Official Update Thread

[Cryptite]

Voting Stability

• Updated to a new Voting plugin which should help prevent a few lost votes. Mainly, you are now free to vote for Loka even when it's down or restarting. So long as our proxy is up (aka Loka shows as online in your server list), your vote should eventually make its way to Loka and thus count.

Conquest Fixes

• You can no longer use /b when in combat, or in an active battlezone.
• Fixed NeoT's OP living bomb bug (People who were a bomb weren't getting reset after fights).
• Fixed a bug in which you could sometimes teleport to a fight prematurely if that territory had been in a fight before.
• Also fixed Core % text being yellow for the same above reason (2+ fights in one day, same territory).

 

[Cryptite]

• Custom Crafting Recipes (Nametags, saddles, etc) should now work. Found a nice new plugin which seems to do the thing goodlier and so you should hopefully no longer have inconsistently broken craftables from /rb. Fixing this was expedited by upcoming Ender Storage.
• Fixed Alliances taking the final-tgen strength hit when they actually have territories left still (New Valyria's strength was restored).
• New Subscribers as well as players who gift to others now get a global chat message akin to Lore Scrolls. If you would not like to broadcast your gifting to the world, you may disable this in /profile -> Settings -> Show Gift Messages.
• We've begun to fix all the wacky and wild bugs with Inhibs/Modules appearing, disappearing, being wrong. Still a WIP but normality is being restored.

 

[Cryptite]

Void Storage is Out!
Hopper-less sorting and infinite storage is now available to everyone on Loka.

What Do

• Void Storage is meant to replace the need for Auto Sorters or, frankly, any sizable Hopper system. This new feature is Loka's take on facilitating storage and opening up some new freedoms to towns wishing to make fancy Vaults without having to block out a ton of space for massive Auto Sorters, while combating the horribly performance that is Hoppers In Minecraft.
• NerdieBirdie has made a very helpful and quick tutorial on how VS works:

• If you'd like a far more drawn out video on the features, you can check out our VS Feature Preview which was released earlier on in development:

• Some smaller changes to note since those videos were made:
  • There is no longer "Live Views" of your storage chests. It will not update while you're viewing your storage to reflect newly added items (from Deposit Chests).
  • The number of storable items was dropped from 36 -> 18 slots.

New Crafting Recipes

• There are now three new crafting recipes in /rb. These are how you craft Void Storage chests as well as their requisite Reinforced Hoppers (crafting material only), which are required to craft the VS chest markers.

Configuration

• Right-Click while sneaking to edit an Access Chest's Configuration and add/remove different types of items for it to store.
• Right-Click while sneaking and holding a Nametag to effectively name your Storage Chest. This will remain the chest's name as long as the chest remains there.
• Void_Storage is a new Town Permission (/g perm) that can be used to gate creation/editing of VS to certain member levels.

Raiding and Functionality

• Void Storage Chests can be raided. While foreigners aren't allowed to modify the VS chest configuration, any player can open an Access chest as they would a normal Auto Sorter, etc.
• Hoppers work with Deposit Chests. You are able to use hoppers with deposit chests in order to facilitate moving things into them to be auto sorted. Deposit Chests will periodically move things that can sort to their respective Access Chests.
  • Deposit chests will not do anything with items that don't have Access Chests, or are considered "Special" (Soulbound, lored, stat-tracked, KoD, etc).

Sorting and Changes in the Future

• The way that items are sorted in Access chests will change and mature over time, but for the most part, sorting works in this order:
  • Ordered the same as the items in the configuration page from left to right.
  • Durability loss in descending order.
  • With Enchanted Books, they are separated by looking at First Enchant only.
  • And then it just kinda gets random. Because of how items are collapsed if they're similar, they will group together, so there is still some order in that regard, but we'll need to add additional logic to unique cases of items.

Item Frame/Hopper Maximums

• The Void Storage Item Frames do count toward your town's Item Frame Limit. However, in the meantime, we have increased the frame limit from 500 -> 750 so people can have some flexibility while setting up VS.
• Because this system is meant to reduce the need for hoppers, after a week or so, we will lower the Hopper Maximum from 2000 -> 500. In the meantime, however, we're leaving it unchanged while people prepare accordingly.

