbos]]:</b> The lag issues ''every'' minecraft server has been experiencing the last two weeks are most likely the result of lighting issues in certain map areas.

If the server is experiencing lag issues, everyone should immediately return to /spawn. If a particular area is obviously causing issues, let us know on the forums and try to spread the word to keep clear of that area.

On our map, Skyland and Hell are two VERY obvious problem areas. Avoid those.

<b>8 November 2010 - [[Rbos]]:</b> Craftbook is nifty:

<ul>
<li>Openable fence gates

<li>Elevators (with buttons)

<li>leaf blocks now drop apples!

<li>Bookshelves now have text (you can’t edit them, sadface)

<li>area light switch

<li>some “cauldron” recipes (seems pretty harmless).
</ul>

<b>5 November 2010 - [[Rbos]]:</b> <ul>
<li>Updated to Notch server 0.2.3,

<li>moved the entire server tree to a ramdisk instead of just the world directory,

<li>put in a plugin to notify when server saves happen,

<li>Added a change to the Minecraft server process that should run it at higher scheduling priority, set it to re-prioritize every 15 minutes just in case the server restarts.
</ul>

Looks good so far, with 1 user the server is going at 10% CPU instead of the 50%+ it was using before.

<b>4 November 2010 - [[Rbos]]:</b> I implemented the LogBlocks plugin yesterday. Now, (members+) can use a wooden pickaxe to access the change history of a particular block, going back to November 2nd.

I’ll probably trim out entries older than 14 days or so, since it uses 30mb/day, approximately.

<b>1 November 2010 - [[Rbos]]:</b> I’m installing [http://forum.hey0.net/viewtopic.php?id=357 iConomy] to try it out. Give it a shot. Maybe it’ll suck, maybe it won’t.

===October===
<b>31 October 2010 - [[Rbos]]:</b> Well, apparently [http://www.minecraftforum.net/viewtopic.php?f=1013&t=69988 quite a few servers] are having lagspike issues right now.  CPU load is spiking up to high values and causing problems with server unresponsiveness, periodically.

Joy.

<b>31 October 2010 - [[Rbos]]:</b> Installed [https://sites.google.com/site/townymod Towny] – give it a try!

<b>25 October 2010 - [[Rbos]]:</b> Hint: It's dangerous to go alone. Here, take this.

<b>24 October 2010 - [[Rbos]]:</b> <ul><li>I spent much of the day working on [http://novylen.net/~minecraft/gamestats/ statistics] for the server users. It’s pretty primitive at the moment, but I have a script to dump them into an SQL database, and a PHP file to parse the results. This is a prerelease only, so don’t be surprised if it breaks.

<li>Runecraft’s “Ice Boots” thing might be what’s been crashing the server. I’ve added it to the blacklist, but there might be others. For now, leave that rune alone, so we can at least eliminate it from consideration.

<li>Installed Robin Sonneveld’s “Hey0Admin” for Zaneo and Jack, so that they can more easily make backend admin changes. SQL and SSH is fine for me, but I can see why they would prefer a web interface. 😀

<li>Zaneo managed to wipe out a good-sized town today. He’d probably prefer I didn’t mention it. But hey. I’m a jerk, it says so right in the charter. :D I’m going to restore it from backup as soon as there are fewer than about 5 people online.

<li>Plus, I’ve done things just as bad in the past. Just today, I filled a cuboid with torches, most of which fell to the ground, which made the server extremely laggy until I managed to collect and /clearinventory the bulk of it. .. Oops.
</ul>

<b>22 October 2010 - [[Rbos]]:</b><ul><li>[http://www.minecraftforum.net/viewtopic.php?f=1012&t=29244 Runecraft 2.1] installed. Includes a “wall builder” rune that I’m a little leery of, but we’ll see how that goes.

<li>TimeRift installed. My intent is to cut night about in half, skipping from 10pm in-game to 6am in-game. (22000 base time, 750 second check time) Might make it a bit longer, but that seems about fair.

<li>Achievements appear to be broken for the moment.
</ul>

<b>21 October 2010 - [[Rbos]]:</b> minecraft.novylen.net, BREAKER OF ADDONS, [http://github.com/sk89q/worldedit/issues/#issue/23 claims another victim].

WorldEdit implemented in-game selective cuboid rollbacks from zipped snapshots, which is very cool.

Our map is so big that it doesn’t work right away, which seems to happen a lot. I’m proud of us.

<b>21 October 2010 - [[Rbos]]:</b> I changed the server over to the new G1 Java garbage collector, which supposedly has a somewhat more efficient memory footprint and an algorithm for releasing memory that avoids some worst-case scenarios.

Some details [http://java.sun.com/javaone/sf/2008/articles/rockstar_tonyprintezis.jsp here], [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3282957/relative-performance-of-javas-garbage-first-g1-garbage-collector here], and [http://blogs.sun.com/theplanetarium/entry/java_vm_trying_a_new here].

<b>19 October 2010 - [[Rbos]]:</b> <ul><li>Implemented the [http://forum.hey0.net/viewtopic.php?id=221 Achievements] and [http://forum.hey0.net/viewtopic.php?id=209 Stats] plugins. See [http://forum.minecraft.novylen.net/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=162&p=761 here] for the list of current achievements. The Stats plugin will let me put in some nice pretty server activity graphs later, I think. 🙂

<li>Updated flight to work only for members+.

<li>Various plugin updates to newest versions (afkkick, blahblah).

<li>Rounded out the desert biome to make it look more natural, added some forests.

<li>Fixed the subscription thinger to properly add to expired subs (rather than just blindly appending time).
</ul>

On the subscription front, we’ve reached $75 in the first two weeks of pimping, plus $13 in Adsense revenue. I’m confident we can pay for the upgraded net connection. 🙂

<b>15 October 2010 - [[Rbos]]:</b> Okay, the ISP has apparently tracked down the issue (again) and confirmed that it’s their router that’s been causing the problem – on mild congestion, packets drop, latency increases, everything goes to hell.

So, as compensation they’re putting us onto their Server Connect 750KB/sec upload package until November.

Until then, I’m putting the user cap up to 30. Let’s see what this baby can do. If in November we have enough subscriptions/ad revenue to pay for it, or if they come out with a cheaper package (they’re rolling out a 3MBit upload package which might be more than enough for us), we’ll consider upgrading to something a little more hefty.

