Official Update Thread

[Cryptite]

Loads of little bug fixes, but most notably:

• The tick-rate of crop growth etc has been returned to normal. For whatever reason it was 8x the speed it should've been... Hope you enjoyed it while it lasted!
• Fixed the glorious Tab List issues.
• Beginning to exempt things from out CIT fudging. Things like player-heads and most loka custom items should now show properly on other players.

Bountiful Territories should be out in the next couple of days as well as the custom S5 Heads showing in pvp games.

 

[Cryptite]

Bountiful Territories are Out!
If you haven't read up on how these work, check out this thread first

Only a couple additions/changes to the original feature:

• Bountiful Territories can be viewed on the map. They'll show as a stack of gold coins and the territory will be outlined in yellow. You can also hover over the icon to see how much of the bounty remains.
• You cannot release a territory if it's a Bountiful Territory.
• If a town is founded on one, the bounty will immediately clear out.
• Instead of depositing the rewards or earned rewards of a Bountiful Territory into the TGen Chest, the rewards will now be held by your town NPC. This could be either the one in the TGen or your Job NPC (/g j npc). The rewards basically just look like job escrow.

Go forth and get those bountiful resources!

 

[Cryptite]

Lots of continued performance issues being tackled and inspected. Hopefully logging into Loka should be much quicker these days

• You can now create town jobs that require a minimum level of prestige to accept. This is [PR] at the end of /g j e.
  
• As part of our ever evolving work towards mandating server rules by features, rather than saying "you can't do that", we have blocked TnT cannoning, and other town-based TnT destruction. In short, any TnT that explodes in a town, but that was not primed in that town will not explode.
• Players trying to create Industries in your town are now subject to the town Industry Permission. Whoops. No more level 1 members making barns everywhere
• Fixed the docks not counting as connecting territories. They should always count as a connecting territory (just like towns do).
• Fixed armor colors "swapping" at the end of fights. Hopefully everybody will new stay on the same teams/colors that they started with.

 

[Cryptite]

Continued perf/bugfixes. Keen observers may've noted that we've started to transition into some Quality of Life updates. This was never going to be some sort of a "hard switch", as much as it's just focusing more on bugfixes/QoL while still continuing to develop other features in parallel. So continue to expect small batches of bugfixes, rather than major feature announcements.

1.13 is slated to come out next week, and as usual, it'll likely be a few weeks before Loka makes the update. As always it tends to fall on other plugin developers to update their things before we can fully switch ourselves.

So, anyway:

• Block Jumping now only checks if you're placing solid blocks. You should no longer get punished for trying to place things like torches, redstone, seeds, etc.
• /lore line#'s 32 character limit no longer includes color codes, so you can use all the colors you want, just only 32 actual characters, woo!

 

[Cryptite]

• Radars have a new design as well as some padding to ensure they have some breathing room for golems
  
  
  
  
• In addition the cost of Radars has been increased from 8 shards (wut) to 40 shards (ye).
• XP Bottles and Blood should now show in Loka+ (no longer CIT-fudged).
• Fixed a pretty significant lagspike that happened when players were beheaded. This should reduce the number of lagspikes that happen during Conquest fights (where your head is less likely to remain attached).
• Since we're on the 7th generation of players, in accordance with RPG Rarity Colors Standards, Generation 6 players in /find are now white, instead of gray.

 

[Cryptite]

More usual performance updates and optimizations (as always), but also some good stuff:

• Much like with the change to TnT recently, we have adopted another new change to help put features in to replace rules. In this case, we're going to start protecting against attempts at despawning items. The way the new feature works is that any item dropped in a town by somebody who wasn't a member of that town will automatically be transferred to that town's escrow (Job/TGen NPC). Items will still stay on the ground for 5 minutes, but when they would otherwise despawn, they are instead sent to the town escrow so that they aren't simply lost.
• Fixed Location Jobs not working for town/public jobs.
• Also hopefully fixed /discord not setting your ranks properly.

 

[Cryptite]

Level 25 Towns Rejoice!
You now have your level 25 town perk

• Finally introducing Intra-Town Portals, the Level 25 Town Perk.
  
• Create a set of two sister portals inside of your town protection that allow transport between two points of your choosing in your town.
• Use zones or build restrictions to encapsulate parts of your towns that the pitiful Level 1 members can't get to. The only limit is your imagination, or your desire for segregation.
• You can use (brace for it), /g setportal2, so long as you have the SET_PORTALS town perm to create both the source and destination portals.
• Also, /g setportal now respects the set_portals permission (whoops).

Great Success!

 

[Cryptite]

• Two new /profile settings have been added:
  • Toggle Battle Helms at Spawn - You can now toggle on/off your Battle Helm being shown when in spawn. If on, whenver you have a helmet on, other players will instead see your toggled Battle Helm.
  • Toggle Total Purchased Amount - Toggle seeing on the Orbs item in /profile the total amount you've purchased on Loka. This is useful for players wanting to see how close to various Star levels, etc they are.
• Otherwise, loads of tiny bugfixes and the usual optimizations.