 

[Cryptite]

Few bug fixes and updates have gone in over the past few days. Just to sum up:

• We updated our Discord library to a newer (and way better) version. This seems to be going well so far and we should hopefully no longer have issues with our link to Discord going down (unless discord is actually down, of course). It's working well!
• We have fixed the hilariously broken Resource Isles. They should no longer have insane amounts of ores anymore, and should be back to normal levels (to the dismay of many, no doubt).
• Viewing your balance in /g info has been updated. For some Alliance leaders, in some cases (eg tax policies), it was actually displaying the wrong daily cost (but were still paying the proper amount). This has been fixed as well as polished a bit to read a little better for all towns. It should make a little more sense how the cost breakdown works.
• And various other fixes here and there as always.
• Work on 1.13 is still underway. Our staff will likely be able to get on our PTS server in 1.13 and start hammering out bugs before we do a public test. Hang in there!

 

[Cryptite]

Announcing the Final Fishing Tournament - Ascalon!
and some visual updates to Garama, and Kalros' Tournament areas as well!

• While nobody was looking, Frodii was busy working on his modest dock and Ascalonian summer home on the Sylvan Isle.
• The West Fishing Tournament is now live! The first one should be tomorrow.
• At the same time, Frodii spent some time beefing up his tournament location on the Searing Isle in Garama and the Frigid Isle of Kalros.

and this was all a part of a bigger update as well for..
Cleaning up the Resource Isles!

• All 3 Resource Isles have had a pass done on them to clean up some of their unseemly features (floating water, bad trees, etc). Additionally, the isles no longer have "restricted resources" on them like they used to. The Ascalon RI, for example, had an excess of Peonies which did not belong there.
• The Ores on RI's are now only found near open air. In other words, we pruned out all of the ores that weren't within a close proximity to air (a cave wall, etc). Strip mining (which nobody really did much of anyway) is now no longer viable on the RI's.
  • This pruning of ores has allowed the Nightly restart to be about 1m30s faster now as a result!
• The above change has allowed us to do a better job of trying to balance the ores on the three isles. Coupled with our previous change to fix their bug, all 3 isles should have a similar count in ores. This means Kalros should be a bit more viable to mine in now, statistically speaking.
• Finally, all Fishing Tournament zones are now permanently there. Previously, only when a tourny was running did the zone technically exist. In plans for future questing updates, we're leaving all 3 tourny zones permanently up and as a sanctuary.

and with all this loveliness, there are now some...
New Titles to Earn!

• We've made some updates to old titles and added some new ones to go for:
• Trawler (Exclusive) - Catch the most fish ever on Loka. Only one player can have this title, and it is based on your Minecraft Statistic of fish caught, not the one that comes from Stat Tracking (why they are different.... idk)
  • Like with other number/statistic-based Titles, you can view the number to beat in /title.
• Whaler - Catch the biggest fish of the month. You must hand this into Haldii like you would've to get Master Angler. This title is handed out at the same time as capitals.
• Master Whaler (Exclusive) - Catch the biggest fish of all time on Loka. This was previously Master Angler, however it is now earnable by all (see below).
• Angler - Win a Fishing Tournament (unchanged)
• Master Angler - Win each of the three Fishing Tournaments

Note: Grubul has had his total fish caught set to 0 as a result of using an auto fisher in the past. This will be the policy going forward if anyone is caught abusing rules to increase a stat like this.

 

[Cryptite]

• /title list will now show the name of the player holding a top title (when statistic based). You'll still need to check with Haldii on Whaler titles
• Also fixed some bugs in which people still were showing titles they had lost.
• Fixed some achievements not working on PvP server, namely some 1v1 arena achievements, but also fixed some bugs that cause the whole network to asplode when achievements were earned, yeesh.
• Added some tools for Streamers to begin streaming Conquest Fights.
  • It's in Loka's best interest to have more opportunities for streaming Conquest fights, so long as it's fair.
  • marble will of course be our first "3rd party streamer". What a guy.
  • We're going to make a post soon about the requirements for streaming Conquest fights. Tl;dr transparency is key, people will have to apply to get the permission stream, and there will be requirements including no VC with fight participants as well as a stream delay.