In the meantime, have fun. 😀

<b>13 October 2010 - [[Rbos]]:</b> <ul><li>Installed [http://forum.hey0.net/viewtopic.php?id=71 ChannelChat] for local and global chat (global default). /ch and /chlist added to default rank, will evaluate/discuss other channels soon, with an eye on the possible problem of splitting up conversations too much. Local chat has a 1 kilometer range, which should cover most towns. If we get a higher server population, more chat channels make sense, but for now, a couple will do. Possibility of giving channel privileges to member rank.

<li>Updated hey0mod to 116 – items now spawn directly in your inventory when spawned with /kit or /item, and admins can now /clearinventory <player>. Not that I see any use for it, since I could always do that just by deleting the player file.

<li>SessionProtect now prevents you using the last slot in your inventory. Allegedly. This helps with a dupe bug. I haven’t tested it, so feedback on that would be good.

<li>more, probably. I also updated cuboidplugin and griefalert, but that probably won’t be major.
</ul>


<b>12 October 2010 - [[Rbos]]:</b> Not mine, but check this out:

http://qt3minecraft.project357.com/map-night/

Pretty cool! I want to do this, too, if we can do it without spending 4-5 hours a day doing renders. 🙂

<b>12 October 2010 - [[Rbos]]:</b>

Okay, happy Thanksgiving from Canada. 😀

While watching How To Train Your Dragon on DVD at my gf’s parents’ place, I was on a laptop dinking about with the Web site a bit.

<ul>
<li>Tower ad on the sidebar! Woo!
<li>Proper links in the menu bar – no more clicking through a page to get to the map.
<li>Cuboid protection zones now have a minimum height of 32.
</ul>

<b>11 October 2010 - [[Rbos]]:</b> Thanks to econnel on the hey0 forums, we now auto-afk-kick people after 15 minutes if the server is full. 😀

[http://forum.hey0.net/viewtopic.php?pid=2300 thread here]

<b>11 October 2010 - [[Rbos]]:</b> Thanks to agrif, regular on the server and contributor to [http://github.com/brownan/Minecraft-Overviewer Overviewer], the [https://minecraft.novylen.net/map/ server map] now marks protected areas. They’re normalized to sea level, which makes them a little off sometimes, but most of them are most accurately represented at sea level anyway.

Hm, I guess I could render it at the *average* Y instead of at a set Y.

<b>10 October 2010 - [[Rbos]]:</b> Well:

<ul>
<li>we’re running WordPress now,
<li>the map is moved,
<li>the forum is moved,
<li>some basic content is in place,
<li>I made a spiffy new banner from the Cathedral (probably the most recognizable landmark),
<li>we’re running MySQL on the backend now,
<li>I updated the map marker and premium member scripts to use MySQL,
<li>We ran with 30 users for three hours. It was amazing!
</ul>

<b>10 October 2010 - [[Rbos]]:</b> Minecraft multiplayer is fun, but playing it quickly grows old. Without the challenges imposed by server-side health, enemy mobs, and the tempting, easily-available /item spawn command, it doesn’t pose a whole lot of challenge for a server admin. Running the server is interesting, though.

Today, I’m working on moving the backend configuration to MySQL out of flat files. That part is done. I wrote a script to parse the text files and insert them into tables, restarted the server, and everything seems pretty okay, with the exception of some duplicate entries in the groups table, and some leftovers in the user table. I’m rewriting the “contributor” script, which will promote users from “regular” to “member”, the premium rank.

2 subscriptions so far. Rolling in the dough!

Still to do: add Google adsense ads to the global WordPress template, and then fix the Paypal registration script. Currently it doesn’t renew subscriptions properly.

<b>10 October 2010 - [[Rbos]]:</b> I moved minecraft.novylen.net to a RAM disk yesterday. Performance issues have been resolved entirely. In a stress-test today, I had 30 users logged in without a hiccup. It’s pretty easy to see how a server with more memory and better CPU could support 60-100 users.

Currently I am limited only by bandwidth: the package we have right now is $150/mo for 130KiB/sec upload, but latency issues when the upload is as little as 75% saturated (sigh, as much as 3 seconds ping time to fraser.sfu.ca) mean that the ISP has temporarily put us on the $300/mo package with 750KiB/sec upload, which is nice. With 30 users, the server did a pretty steady 300KiB/sec up. So we could easily support more users if I could find a way to partially fund it.

Subscriptions will help, if I can find the right combination of carrot, stick, and price. It doesn’t seem to be the price so much as the concept of paying a subscription, or donating, that people have trouble with. So I’m aiming for $2/mo, which is pretty comparable to iphone apps. I only support paypal at the moment.

<b>10 October 2010 - [[Rbos]]:</b> As current members have noticed, I’ve re-vamped the novylen.net Minecraft web site. The links along the top lead to various places. This feed is intended for news related to the server. I will post here from now on instead of making forum threads.


==Announcement Summaries==
==Announcement Summaries==

Latest revision as of 07:08, 19 December 2025

All announcements from the discord #announcements channel. If you don't have Discord, this page will let you keep up to date. Important announcement below. Please read. Starts from latest to oldest.

2025

December

10 December 2025 - Doozie: 🌲 Winterfest is upon us! /dial stockings to join the Feast 🌲

November

24 November 2025 - Doozie: We have added a redstone flag to bolt, /bolt lock redstone

17 November 2025 - Doozie: We are now running conversion from LWC to Bolt for locking functions, /bolt. Existing locks have transferred over. And we are now updated to 1.21.10.

4 November 2025 - rilelyscastle: Server is back up.

4 November 2025 - Reiyuka: We have to do a server shutdown today - the utility is doing some power pole maintenance in the area. Shutdown will be before Tuesday 4 November 2025 at 05:00 pm today. Sorry for the short notice. Expected downtime probably only a few hours, but they asked us to be ready for 8 hours.

1 November 2025 - rilelyscastle: Merry Halloween!

October

23 October 2025 - Reiyuka: Servers have been down since ~8:30 PST, am investigating. It took down everything, so it's either internet or power. Probably power. Map is full of many overlapping red zones.

10 October 2025 - Doozie: Graffiti is now in voting! Nordawnia Graffiti Voting

September

3 September 2025 - Doozie: Graffiti Contest! Deface the western side of Nordawnia Railway! Ends October 1st, for more details see #smp #smp

August

5 August 2025 - Doozie: 5th Novylen Map Art Contest is now in voting! /dial vote to visit the ballot station and gallery by spawn to cast your votes. Polling ends August 31st.

4 August 2025 - Doozie: Happy 15th Anniversary Novylen! /dial novy15 for player build fairgrounds. Official Birthdate: Aug 04 10:12:39 PDT 2010 or <t:1754327559:F> your time!

