Official Update Thread

[Cryptite]

Some long-standing bugfixes:

• (Hopefully) fixed the bug in which chunks remained unloaded/broken when teleporting to Conquest fights. This was very difficult to reproduce, but we were unable to reproduce with some testing after a potential fix. So cross your fingers!
• Fixed various bugs surrounding deleting industries. Some things won't fix but for new industries (physics blocks like ladders dropping upon deletion, etc).
• Standing on blood (on Andesite) no longer blocks charging a lamp in Conquest.
• Breaking locked doors/gates will now also unlock them, rather than leaving the block location in a locked state.
• Fixed prayers breaking if you disconnected during one.
• And more!

 

[Cryptite]

End Crystal Changes
No more one-shotting, and no more hiding underneath 'em.

• After heavy discussion among admins and various players on all sides of current conflict(s), we have decided to nerf End Crystal explosions. It seems to be generally accepted that it's Just Not Fun that there's a 1-shot bomb in the game whereby the user can entirely avoid death. As a result, there are two primary changes, and one fix!
  
  
• End Crystals no longer one-shot players in god armor. At most they should deal up to around 7 hearts of full damage if you're at point blank range.
• In addition, standing one block below the crystal no longer shields you from extra damage. EC explosions are now radius based (about 4 blocks) and anyone within that distance will take damage based on proximity to the crystal.
• On the plus side, due to reworking their explosion, players who get kills with them should get credit for the kill now!

Some Lag Fixes

• Thanks to the big fight yesterday, a couple of notable causes of lagspikes were identified and have been fixed, with some additional fixes/optimizations incoming over the next day or two.
• The first was the neato helix-particle effect that plays every time a player beacon-warps to a fight. There is already one lagspike here when players teleport caused by Just 1.13 Things that we can't really resolve. However, the effect was poorly written and was causing a notable lagspike on the entire server each time we played the effect, and has been resolved. This should hopefully smooth out the Big Lag that happens when players warp in to fights.
• The other was that we do a Lot Of Fancy Things™ with regards to how we intercept the packets that describe how players see each other (armor pieces, weapons, etc). This is the tech that turns diamond armor to colored leather for our battle zones. We've done a lot of optimizations here and hopefully this should draw a lot less on the server.
  • In Technical Terms (for those interested):
    
    Anytime a player sees another player in-game, Minecraft sends up to 6 packets for a player (1 for every armor piece, main and offhand) JUST to show their gear. This can obviously greatly scale in big fights as 40 players are getting packet updates about each other, whenever they see each other and every time you take damage. It can get crazy-town.
    
    We now cache the potential fake armor we send to players, since 99% of the time it's only one of 4 possible things, Attacker Leather Armor, or Defender's armor, and then the enchanted or non-enchanted version based on your personal /profile setting that toggles on/off seeing Enchanted armor.
    
    
  • The expectation isn't that this provides a notable smoother experience in Conquest fights as there are other causes for TPS loss, simply due to having a lot of players online, but it's possible that these "micro-optimizations" will smooth things out, especially as they have a greater effect the more players are involved.
• Due to rewriting these systems, some bugs around seeing Enchants on armor when you toggled it off should now also be fixed. NOTE: If you aren't already doing this, and have FPS issues in Conquest battles, go to /profile and turn OFF seeing Enchanted Armor. This can help FPS in fights, especially big ones.
  
  
• On the same vein, the similar tech we use to "Fudge CIT packs" is also complex and will be rewritten to address the same issues. This version of the packet interception happens for players everywhere else (outside of a Battle Zone), so heavily populated areas like spawn, etc where players are seeing each other are also subject to these inefficient packet rewrites. This will be optimized and added soon.

 

[Cryptite]

Bugfix week!
In the absence of Mag/Crypt over the next two weeks for holidays/etc, we're focusing on buggos rather than new features.

• The World Capital Policy of Climate Engineering (Neutral) has been changed.
  • Instead of being able to grow any crop of your choosing in town, which could frankly be used to insane effect to harvest unimaginable amounts of a single crop, the policy has been changed entirely.
  • Now, upon choosing a crop, The World Capital + it's allied towns' Windmill Industry will ONLY generate that crop resource.
  • Eldritch has opted for Pumpkins this month and as such all towns in their alliance will generate Pumpkins in their Windmills.
    