 

[Cryptite]

• The Portals to the Old Worlds have been fixed. Worlds 2 and 4 are available like they should be, and 1 and 3 should be "sparking" as they do not function.
• We've added a Fourth Voting Site that acts as an optional site but still gives you credit.
  • Due to the fact that one of the sites frequently fails to deliver votes correctly, you can now earn full credit for a day by voting on 3 of the 4 sites.
  • You can vote on all 4 if you'd like and you will get voting credit for the 4th that counts towards earning Herald at the end of the month.
• Fishing Tournaments are now back to random between the three continents.
• Fixed a bug in which breaking Void Storage Item Frames wasn't properly subtracting from your town's Item Frame Limit.

 

[Cryptite]

March Conquest Updates
Not too many since we're about to hit 1.13

• All TGen Modules now only fire at Hostiles or Enemies in Battle Zones. This change is mostly to when they're not in an actual battle. Previously, unless you were a literal ally of the tgen, you would be shot at by all modules. This mostly wound up just killing new players who had no idea what was going on.
  • TL;DR: Unless you are marked as hostile by the TGen owner, you won't be fired at by tgens in the wilds outside of battles.
• TNT from the TnT Module now explodes after 2.5s (was 3s).
• Being "inside the TGen" no longer prevents you being targeted by the Laser Module. It will retain a virtually permanent lock on you until you get out of range.
• TnT, Lingering Death, and Slow Modules (the projectile-based ones) now all do a basic Line of Sight (LOS) check on their targets. They will now attempt to pick a target that they can actually see and shoot at, rather than closest person. This will likely continue to be polished.

 

[Cryptite]

A nice smattering of various bug fixes post 1.13.

• Fixed a bug in which being on fire prevented you from warping in portals. The post-fight mad-dash to the tgen portal should less frustrating now.
• Fixed collecting taxes from your town NPC only giving you 1 slot's worth of returns.
• Basically rewrote how "spawned in blocks" for Industries and Beacons works.
  • Industries and Beacons, when spawning in, will now remember what blocks they spawned in. If you break one of those blocks, it will drop nothing, but then you will no longer be blocked from placing random blocks in the industry/beacon.
  • This mostly affects the Beacon. Now, you are able to freely build in your beacon zone with ANY blocks except ones required by the beacon (RS Block, RS Lamp, Button, Gray-wool, Gold Block).
  • This may also fix laggy block place/breaks when editing industries/beacons, as the bad code was replaced with Really Good Code.
• Fixed a number of bugs where logging out while riding a horse/pig/llama, or having a mob in your boat would result in them all disappearing when you log back in.
• Fixed various Turtle bugs. You can bring them to your town if you'd like, but they won't breed or lay eggs anywhere but on Rivina.
• /g zone remowner now works to remove the zone owner if they are a tempbuilders.
• Nomads will get some scarier, redder text when trying to make a town in a territory owned by somebody. Whether this makes them look elsewhere shall remain to be seen.

As for what else is going on:

• We're still basically fixing things that broke since 1.13 or need to be reintroduced due to new plugins. This includes things like using a feather for town block-logging, forum registration, etc. A lot of these systems have been revamped, and/or are using newer plugins and so we're having to redo some things to get them working again.
• The next week or two is meant to be pretty much just focused around bug fixes, implementing features that have long-been promised but still not in yet, etc.

Go Forth!

 

[Cryptite]

Announcing Town/Alliance Proving Grounds!
Along with a smattering of other various bugfixes
​

• Two new options (where applicable) in /pvp. You may now enter a Proving Grounds lobby that is private to only your Town members or, if you choose, your Alliance members. Practice PvP in a safe lobby without the fear of horses coming to murder you out of boredom!
• Also added some icons to PG menu so it's a little more straightforward, and fixed some various formatting bugs.
• The tech for private PG has been suggested by players before and is definitely something we'd very much like to expand on in the future. We envision a scenario where players are able to create private PG matches with lots of settings options (no 33% damage buff, customized kit, gamemodes, etc). We realize PG is popular and to be able to make-your-own for various reasons would be a huge draw and is something we look to improve upon in the future.

Meanwhile, other things

• Overloading a Lamp now has a new visual. Instead of fighting with the actionbar down below, the subtitle section of your screen will now be used to display charging progress.