May

13 May 2025 - Doozie: New Map Art Contest starting! End date August 1st, for more details see: #smp

April

6 April 2025 - rilelyscastle: Keep Inventory is now disabled outside of the main end island.

6 April 2025 - Doozie: Server is now updated to 1.21.4 /dial new or visit wild portal at spawn for new terrain, pale wood available at /dial getwood

5 April 2025 - Doozie: Good News Everybody! Chestshop for nbt data is now functioning! Buy/Sell your unique junk at will

January

1 January 2025 - rilelyscastle: Happy New Years! May 2025 be better than 2024

2024

December

25 December 2024 - Doozie: Happy Giftmas to all! The earth has circumnavigated the sun and the day of stocking has arisen in every corner, including Novylen. 🧦 /dial presents to collect your dues! 🧦

8 December 2024 - Doozie: Stockings are hung by the yeti with care, all little stuffers had better beware! ❄️ /dial presents for gift exchange 2024 ❄️

October

31 October 2024 - rilelyscastle: https://tenor.com/view/jazzskull-trumpet-skull-doot-doot-gif-3005205123992593904

18 October 2024 - Frogofwar: Forum is open to all who can identify which popular gourd is associated with the month of October.

13 October 2024 - Doozie: Diggy Diggy Hole resource side-world is now open for looting, /dial diggyhole

9 October 2024 - Doozie: The Mapart Contest has concluded! Please submit your votes at /dial gallery #smp Voting closes October 15th

7 October 2024 - Doozie: /dial trials to visit Night Court for a pristine and enormous set of chambers set aside of death and preservation

September

30 September 2024 - Doozie: /dial destiny2 to submit to the Trials

30 September 2024 - Doozie: Server has now updated to 1.21, new terrain available via wild portal at /spawn or /dial new

July

26 July 2024 - Doozie: Map Art Contest! Currently ongoing, deadline October 1st. For more details see: #smp or pinned msgs in #smp

13 July 2024 - Doozie: Just a note: for players who do not wish to be visible on the website map, while ingame type /dynmap hide

April

22 April 2024 - Doozie: Delicious fresh Dargon eggs now available for 1000p at the admin shops in the geode at spawn

January

15 January 2024 - Doozie: Beware the Ides of January! At the stroke of midnight, the Stockings will open. Woe unto all who have not yet done their stuffing.

2023

December

25 December 2023 - rilelyscastle: Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

23 December 2023 - rilelyscastle: Hello Everyone! After discovering the fact that we forgot to build a place where everyone can gift presents this year we have built one. it is rudimentary at this moment but should be working fine! The Stargate Address is Stockings. We also have a backup runecraft teleporter incase the stargate fails. you can find it by the big slime in topside which is west of the sign boards and maps.

September

25 September 2023 - rilelyscastle: Minecraft has a new wiki! https://minecraft.wiki/

August

9 August 2023 - Doozie: We are in the process of rendering Flatmap, for everyone who always wanted a huge ingame map of the whole map. Link from website minecraft.novylen.net now redirects here, select from smp and creative options

1 August 2023 - Frogofwar: Hi, everyone! I hope you are all enjoying the new patch and having fun. A quick reminder: Novylen prohibits the use of autoclickers. Using such tools or other scripts to gain in-game advantages may lead to a permanent ban. For an approved mods list, please consult the #faq. We value the fair play spirit of the majority of our players who refrain from using such scripts. Thank you all for taking the time to read this announcement.

July

23 July 2023 - Doozie: SMP is now updated to 1.20, please report any plugin issues. /dial new and wild portal active in new terrain, /dial getwood has a temporary cherry area outside its walls. Spawn will move sometime in the coming weeks.

10 July 2023 - Doozie: Admin shop will now buy and sell cobbled deepslate as a banking option, if you want to store cobbled deepslate for your future retirement.

June

11 June 2023 - Doozie: We are now running 1.20 on temp map for testing, /queue tmp to join

7 June 2023 - Doozie: Update: https://support.curseforge.com/en/support/solutions/articles/9000228509-june-2023-infected-mods-detection-tool/

7 June 2023 - Doozie: "Multiple groups are reporting CurseForge as compromised. Malware has been uploaded in various projects and it may be a security vulnerability in the CurseForge platform. We recommend not downloading or updating any mods from CurseForge at the moment" https://prismlauncher.org/news/cf-compromised-alert/

May

5 May 2023 - Doozie: May 15 Imgur will be deleting images from innactive accounts, make sure to download any precious images, or save them in another manner such as copying to a personal discord server https://help.imgur.com/hc/en-us/articles/14415587638029/

4 May 2023 - Doozie: We will now be returning to our previous twice weekly random end reset schedule.

April

9 April 2023 - Frogofwar: Hi all,

Firstly, happy holidays to all who celebrate, whether it is Easter, Passover, Ramadan, or none of the above.

Secondly, I would like to take the time to clarify some expectations we have for the server. These are not new rules, just some old guidelines I want to make clear through an <#919045985924182087> post.

In-Game:

  • When making tickets asking for a region, please do not write out precise coordinates. Instead, please mark them with blocks out or allow us to use discretion.
  • Please refrain from sending moderators letters/tickets with nothing more than a greeting. It makes our job more difficult and we will /warn players about the behaviour.

Discord:

  • Please only use the designated 'bans-and-reports' channel for the designated purpose. I.e. reporting incidents to the moderator team, or submitting ban appeals. Anybody found misusing the channel will be immediately kicked from the server.
  • Please note that 'friends' are not permitted to make ban appeals. If you have received a ban and wish to challenge it, please use your account. Any attempts to circumvent this rule will result in an instant time-out.
  • If you want to make a ban appeal, or report something Novylen-related, <#335158837365440513> is the appropriate channel. Please do not Direct Message the mods unless you have a clear reason for your grievance to remain private.
  • We appreciate all your suggestion-box posts. But, please understand that we may not be able to act on many of them due to time constraints or other reasons.

Thank you all for being understanding. 🙂

March

29 March 2023 - Doozie: estimated 5.5 hours from now uptime, no guarantees however

29 March 2023 - Frogofwar: Server is currently down as the ISP is doing scheduled maintenance.

27 March 2023 - Frogofwar: You can check out the full range of submissions in #unknown. Thanks to all who joined in. I plan to cycle through a bunch of the submissions, so even if you missed out on a place, your image may end up as our banner for a while still.