 

[Cryptite]

• Achievements have been updated/modernized to behave like the rest of /profile.
• Banner of Conquest will default to your town's /g banner if it has one set. You can still use /boc update to update your own, but at least it shouldn't be black by default now.
  
• Double blocks (doors, double plants like rose bushes, and beds) are now properly handled by the regen system and as such shouldn't leave half of themselves all over the place.
• Hanging items (Item Frames, Banners) will now also be properly removed by regen.
• The Nether will now fully reset every server restart like The End does

 

[Cryptite]

• No-Fly Zones (like the Dreadfort) will now forcibly drop you like with towns/foreign-territories.
• Further, when being dropped from the sky; once you land, you should no longer have the forced 10-second "freeze-falling" debuff on you, so that should be a little less horrible feeling.
• Thanks to @lottaine, more in-game tips have been updated to point to their respective (newly added/updated) Wiki Pages:
  • Fish Weights
  • Fishing Tournament
  • Blood
  • Beheading
• Blood now coagulates before it stains, cause that's how it really works. This was backwards.

 

[Cryptite]

• Laurel - The Infinite Layer Banner NPC - has returned! You may now, once again, create banners that have more than 6 layers. See Laurel in the basement of the Capital Halls area to create them. To design a Infinity Banner costs 400 orbs. You are then, however, free to clone that banner as much as you'd like, so think of it more as paying for the design.
• Hopefully fixed Intra-Town Portals teleporting you to places you didn't ask it to.
• /prowess now takes you straight to your PvP stats page in /profile
• Fixed Summer Fireworks disappearing on you if you attempt to use them in-town.
• Loads of other small fixes and usual performance optimizations!

Go Forth and Design some beautiful banners!

 

[Cryptite]

• The Night has become more dangerous.
  • Our efforts to bring back into life the lack of mobspawning have begun. Intrepid explorers of the Wilds should now begin to notice more mob spawning these days, including animals and monsters. Be wary!
• Boats left after 5 minutes will despawn. Much like dropped items, except without the unloaded-chunk-saving, boats that are left empty will despawn after 5 minutes. The current massive clutter of boats around things like RI's will begin to clean themselves up. Boats in towns are not subject to despawning.

 

[Cryptite]

• Supporters have finally received a long-awaited update in their perks. A few things have been moved around, and supporters now have access to Six New Collectibles!:
  • Pets - Only available in Spawn or in your Home Town
    • Lil' Guard - The Stalwart tiny Aladran guard. Grumpy, but happy to follow you around wherever you go.
    • Fateful Timmy - Forever bouncy, but forever ill-fated. Lil' Timmy will join you on your adventures.
  • Conquest Helm
    • Aladran Guard - The unique helm worn by all of Aladra's (upcoming) Guards
  • Kill Message
    • Sent back to Aladra - Send your foes back to Aladra! Bwahahaha
  • Player FX
    • Timmy's Fate - Is it blood magic? Who knows. Timmy's fates are ever as uncertain as the swirls of Blood around your character.
    • Aladra's Charge - A regal cape of sparks, sure to be as showy as your skills in Minecraft!
• With this update, /fx has been removed. The variety of (poor) FX that Supporters had access to has been removed in favor of the new FX menu.
• Removed /g war, cause it wasn't supposed to be there anyway hehe.

Go Forth! And a thousand thank yous to all the supporters of Loka. Enjoy your new gifts!

 

[Cryptite]

• NEW: /g a rename - This is now the official way to request an Alliance rename. Mag/I will still have to approve the name, but you can now do it in-game rather than through DM's.
  
• Bunches of bugs relating to Town Jobs have been fixed. Weird issues with quantities, not being able to accept or turnin jobs, etc should hopefully be fixed.
• Fixed FX for Supporters not showing up most of the time.

 

[Cryptite]

• NEW: You can now toggle on/off your pet sounds in /profile. This does not currently work to mute other players' pets, however.
  
• /pvp no longer shows Queued Players and Playing Players. It will now show the average length of time people are spending in the queue before getting matched. Proving Grounds will still just show active players, however.
• Fixed an issue where, when looking at /b, and picking up an item, then closing your inventory (with escape, etc), you would just straight up lose that soulbound item.
  
• In a majority of the GUIs on Loka, items will now have their attributes hidden. In other words, the sword item to queue for ranked 1v1 no longer shows stats like its weapon damage, etc. So, cleaner.
• Still tweaking mob/animal spawns. Turned down the animal spawns a bit, as they were getting a bit dense.
• And about a million other tiny fixes.

 

[Cryptite]

• The EDIT_MEMBER town permission has been split into two parts, ADD_MEMBER and REM_MEMBER. If you so choose to have different town member level permissions for adding versus removing members, you now can.
• Fixed up our CIT Fudging tech to not obfuscate the data tags for items like Concrete, etc. You should not be able to see what color concrete a player is holding, etc. This would apply to anything that is the same type, but whose data changes what they are (think dyes for things like bonemeal, etc).
• Many many other fixes. like /me throwing an error if you don't provide any other arguments :|

 

[Cryptite]

• New Player Setting - Mini Titles - Opt to use only the bottom title line for zones. Useful if you're not fond of Very Big Titles in your face all the time.
• Fixed a pretty huge bug in which the Restriction checks for a lot of things weren't really correct. This should mean all kinds of things may start working again; namely animals in your barns that weren't processing right. Restricted animals (rabbits, pigs, etc) that should spawn in certain places weren't, etc.
  