• /c train should now be fixed and working once again.
• /m, /r, and /find now support autocompletion. We are slowly adding commands that will work with this, so just keep an eye out!
• We continue to monitor things "That Lag Now Because 1.13" and are working on them constantly.
• Market additions:
  • Logs - All stripped logs/wood
  • Greenery - Cocoa Beans
  • Brewing Materials - Gunpowder
  • Baking Materials - Eggs
  • Organic Blocks - Red/Brown Mushroom Blocks

 

[Cryptite]

• Town/Alliance PG should work betterly now. It's tough to get the status of who's playing and all that...
• Even though it's been way more than a week, we have now reduced the Town Hopper Limit from 2000 to 500 as per the heads-up on this thread.
• After confirming a Conquest Lock, you'll now be taken straight to the module selection stage of setting up an Inhib, rather than having to hit the pad again. For your health.

 

[Cryptite]

Ruins Tech Improvement

Previously, the inside of this building would've been full of leaves/logs​

• Ruins tech has been improved. When towns die and trees begin to regrow, they no longer grow inside of buildings.
  • This was a remarkably simple fix but made a world of a difference to how ruins look and feel. Kudos to Magpie for thinking of this one.
  • Technically speaking, the simple change was to check if the light level of a block is 13 or higher. If so, leaves/logs may regrow. Things like skylights etc are what will still allow leaf/log regrowth inside of buildings if applicable, but otherwise this leaves interiors untouched most of the time.
  • The Ruins of Xefros can be checked out to see this in action on Loka presently.
  • I kinda wanna do a stream one night that shows what some major towns look like when they become ruined, because it's pretty awesome.
• Resource Isles have been fixed and should now have lots of ores down at the bottom like they once did.
• Fixed brewing not counting towards town mastery (looking at other places mastery seems to have broken since the 1.13 update as well).
• Players are no longer able to resolve their own reports. They can delete them, just not resolve them (that'd be weird).
• Added more messaging and information for players when they try to grow something they cannot (bonemealing crops/saplings, for examples).
• When you are within 50 of the cap for Item Frames, you will now receive a warning showing how many frames left you can place.

 

[Cryptite]

Over the next few days we're continuing to both fix bugs, but also polish/update some Very Old Systems that can be made far more stable and powerful. We'll likely be resuming work on Jobs 2.0 next week which is the last major feature before the fabled Treasure Knives can be finished.

In the meantime, most minor bug reports are being resolved in-game by the players who reported them, but some of the bigger changes are below:

• Rewrote a chunk of the area checking system (how Loka figures out where you are, what territory/area/ruin/chatzone/etc you are in). Ultimately this fixed problems like being unable to discover biomes that are fully controlled by a town. This should allow people to finish some of their Discovery achievements.
• Ruins will no longer show up if you're in a battle zone (it was confusing).
• Spooky somethings have been spotted in Ruins once again...
• Fixed various bugs with both hopper/item-frame caps not updating properly. As well added a warning message when you are within 50 of either cap.

 

[Cryptite]

No Mobspawning in Towns is now active

• As per this post, with the exception of Monsters, no mobs will spawn naturally in towns that are level 6 and above.
• This includes Fish. Fish will no longer naturally spawn there, but you can still bring them in via bucket, etc.
• You can still just walk right outside your town to get spawns, though, so it should still be easy enough to get what you need.

Arena Season 8

• Due to low turnout, there are simply not enough participants in this arena season for rewards to be handed out. As a result, there will be no rewards tonight at capitals for the season.
• Instead of resetting, however, Season 8 will simply remain going for another 3 months and all current ratings/wins/losses will remain.
• Prowess and Tier, however, will be wiped so players can have another go at earning kill messages and Tier rewards.

Other!

• The death message for dying to Soulsand now works properly.
• Fixed blood preventing obsidian blocks from properly becoming part of the lava floor
• Underholme and the Oasis were old requirements for Discovering Garama and have since been removed. Players who've explored Garama properly will retroactively earn the achievement when they logon.
• Spooky somethings should be a little easier to find in Spooky Ruins now.

 

[Cryptite]

Group Prayer!

Everything's better together!
​

• You can now /pray in groups to earn extra Faith!
• So long as you are within 25 blocks of another member of your Faith while praying, your prayer will link up.
• Mechanically speaking, the last person to join in a group prayer resets the prayer timer.
• In a group prayer, everybody's praying ends simultaneously.
• Taking part in a group prayer is worth up to 3 faith per participant (if you're in your holy site). You can still pray together anywhere in the world and for 1 extra faith, but to earn the max possible faith in a single prayer, it needs to be both group and in your holy site.