27 March 2023 - Frogofwar: 2022-08-02_23.png

27 March 2023 - Frogofwar: And highly commended is this snap of 14spawn by @AlyQT

27 March 2023 - Frogofwar: Coming in at Number 1 is Empirerose at Night by @Frankaliti - I'll place the winnings in your inventory for when you log in next. 05_2023-02-28.png

27 March 2023 - Frogofwar: G'day everyone. The banner submission contest is over and I am very happy to announce that we have a winner.

21 March 2023 - Doozie: 3rd Novylen Map Art Contest now open for voting at /dial gallery, ends march 28

21 March 2023 - Frogofwar: Hi all, following up on that last post. Voting will open for a week. You may vote for your own submission, and you can vote for as many banners as you like. Thanks all for participating.

5 March 2023 - Frogofwar: Hi all, just a reminder that the banner competition is ongoing. There hasn't been too much interest as of yet, but entering is really easy and it would be great to see some more involvement.

February

27 February 2023 - Reiyuka: Aight, all appears to be good for now 🌦️

26 February 2023 - Reiyuka: Okay, so the current plan (afternoon Feb 26) is to get a new server IP, and figure out some kind of tanking arrangement with gcore or cloudflare or something, all of which will take a few days. So, settle in, it'll be a while. Go play outside.

25 February 2023 - Reiyuka: Currently a network outage starting about 9:15 Feb 25. Downtime duration TBD, but hopefully only an hour or two. Probable cause: car accident hitting a local Shaw node.

update 12:30PST: no updates, downtime 3 hours. It's snowing, which could complicate their repairs.

update 16:33PST: okay, after trying a bunch of things, we're about 80% sure it's a DDOS. Unfortunately we can't do any more debugging today, so I'll have to revisit it tomorrow. At that point, I'll capture some network traffic logs and see if that theory bears out.

update Feb 26, 9:50PST: waiting on someone on-site to do further testing, in case something goes wrong.

update 11:10PST: Yep. DNS reflection attack, now that I have some log captures. Pretty cool! https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ddos/ntp-amplification-ddos-attack/

So someone is probably spending $50 a day to give us a hard time. Fun!

24 February 2023 - Doozie: There is currently a bug with worldguard allowing interaction with dragon eggs inside regions, if you have dragon eggs in the open please either secure them or ask a mod for an interact denial flag to be applied to that region

23 February 2023 - Frogofwar: Hi, I'm looking for people to submit new banner images for the Discord: #banner-submissions

19 February 2023 - Doozie: Do you like making map art? Do you like possibly winning some really nifty things? Then you’re in luck because the 3rd Novylen Map Art Competition is now on!

14 February 2023 - Doozie: Happy Heart Day everyone! Visit /dial topside to make a new friend! Bring your Amethyst Shards! (max 3 allay / chunk)

12 February 2023 - Doozie: We now have #roles for those who wish to assign pronouns to themselves, take as many as you like!

January

10 January 2023 - Frogofwar: Update: Happy to advise that it appears as though these issues have resolved themselves with the automated server reset. However, please feel free to report anything else you find in #bans-and-reports.

9 January 2023 - Frogofwar: Hi all,

I wanted to bring to your attention that due to a bug involving the FAWE plugin some areas near spawn have been rolled back a few days. One unforseen consequence of this rollback is that some parts of the server, including chest shops, player money balances, and LWC's auto-protect feature for new chests, are not fully functional at this stage. As a quick fix to the LWC issue, for the time being please /lock your chests upon creation.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and are actively working on a solution. In particular, while we hope to be able to restore your chest shops and economy balances, there is a chance that they may need to be remade/regarnered.

We appreciate your understanding and apologise for the inconvenience. Thank you for your patience.

1 January 2023 - rilelyscastle: Happy new year!

2022

December

25 December 2022 - rilelyscastle: Merry Christmas & Happy Holidays!

24 December 2022 - Frogofwar: One of our players @TakeYourShirt12 is running a build contest for Christmas and a few last slots have opened up. See here for details: #smp Rewards are quite generous.

19 December 2022 - Doozie: /dial Christmas a bit before 1pm server time daily(westcoast Northamerica) for Menorah lighting with iiamgoddly! 🕎

18 December 2022 - Frogofwar: YW

4 December 2022 - Doozie: Visit /dial presents for this year's stocking grotto! Santy is waiting.

1 December 2022 - Doozie: New winter items are appearing at mall1 weekly this month, limited head stocks are reduced to 375p and your player head (available at spawn) are reduced to 500p. Happy December!

November

29 November 2022 - Doozie: End resets are moving to a random schedule. There will still be 2 weekly resets but they can now be at any day/time. A warning will still be send before reset.

12 November 2022 - Doozie: We are pleased to announce that conversion of all previously existing full sized stargates has been completed! As planned we will be transitioning to full use of NXT for transport. Going forward new stargates will require a 100p one-time activation fee, as is tradition.

October

31 October 2022 - Doozie: New more realistic recipe for Name Tags: Leather and Iron Nugget

29 October 2022 - Doozie: Trialing a new sorter plugin, give it a go and see if you will be the one to find the game breaking bug! #smp

27 October 2022 - Doozie: Its Spooky Season! This Halloweek Only, at /dial mall1 we have not 1 but 2 Limited Stock Items available! Get your TINY GOURDS and INVISIBLE ITEM FRAMES before they're gone! *invisible item frames will become visible if broken, one time use only*

19 October 2022 - Doozie: replacement for PolyMc released https://github.com/PrismLauncher/PrismLauncher/releases/tag/5.0

17 October 2022 - Doozie: Apparently something shady is going on with PolyMC, if you use it, do some research and consider uninstalling until the water clears #general

11 October 2022 - rilelyscastle: Happy Thanksgiving!

September

13 September 2022 - Frogofwar: Hi everyone! We are very happy to announce that Novylen is now running the NovyXTreme (NXT) plugin. 🙂 This plugin is intended as a long-awaited replacement to the beloved "Wormhole X-Treme" plugin that we used to run.

A huge thanks must go to @Dograffe who volunteered hours of his own time to build this plugin entirely from the ground up. If you would like more information about the plugin and how it works, please check out the wiki page: NovyXTreme Going forward, we will be slowly phasing out our current system of /warps. We will no longer be acting on any new warp requests, and will most likely be disabling /warp entirely at some point in the future.

Please direct any questions or concerns to #general chat.

4 September 2022 - Doozie: Recipes for craftable Reinforced Deepslate and Echo Shards are now live

August

28 August 2022 - Doozie: Now running a Dev build for Runecraft, replacing Runecraft 3.0 levitation obelisks with Runecraft 4.0 flight runes. See pinned posts in #runecraft for more info!