• Fixed Bountiful Territories not actually granting you more than 1 cycle's worth of loot if you weren't collecting it.
• Fixed the public jobs at spawn all claiming to have no instances left.
• We're going to start going through ruins soon and renaming them to be more accurate. The Ruins of Nazariack are really the ruins of Sickholme (who did most of the building of that town, for example).
  • Help us out on this! Use /report in a ruin if you'd like to suggest a ruins rename!

 

[Cryptite]

Haven't been a ton of bugfixes lately, but a few things have been updated/fixed/added

• Mob Spawning continues to be adjusted and tweaked.
  • Our old "manual spawning" mob behavior has been removed in favor of a replacement-style system. This is likely more performant and will simply replace certain mobs with other ones, letting Minecraft's Vanilla mob-spawning algorithm do what it does, rather than us trying to compensate for it.
    
  • Ghasts, Blazes, and sometimes Magma Cubes (though they may be the tiny ones only) will now spawn better in the Nether. The ghast spawning behavior is also hopefully fixed such that they will only spawn in the air and not immediately suffocate.
  • Illagers in Resource Islands should now start popping up more places than just on the surface. RI's as a whole may be very much more dangerous, as Vexes will now harass you in the lava caves, etc.
• For those choosing to compete for titles like Tycoon, Altruist, and Gold Digger, the current owners of these titles can now be seen if you hover over that specific title in /titles. The name of the player who owns each title will only show if they have that title active themselves. Otherwise you will merely see the $ value to beat to take the title from its current owner.
  • Additionally, if you've opted not to hide your total purchases on Loka in /profile (settings), you will now also see your gifted and gifts-received amount so you know how much/little you need to go for the titles.
  • This whole thing is admittedly weird, but we feel it's more important that people who want these things know what they have to do to get them. The lack of information is sort of equally crappy as having to ask me/mag who has what, how much, etc. The way we look at it is that if you wanna brag about it, and show off Tycoon, then you're not shy about people knowing your amount(s).
    
  • The entire idea behind these Collectibles is that you should know exactly what you have to do to get it. Things you cannot get at all (Hero V, for example), simply won't show up in your titles list since you can't have it. But, if a title is in there and locked, that means you should get it and you should be able to know how, regardless of what it is.
• Fixed issues with losing items that were on your cursor when closing certain inventories. This also means you should no longer lose things from your soulbound bag the same way as well.

 

[Cryptite]

Heretofore, any update that might help players who run Minecraft on potatoes shall have next to its bullet-point a

• Particle Effects have been overhauled and now display both less densely (in most cases) as well as will only now show when you're much closer to their emitter(s).
  • For example, all industry buildings mostly produce particle effects in some way. Currently, you can see those particles up to 100 blocks away. This is really wildly unnecessary and may be contributing to poor performance for our 's out there.
  • Now, Particles will be less dense, and will (in most all cases), only show when you're within 32 blocks of the emitter.
  • Does this make Silverhand less laggy?
    • Well, no, most of that is the sheer amount of item frames, armor stands, paintings, redstone, and various that comprise the silverhand tower. Those are all things that we don't control, aside from make them hurt the server less, so, gg.
• In addition to this change, from a server performance standpoint, Industries (as one source of constantly running particle effects) now are way smarter and only play particles if their chunk(s) are loaded. It used to be that every Industry in all of Loka regardless of whether anyone was in the area or not were all constantly running thousands and thousands of particle effects. As a whole this actually wasn't hurting very much. Loka still runs at pretty much 20tps 99% of the time, but these are the kinds of things that scale with the player-count. The more players are online, the more the code has to check which players can see the particles, so, more players = more checks, etc. These kinds of performance optimizations matter when we get bigger and bigger.
  
• The past few times Loka has fully crashed (a handful of times over the past few weeks), it was due to the Discord api failing out and Loka not properly disconnecting when this happened. This should now be fixed and if Discord goes down, it shouldn't eventually take Loka with it. Phew.
• As ever, mob spawning rates continue to be polished. Please continue to bring up any issues (too many, too few mobs) you find with /report. It is Vanilla behavior that animals never despawn, so in some case the "over spawning" we had before has already done its damage, so if you find some concentration of like a billion animals on a hill, please let us know!
• When queued for PvP matches, we no longer use scoreboards (how we do tablist colors, etc) to indicate queue status. This was causing a lot of bugs here and there, so now we just use the dragon boss bar up top to indicate queue status. Less bugs, and easier!

And that's all for now! Go Forth!

 

[Cryptite]

Ported over some fixes from the September Update since they address some critical things:

• Players can be inadvertently hidden (look invisible) from each other when Power Sources turn on, same with when the core switches back to a chest after a TGen is defeated. This is fixed.
• Fixed a bug in which Lingering Death, Slow, and Spectral modules simply didn't work on Inhibitors.