Go Faith!

 

[Cryptite]

Item Pickup LOS

You can no longer pickup items through blocks
​

• In our latest series of "Why does Minecraft be like that?", we have made a change to the vanilla behavior of Minecraft of picking up items through blocks.
• On Loka, it is now no longer possible to pickup items that you have no Line of Sight (LOS) to. Aka, can't pickup items through blocks.
• This affects Players and Living Entities (Zombies, etc), but not things like hoppers, etc.
• We understand this is another nerf to raiding, but it is in keeping with other vanilla changes we have made around similar ideas, namely:
  • Does it completely hamper the ability to "build naturally"? You should not be required to live in a box of 2x thick solid-block walls in order to feel comfortable that your items can't be access through glitchy MC behavior.
  • Is it raiding via abusing poor MC code (the aforementioned block glitching). A good example of this is accessing chests behind walls because your client can see the chest momentarily when you break a block and the server is cancelling the event.
• We are likely to adjust this feature in the future as needed for legitimate use-cases and the like.

Meanwhile...

• Banners of Conquest and Jump Pads should be placeable at spawn once again. They should also find their way back to your /b if they were missing before.
• Relogging should no longer remove any jobs you accepted.
• Due to 1.13 changes, the item-id version of making Gathering Jobs (/j gather 1 1) is no longer possible. For the time being you must use /j gather item until Jobs 2.0 is released.
• Whenever a Radar is attacked, the entire Alliance is now alerted, rather than only the town that owns it.
• The Horseman now drops Diamond Horse Armor when killed.

Did you see the Pretty Pictures?

• We released two big renders of towns this weekend on Discord. One of Nassau and one of Elrohir. We've polished up our town-rendering pipeline and it's way easier to do these now.
• Feel free to share around!

 

[Cryptite]

• The Horseman now drops diamond horse armor when killed.
• Using a feather to block log in your town now works once again. Unfortunately, due to the 1.13 update, the data will only be roughly a week old. We have had two block loggers running (CoreProtect is the old one) simultaneously to be sure we have enough data for now, so if you have data that's missing and need to look further in the past, be sure to issue a /report so an admin can come take a look.
• You can no longer use /rl convert as a way of seeing if somebody is in your holy site zone. Only when the receiver of a religion invite his accept will location check be done.
• Alliance Leaders will now see the Actual Daily Cost of towns in their alliance when doing /g info in addition to their dues. We are discussing how to make dues overall more sensical, so expect more changes on this soon.
• Fixed mounts despawning when being ridden. Predominantly, you should no longer lose your mount if you logout riding it.
  • There is still possibly a bug where they become invisible when you dismount them, but this appears to be an Optifine bug, and so we can't fix that.

 

[Cryptite]

Updates/Changes

• Rotting Blocks should be a lot less annoying now. The mechanics behind deciding Rot has changed and should make a little more sense.
  • Technically speaking, the way it works now is that if a block that should not be found there is broken and is natural, then it will rot. Natural Blocks are what we call blocks that were there in the original, clean version of the world (how we do regeneration).
  • A good example of this is that the Moor should not have Spruce Trees, but there are several in the NE corner of it. They are natural (in the clean world), and if broken will rot. We have a task on our plate to go remove all those trees so it's less confusing.
  • The assumption can be made that if you're breaking a non-natural block that is somewhere it shouldn't be, it must've been put there by a player and as such should drop normally. This should fix a lot of problems people have with placed blocks rotting in their town when they're building, etc.
• You can grow Nether Wart in the overworld if you'd like (not new), but now you will only ever get 1 netherwart back when you break it regardless of the age of the crop. It's only meant to be "farmable" from The Nether.
• Players in Battle Zones will receive less overt messaging (no big title in your face) if their town levels up in a category during fighting.
• Snow will no longer form on Inhibitors and TGens. Snow already there won't melt, but it won't form anymore, so Inhib Pads shouldn't be quite so camouflaged in snowy biomes.