14 August 2022 - Doozie: We are now officially asking everyone not to interfere with ban appeals, and not to mock people's appeals in other channels or ingame. Please remember rule #1: Don't be a Jerk.

10 August 2022 - Doozie: We are now running 1.19.2, server is set to allow anti-chat report client mods

July

22 July 2022 - Doozie: In preparation for the coming update we are doing some rebalancing of our economy set up. New player balance will now be set to 50p and Cobbled Deepslate will be our new standard at the Admin Shop, replacing Cobblestone. Pay-out for Cobbled Deepslate has been increased to 2p per stack, and for a limited time you can sell Amethyst Clusters for 4p per stack. We will also have new limited time offers for limited stock of select rare and/or unavailable items. Also the Buy Your Head price is now 750p, down from 1000p

June

12 June 2022 - Frogofwar: We're having a blast on the new patch! Join with 1.19 and type /joinq tmp in the lobby. ❤️ Same rules as regular SMP. If you get an error about "public profile keys" just log out and back in and it should fix things.

February

18 February 2022 - Rbos: server is no longer whitelisted. Open to the ravening hordes.

January

26 January 2022 - Rbos: After approximately two dozen very nice and helpful people offering to rewrite the perfectly-good plaintext webpage and make it more “modern” and “colourful” and “less stuck in 1997”, I’ve put back the WordPress page. HAPPY?! 😛

21 January 2022 - Shutitdown (Mrepic): @here Good news everyone! With the 1.18 Update comes a new spawn!

14th spawn is ready for you to enjoy and explore! To celebrate all the new people, the new spawn but above all, the new update, the Novylen team has set up a small celebration when we open 14 spawn to the public!

This celebration will start when the spawn opens in 1 hour!

1 January 2022 - Dograffe: Map Art voting is about to commence! last chance to submit entries, I'll repost all entries in about 15 minutes in #smp; use the <:mcrose:547223117173620739> reaction to vote for your favorite, only one vote per player allowed, I'll leave the votes open for 24 hours to let all players get a chance to vote!

2021

December

31 December 2021 - Reiyuka: the End should now reset 2am Tuesday and 4pm Thursday PST.

24 December 2021 - zweirus: Hey guys, check out the Christmas tree at spawn! It is to the west on ground level. Behind it, you can find a tunnel that goes down to a room for presents. Put your name on the signs there, and maybe someone will leave you a present this Christmas! :)

21 December 2021 - Reiyuka: @everyone Hi! Now that we've processed all the existing players, giving them a chance to play, and made the queue somewhat manageable, we're opening up a player intake signup sheet. People will get in as spaces open up, in order of signup. https://minecraft.novylen.net/~minecraft/signup.php You'll get an email when your name comes up. This will probably be the last such announcement; apologies for the spam.

If you need to set up a filter, the email will come from "minecraft@minecraft.novylen.net".

The next policy decision will be in regards to donations (not yet), and will have to involve some solution that doesn't effectively make us a fully pay-to-play server. Have a great day.

19 December 2021 - Reiyuka: @everyone Hi! I've done another set of player intakes (2021-12-19). This one is 1300 players, and is composed of everyone who's logged any time on the SMP server in the last month (ie, from before we went to a whitelist). Lobby server doesn't count. Either try to log in, or check your name on this list first.

https://dpaste.com//BP5X2DWGZ

16 December 2021 - Reiyuka: @everyone Hi! I've done another set of player intakes. I actually screwed up the first one: I thought the number was seconds, when it was actually ticks. :) So here is take 2! 200 players, with playtime on the Novylen SMP server (not lobby!) of more than 1 hour.

More intakes to follow as we clear up the queue times!

https://pastebin.com/yaPsg799

16 December 2021 - Frogofwar: https://wiki.minecraft.novylen.net/index.php/Main_Page - Link to Novylen Wiki. Locked to only be editable by players with moderator+. Contains useful information on server plugins (including runecraft), tour spots, staff, rules, recent updates, and more. Worth visiting if you have any questions that aren't answered in the FAQ.

15 December 2021 - Scouter: The time count is when playing in smp or creative, not the lobby.

15 December 2021 - MiWadi: @everyone As of right now, we will be letting an additional 153 players join who had previously logged between 1-2 hours on the server. If you joined for awhile but didn't make the initial cutoff, check to see if your name is on this list: https://pastebin.com/jBdC9PfF

11 December 2021 - rilelyscastle: For some clarity: we have shut the server to any new player who has not logged 3 hours or more in SMP or Creative, the queue lobby does not count. Donators are allowed in but we have since stopped the ability to donate sorry for this being out of order

11 December 2021 - Frogofwar: Attn: we have whitelisted the server for the time being. We are likely to reconsider this decision in the future once the hype surrounding the server dies down a little, and things become more manageable for the small team of volunteer moderators/administrators. Thank you.4

10 December 2021: Due to high interest in the server, we have imposed a temporary whitelist. We have also temporarily paused donations. Anybody with 3+ hours of playtime across the Creative and SMP worlds may join the server. In total, 20 players may connect to the SMP world, 10 players may connect to the Creative world, and 20 more players may queue in the lobby. Donators may bypass these player caps. The AFK timeout has been increased to 10 Minutes.

August 2021: The server has been updated to 1.17.1. We are waiting on new hardware, and some plugin updates, before proceeding to 1.18. 1.18 clients can join the game, but not access any 1.18-exclusive mechanics. The new /spawn is 13spawn. The 1.18 temp-map has been taken down due to lack of demand.

2018

April

12 April 2018 - Rbos: Koo koo kachoo.

2016

March

7 March 2016: Novylen now has a Discord. You can join at https://discord.gg/z7XkG83g. You can link your in-game Minecraft account with your Discord account by typing '/discord link' in game. Before joining, please take the time to read through the discord Rules. The old forums have been locked, but are still viewable at this page.

2013

August

17 August 2013 - Rbos: I am testing the Prism block logging addon in minecraft; it has more advanced rollback features, and records more events, more usefully. So far, so good. Bit of learning curve, but once we’re over it, it should allow us to do some very helpful things, like previewing rollbacks before committing them, and recording what player killed what, or picked up what. Hopefully it prevents some arguments. I’ll have to rewrite a couple of auditing scripts.

Today we also had an interesting WorldEdit accident, one of the mods set a pos2 but left the pos1 back at the previous location, and then did a //set 0. Server locked up, and intending to force a rollback, I hit ^C on console. Unfortunately, that saved the changes that did go through, so in hindsight, I should have suspended java and did a kill -9 to prevent it saving the changes, an approach that has worked well in the past.

Oh well. Restored the missing areas from backup. Sadly, WorldEdit does not in the current build restore sign contents, so some shops in the mall got messed up. The dev build evidently fixes that.

BungeePerms is updating to use MySQL, which should allow me to set up tab list colours pretty easily. The main problem was generating a permissions.yml from a database export of PermissionsEx data, and I didn’t really care enough to go to the effort. But if they’re both in the database, then porting the data over is a relatively simple procedure, I can just make it part of the BungeeCord startup script or something, and it’ll sync once a day.

14 August 2013 - Rbos: I was having a conversation with someone, and the question of the server stats came up. Here we go:

The server hardware is actually two Dell R420 servers. From that beginning, I added a hardware RAID card, three rotary hard drives (1TB each), and one solid state drive (128GiB), 16GiB of RAM, and Intel Xeon E2430 CPUs, six cores each, 2.3GHz.

Two of the drives are RAID-1 (mirrored) with the third as a spare that will kick in automatically. I chose that configuration because a 3-disk RAID5 and a 2-disk RAID1 have very similar performance and reliability characteristics: they both have 2x read I/O and 1x write I/O, and can both tolerate one failed drive. With mirrored/spare, however, I trade off some space for automatic failover and rebuild onto the spare drive. I use the SSD as a block cache for the RAID1; that is, writes to the disk first go onto the SSD, and then get written out more efficiently, sequentially, to the rotary storage in batches, getting the best of both worlds. I use Bcache for that part.

The two servers both run Debian, a lightweight Linux distribution particularly well suited for servers. They are mostly identically configured; one is named ‘node1’ and the other is named ‘node2’. Installed on both servers is a piece of software named Ganeti, which manages KVM, a hypervisor; it’s used to run “virtual” machines, that is, machines that run virtually, separately from one another and can share a single physical computer. Ganeti lets me run VMs in a master-slave configuration, mirroring a VM between both node servers in such a way that if one server fails, the other server can take over. VMs can be migrated between the servers without people logged into the VM even noticing that it happened. For instance, I can move all the VMs onto node2, reboot node1, and then move all the VMs to node1 and reboot node2. Users don’t even notice, in theory. So, it’s pretty cool technology.

Right now, minecraft pretty much gets a node to itself. It’s extremely overpowered for the task, but I’ve specced things out to hopefully last me five or six years, so I’m pretty comfortable with the investment.

3 August 2013 - Rbos: Hard drive latency graphs for the last week on my two node servers. Notice how disk response time goes from ~100ms to ~10 on both servers.

aio=native on KVM. Pretty great. Had to patch it into Ganeti.

2012

February

10 February 2012 - Rbos: The map is now being regenerated with DynMap. Should take a few weeks to process.

Also if you hadn’t noticed, we’re on a new physical server now, and I’ve been profoundly lazy with some things, so the website’s been kind of spotty of late. Most things are running though.

Need to fix the paypal link at some point, I have to set up accounts manually right now.

2011

December

18 December 2011 - Rbos: https://minecraft.novylen.net/stats/econ.html

November

17 November 2011 - Rbos: http://minecraftservers.net/server.php?id=9309 http://minecraft-server-list.com/server/13768/

September

5 September 2011 - Rbos: Hey, for funsies I’m trying out Supernatural Players in pvpland, which adds player classes (ghouls, priests, hunters, and vampires). Give it a try. It’s complicated, so read up on it.

August

25 August 2011 - Rbos: I added a sky biome area. Permanent day, separate world inventory.

Gate to ‘aether’.

19 August 2011 - Rbos: gate to ‘creative’, give it a try. /i for stuff.

This is a BETA so don’t get too attached to it.

15 August 2011 - Rbos: http://wiki.minecraft.novylen.net

15 August 2011 - Rbos: Updates:

Citizens.jar PlugMan.jar MapMarkers.jar Spout.jar LogBlockQuestioner.jar LogBlock.jar BaseBukkitPlugin.jar LongGrass.jar LogOres.jar NoCheat.jar properTime.jar SimpleSignEdit.jar ecoCreature.jar CraftBukkitUpToDate.jar LWC.jar runecraft.jar WorldBorder.jar Achievements.jar Stats.jar

  • Moved Stats and Achievements to a mysql database on rollup (the database server).
  • Moved LogBlock datebase to rollup.
  • Teleporting (/home, /warp, /wxgo) is much faster now.

15 August 2011 - Rbos: Wild pumpkins now grow back.

15 August 2011 - Rbos: LogOres: a more sophisticated x-ray hack detector. Some neat features. It does some basic crunching on ore finds, figuring out average distance between finds, average time between finds, and some other things. Legit ore finds tend to be on the same plane, fairly widely spaced in time and space. Xray hackers tend to be closely placed, and on more varying Y axis.

http://forums.bukkit.org/threads/sec-admin-logores-v0-7-log-ores-to-look-for-cheaters-1000.25432/

Interesting stuff.

10 August 2011 - Rbos: Some things I’d like to do over the next few months:

1) Moar NPC shops. Probably will keep /shop, because it’s better for bulk items, but maybe we shouldn’t do bulk item transfers. It’s too magicky. 2) Blacksmith NPCs to replace /repair. 3) A “creative” mode has been on my list for a while. It’s sort of, kind of there already (gate to ‘creative’, it’s perma-day and no player damage), but there’s no infinite supplies because of trouble restricting /item to that world. Notch is allegedly introducing creative mode, so I’ll wait to see how that turns out. 4) Review and update addons. iConomy is like four months old. Wormhole XTreme revamped entirely. 5) Possibly introduce player classes.

10 August 2011 - Rbos: I recently checked up on the status of the iAuction plugin.

(seriously guys if you want a plugin, see if it exists or has been updated to work with the latest craftbukkit, anyone could have noticed that iAuction had been updated recently).

I won’t be installing it, because:

1) I like local shops. They give players something to build in their towns, and give people a reason to go to those towns. NPC shops are even better (once cough I make them work).

2) Spams chat. Mostly that’s fine, but the vast majority of auctions, people don’t care about.

3) Magic. It’s FAR too easy to transport tons and tons of stuff across the entire map. Your pockets are full of mountain, and you can just whiz it over to another person with a /auction command? It’s boring, it’s not “game”y. Some things SHOULD be hard. Even a little bit.