Bugs

• Fixed some Group Prayer bugs (naughty admins)
• Fixed a bug in which some Inhibs wouldn't properly spawn with their modules.
• Fixed a few errors with Void Storage and updated some comparison checks so that it sorts things a bit smarter now.
  • All other things equal, items will now be sorted by Display Name, and then stack size.
  • Fireworks sort from highest-power to lowest power.
• Fixed Radar pings not always showing the right player color (via alignment).
• Fixed a bug in which modules would not fire at players in a fight because their targets were aligned as friendly/neutral by the module-owning town. This is meant to be this way in the Wilds, but wasn't checking differently in battle zones.

 

[Cryptite]

May Conquest Update
Just two notable changes this month!

Better Lamp Damage FX

​

• It wasn't entirely obvious what lamp health was, other than "more particles" previously.​
• By using literally different Particle FX for each 20% block of health, hopefully players will be able to glean the health of lamps easier from now on (if you show particles anyway).​

Core/Inhib Regen
Adding a little risk to the fights​

• A tactic we've noticed on some fights is that players will intentionally leave the TG/Inhib at 1 charge, or 1% Core remaining so that they can let the other side warp in, farm kills, and if things get hairy, go one-tap the core in order to win. We feel this is a fair part of the Conquest game, but we also feel that if you wish to try this move, you should have to risk more than being able to slip somebody in to whap the core 1 time to win suddenly.
  
  Thus, the below changes were implemented to make it so that you could possibly risk losing if you wanted to try this tactic. We know this is an edge case and probably won't often happen, but when it does, we feel it could be quite a thrill to potentially throw a fight by being greedy.
  
  
• Territory Generator - When defenders warp in, if the Core has less than 25% health remaining, it will REGEN back to 25% right when the defenders warp.
• Inhibitor - When attackers warp in, if the Inhibitor has ONE remaining lamp left with ONE remaining charge left, that lamp will regenerate ONE charge (so it'll have 2 charges left).

Ender Pearl Teleportation

• You can no longer attempt to throw a pearl from inside a foreign town. Previously you could throw it and it would work if it landed outside the protection, but this was inconsistent behavior.
• Pearls will fail if they try to teleport you over 100 blocks. In short, blocks pearl loaders and keeps Recall Stones relevant.

Big changes to /tpa and /tpahere
It's a buff to nomads, but it's also really for player retention

• One major fall-off point (there are many, but they add up) for new players is our very restricted /tpa mechanics. We had good reasons for implementing these, but not all things must stay the same. Frankly, most players get into towns pretty quickly, and so never even wind up using /tpa. However, during the first hours/days of play, while players are learning the server, getting around, trying to get to their friends in the wilds; these are prime examples of when players want to be able to /tpa and /tpahere.
  
  We feel it's unnecessarily punishing to brand new players who just want to get around the world, be with their friends, and find a place to settle. As a result, we're allowing /tpa mechanics more similar to other servers.
  
  
• /tpa, /tpahere, /spawn, and /home can now used (almost) everywhere with the following exceptions:
  • They still cannot be used within towns. Town members with proper permissions can still /tpahere players to their town portal destination.
  • Some specific zones (like the Dreadfort)
• The behavior of these teleports now work like the Recall Stone:
  • You cannot be in combat while teleporting.
  • You have to sit still for 10s.
• /spawn works immediately if you're near your /home, otherwise it takes 10s too.
• You still cannot use /sethome in certain places like RI's, etc, but you could /tpa and /tpahere.
• There are likely to be some restrictions still to figure out, and we'll be keeping a close eye out, but hopefully this lets new players stick around a bit longer.

Misc

• We've removed Town/Alliance information in the Tab List Footer and replaced it with more relevant information like where you are, and if there are any events coming up. The Tablist is really not meant for unchanging, static data (like your town/alliance). It's more useful for temporary, or quickly changing information.
• Naturally, lots of minor bugfixes; mostly prep for Jobs 2, 1.14, 1.13 content, etc.

 

[Cryptite]

Void Storage Logging
​

• Access to Void Storage is now properly tracked by our Block Logger (Prism).
• This includes the ability for town members with proper permissions to see items added and removed from Void Storage.
• Unfortunately this is not a retroactive change, so only VS use from about an hour ago and on will be tracked.
  
  
• As an added bonus, since we figured out How To Do The Things, Doors locked/unlocked now show in logs properly as well, instead of saying locked/unlocked null.