2010

November

23 November 2010 - Rbos: Bunch of updates today.

The main thing is, I installed WorldGuard – which replaces SessionProtect, GriefAlert, Llamacraft, and BlockIt. It allows us to block fire, tnt, and optionally ban/kick people who do so. It prevents multiple sessions, and warns people when certain griefs happen. It’s verranice. It’s quite configurable, and can warn/block/kick by rank. Elegant solution to some annoying problems.

It also fixes the “block lag” bug Notch introduced last patch.

Since GriefAlert is now gone, so is the grieferstick, so I’m using WorldEdit’s “super pickaxe”. Toggle it with “//”, available to mods+.

I added the ability for members+ to spawn their own NPCs.  Nothing fancy, just warm bodies to populate towns and make them look more lived-in. Pretty fun. Eventually we could use this to implement quests, and if someone comes to the admins with a compelling pitch, we may allow certain people to play with it. For now, read up on it and if you have an awesome idea, let us know.

Also updated to hMod126 (beta), which means we no longer have to have a custom patch for the Stats plugin.

14 November 2010 - Rbos:

What was at first a trivial “move the server to a new location” turned into hijinks today as it refused to boot up. We’ve fixed the problem, but because we were offline for about 40 minutes, the IP address lease ran out, and we were assigned a new one.

Dammit. 🙁

So use the hostname or memorize the new IP. Sorry!

13 November 2010 - Rbos:

You can set up player shops now (thanks be to the authour of iConomy).

See /warp mntc for an example of a working shop, or /spawn for a non-working but valid shop.

From the instructions:

Creating shop sign

In-game create a sign, on the second line you must but only “buy” or “sell” without the parenthesis. On the third line you put the itemID and the amount for every transaction. On the fourth line you put the price of each transaction.

It will look like so:

buy 1 10 10

Click “Done”, and it should create the shop, you will now be buying 10 (stone) at 10 coin per transaction. Replace “buy” with “sell” for a selling sign.

To show users how much you currently have in stock, place a sign anywhere around the base sign. must be touching the base sign however and it will update that sign with stock information.

Using shop sign

Go up to the sign, if you are the owner you can add stock by clicking the “sell” sign with the item in your inventory to add to the stock. Make sure that you have nothing in your hand, click the sign (left) and it will either a) tell you an error or b) give you the item or sell it depending on the sign you are clicking.

12 November 2010 - Rbos: The lag issues every minecraft server has been experiencing the last two weeks are most likely the result of lighting issues in certain map areas.

If the server is experiencing lag issues, everyone should immediately return to /spawn. If a particular area is obviously causing issues, let us know on the forums and try to spread the word to keep clear of that area.

On our map, Skyland and Hell are two VERY obvious problem areas. Avoid those.

8 November 2010 - Rbos: Craftbook is nifty:

  • Openable fence gates
  • Elevators (with buttons)
  • leaf blocks now drop apples!
  • Bookshelves now have text (you can’t edit them, sadface)
  • area light switch
  • some “cauldron” recipes (seems pretty harmless).

5 November 2010 - Rbos:

  • Updated to Notch server 0.2.3,
  • moved the entire server tree to a ramdisk instead of just the world directory,
  • put in a plugin to notify when server saves happen,
  • Added a change to the Minecraft server process that should run it at higher scheduling priority, set it to re-prioritize every 15 minutes just in case the server restarts.

Looks good so far, with 1 user the server is going at 10% CPU instead of the 50%+ it was using before.

4 November 2010 - Rbos: I implemented the LogBlocks plugin yesterday. Now, (members+) can use a wooden pickaxe to access the change history of a particular block, going back to November 2nd.

I’ll probably trim out entries older than 14 days or so, since it uses 30mb/day, approximately.

1 November 2010 - Rbos: I’m installing iConomy to try it out. Give it a shot. Maybe it’ll suck, maybe it won’t.

October

31 October 2010 - Rbos: Well, apparently quite a few servers are having lagspike issues right now.  CPU load is spiking up to high values and causing problems with server unresponsiveness, periodically.

Joy.

31 October 2010 - Rbos: Installed Towny – give it a try!

25 October 2010 - Rbos: Hint: It's dangerous to go alone. Here, take this.

24 October 2010 - Rbos:

  • I spent much of the day working on statistics for the server users. It’s pretty primitive at the moment, but I have a script to dump them into an SQL database, and a PHP file to parse the results. This is a prerelease only, so don’t be surprised if it breaks.
  • Runecraft’s “Ice Boots” thing might be what’s been crashing the server. I’ve added it to the blacklist, but there might be others. For now, leave that rune alone, so we can at least eliminate it from consideration.
  • Installed Robin Sonneveld’s “Hey0Admin” for Zaneo and Jack, so that they can more easily make backend admin changes. SQL and SSH is fine for me, but I can see why they would prefer a web interface. 😀
  • Zaneo managed to wipe out a good-sized town today. He’d probably prefer I didn’t mention it. But hey. I’m a jerk, it says so right in the charter. :D I’m going to restore it from backup as soon as there are fewer than about 5 people online.
  • Plus, I’ve done things just as bad in the past. Just today, I filled a cuboid with torches, most of which fell to the ground, which made the server extremely laggy until I managed to collect and /clearinventory the bulk of it. .. Oops.

22 October 2010 - Rbos:

  • Runecraft 2.1 installed. Includes a “wall builder” rune that I’m a little leery of, but we’ll see how that goes.
  • TimeRift installed. My intent is to cut night about in half, skipping from 10pm in-game to 6am in-game. (22000 base time, 750 second check time) Might make it a bit longer, but that seems about fair.
  • Achievements appear to be broken for the moment.

21 October 2010 - Rbos: minecraft.novylen.net, BREAKER OF ADDONS, claims another victim.

WorldEdit implemented in-game selective cuboid rollbacks from zipped snapshots, which is very cool.

Our map is so big that it doesn’t work right away, which seems to happen a lot. I’m proud of us.

21 October 2010 - Rbos: I changed the server over to the new G1 Java garbage collector, which supposedly has a somewhat more efficient memory footprint and an algorithm for releasing memory that avoids some worst-case scenarios.

Some details here, here, and here.

19 October 2010 - Rbos:

  • Implemented the Achievements and Stats plugins. See here for the list of current achievements. The Stats plugin will let me put in some nice pretty server activity graphs later, I think. 🙂
  • Updated flight to work only for members+.
  • Various plugin updates to newest versions (afkkick, blahblah).
  • Rounded out the desert biome to make it look more natural, added some forests.
  • Fixed the subscription thinger to properly add to expired subs (rather than just blindly appending time).

On the subscription front, we’ve reached $75 in the first two weeks of pimping, plus $13 in Adsense revenue. I’m confident we can pay for the upgraded net connection. 🙂

15 October 2010 - Rbos: Okay, the ISP has apparently tracked down the issue (again) and confirmed that it’s their router that’s been causing the problem – on mild congestion, packets drop, latency increases, everything goes to hell.

So, as compensation they’re putting us onto their Server Connect 750KB/sec upload package until November.

Until then, I’m putting the user cap up to 30. Let’s see what this baby can do. If in November we have enough subscriptions/ad revenue to pay for it, or if they come out with a cheaper package (they’re rolling out a 3MBit upload package which might be more than enough for us), we’ll consider upgrading to something a little more hefty.

In the meantime, have fun. 😀

13 October 2010 - Rbos:

  • Installed ChannelChat for local and global chat (global default). /ch and /chlist added to default rank, will evaluate/discuss other channels soon, with an eye on the possible problem of splitting up conversations too much. Local chat has a 1 kilometer range, which should cover most towns. If we get a higher server population, more chat channels make sense, but for now, a couple will do. Possibility of giving channel privileges to member rank.
  • Updated hey0mod to 116 – items now spawn directly in your inventory when spawned with /kit or /item, and admins can now /clearinventory <player>. Not that I see any use for it, since I could always do that just by deleting the player file.
  • SessionProtect now prevents you using the last slot in your inventory. Allegedly. This helps with a dupe bug. I haven’t tested it, so feedback on that would be good.
  • more, probably. I also updated cuboidplugin and griefalert, but that probably won’t be major.


12 October 2010 - Rbos: Not mine, but check this out:

http://qt3minecraft.project357.com/map-night/

Pretty cool! I want to do this, too, if we can do it without spending 4-5 hours a day doing renders. 🙂

12 October 2010 - Rbos:

Okay, happy Thanksgiving from Canada. 😀

While watching How To Train Your Dragon on DVD at my gf’s parents’ place, I was on a laptop dinking about with the Web site a bit.

  • Tower ad on the sidebar! Woo!
  • Proper links in the menu bar – no more clicking through a page to get to the map.
  • Cuboid protection zones now have a minimum height of 32.

11 October 2010 - Rbos: Thanks to econnel on the hey0 forums, we now auto-afk-kick people after 15 minutes if the server is full. 😀

thread here

11 October 2010 - Rbos: Thanks to agrif, regular on the server and contributor to Overviewer, the server map now marks protected areas. They’re normalized to sea level, which makes them a little off sometimes, but most of them are most accurately represented at sea level anyway.

Hm, I guess I could render it at the *average* Y instead of at a set Y.

10 October 2010 - Rbos: Well:

  • we’re running WordPress now,
  • the map is moved,
  • the forum is moved,
  • some basic content is in place,
  • I made a spiffy new banner from the Cathedral (probably the most recognizable landmark),
  • we’re running MySQL on the backend now,
  • I updated the map marker and premium member scripts to use MySQL,
  • We ran with 30 users for three hours. It was amazing!

10 October 2010 - Rbos: Minecraft multiplayer is fun, but playing it quickly grows old. Without the challenges imposed by server-side health, enemy mobs, and the tempting, easily-available /item spawn command, it doesn’t pose a whole lot of challenge for a server admin. Running the server is interesting, though.

Today, I’m working on moving the backend configuration to MySQL out of flat files. That part is done. I wrote a script to parse the text files and insert them into tables, restarted the server, and everything seems pretty okay, with the exception of some duplicate entries in the groups table, and some leftovers in the user table. I’m rewriting the “contributor” script, which will promote users from “regular” to “member”, the premium rank.

2 subscriptions so far. Rolling in the dough!

Still to do: add Google adsense ads to the global WordPress template, and then fix the Paypal registration script. Currently it doesn’t renew subscriptions properly.

10 October 2010 - Rbos: I moved minecraft.novylen.net to a RAM disk yesterday. Performance issues have been resolved entirely. In a stress-test today, I had 30 users logged in without a hiccup. It’s pretty easy to see how a server with more memory and better CPU could support 60-100 users.

Currently I am limited only by bandwidth: the package we have right now is $150/mo for 130KiB/sec upload, but latency issues when the upload is as little as 75% saturated (sigh, as much as 3 seconds ping time to fraser.sfu.ca) mean that the ISP has temporarily put us on the $300/mo package with 750KiB/sec upload, which is nice. With 30 users, the server did a pretty steady 300KiB/sec up. So we could easily support more users if I could find a way to partially fund it.

Subscriptions will help, if I can find the right combination of carrot, stick, and price. It doesn’t seem to be the price so much as the concept of paying a subscription, or donating, that people have trouble with. So I’m aiming for $2/mo, which is pretty comparable to iphone apps. I only support paypal at the moment.

10 October 2010 - Rbos: As current members have noticed, I’ve re-vamped the novylen.net Minecraft web site. The links along the top lead to various places. This feed is intended for news related to the server. I will post here from now on instead of making forum threads.

Announcement Summaries

December 2022

Please see Discord for a full summary of recent changes. From now on, 'recent updates' will be detailed in the server Discord channel (see below), #Announcements

August 2022

Novylen is now running version 1.19.2 with ViaVersion, and the option to join with NoChatReport. Travel to /warp new for new worldgen.

With the update to 1.19, we have made some changes to server plugins: infiniteannoucements, ChestSort and DualWield have all been disabled, and several changes have been made to Runecraft (thank you to the Runecraft development team for giving us access to their latest deveopment version). To manage latency issues, we have also made various changes to redstone and tile entity gamerules. There have also been various tweaks to our policy around shops - in-particular, the cobblestone adminshop at Spawn has been replaced with a limited supply player-head chestshop.

May 2022

Novylen has had a few updates over the last few months: The server is now running on 1.18.2 with a new spawn (/warp 14spawn) and mall (/warp rvsc). Some new plugins have been added to the server: CourierNew, DualWield, VillagerTradeLimiter, YourHeadShop. The server currency has been moved from Amethyst to Pence (fiat currency), and you can make Pence by selling cobblestone, deepslate and/or netherrack to the 'admin shop' at rvsc. Some Runecraft features have been disabled to prevent trolling (eg. Sheild Rune). The Keepinventory Gamerule has been enabled in the End for similar reasons.

Regarding Server Events, we have hosted a party at 14spawn to celebrate the 1.18 Update, and two Map Art Challenges (please see the Discord server, linked below for more information). Some other seecret changes as well.

February 2022

Update: We are no longer using a whitelist.

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