• Trying to [Click to Join] a match is no longer a button you can only press once. Generally we allow you to consume [Click To Do A Thing] buttons once to prevent spam, abuses, etc. However, joining duels and the like is not one of these circumstances, especially if you're waiting to get out of combat before you join. You may now freely spam this button to get into your duel if it didn't work the first time.
• Also fixed a bug in which the Hub server didn't properly track players logging off, and thus wouldn't remove them from the queue thereby still matching them with players giving the other opponent an automatic win
• Also fixed (hopefully) a bug where failing to join a match still let you join later, into the the wrong pvp world.
• You can no longer place End Crystals on Lingering Death Bedrock.
• The distance Pearls can fail was increased from 100 -> 150, because some of you can apparently throw real far.
• Fixed Stripped wood variants not being subject to normal Biome Restrictions.
• And more!

 

[Cryptite]

Get Boosted

• Let's face it, we want your boosts. So we'll give you some stuff when you boost us, so that we can boost you, so that you can be boosted (animal, even).
• Discord announced the cool Server Boosting feature, and we on Loka want them sweet treats so we can spiffify (a real word) the graphx on our server.
• If you have Nitro, and you Boost Our Discord, we'll reward you with some Sweet Stuff:
  • An Epic Title - Boosted! Like, Boosted Cryptite
  • An Epic Kill Message - Boosted Animal Cryptite actually killed Magpieman using [Good Sword Very Cool]
  • Another Epic Kill Message - Magpieman sent Cryptite crying back to their discord after being hit with [Very Big Sword]
  • We will love you very much!
• Note: These boost rewards only apply as long as you're boosting us. If you remove your boost (pls don't), you'll lose the rewards above as well.
• The more boosts the merrier and the better stuff we get and the more EMOJIS we get and the more BYTES we get in our VC channels! What more could you want! Don't answer that

Also Some Bugfixes

• Fixed some Bugs around using the hotbar-swap inventory actions when using Void Storage (aka you can't cheat anymore and stick stuff in there you shouldn't be able to).
• Fixed things like Special Arrows (spectral, etc) devolving into Uncraftable Tipped Arrow or whatever. You should be able to nicely organize your arrows in VS if you want.
• You can no longer kill yourself/teammate for a Conquest Battle's First Blood, jib
• We're working on fixing a variety of the town mastery buggos
• And more!

Go Forth and Boost!

 

[Cryptite]

Town Mastery Fixes
With more updates coming soon!

• Mastery is one of those systems that have been left to languish for years and we haven't taken a stab at adding new-block support for some time. As well, because of The Great 1.13 Block Data Change, a lot of things stopped counting for XP. Until now!
• There're too many specific item-fixes to list, but in short, things people frequently missed out on credit for like farming, logging, etc have been fixed.
• Also Shift-Clicking when crafting now gives you proper credit for all the things you crafted.
• Support for new blocks that've come out since around 1.8 are coming soon.
• We're also in the process of rebalancing how much credit things are worth, as well as fixing a few things that can be easily abused for quick town-leveling.
• In the future, as we add blocks, there will be changes to your town levels.
  • Your final town level will not be affected, however your individual categories for levels may go up/down based on the changes.
• Some of these fixes are already in, and some will be coming out over the coming days as we track down and isolate/update various pieces of the system.

 

[Cryptite]

July Conquest Updates
Change ALL the things!​

• July's update intends to try to bring TGen Modules into a better balance and try to change up the strong meta we have right now as well as change the dynamic of the invis meta in a big way. With that, the biggest fight mechanic change is that...
• Invisibility is toggled OFF if you are wearing any gear in a Battle Zone.
  • We feel strongly that the very common tactic of ensuring your whole team is invisible is damaging to the landscape of Conquest Battles. While there are good reasons to be invis, for example trying to backdoor lamps/golems, beyond that we feel that everyone always being invisible removes a ton of strategy from fights by preventing anybody from potentially shot-calling and calling out targets. Spectral just purging invis off is also a poor mechanic, but is also not the module's greatest strength. Further, many players feel it's disadvantageous to wear their battle helms because it targets them when they want to be using invis. And this problem will only get worse in the future as more helms are released.
    
    Simply put, we feel it's more fun and adds far more strategy to be able to actually target players in fights, on both sides.
    
    So, mechanically speaking, Invisibility is now handled thusly:
    • If you have invis, or drink/get invis in any way in a battle zone, it is stored on your Player.
    • If you have even 1 item in an armor slot (elytra, armor, etc), your invis is removed, but saved. This does not include holding items in MH/OH. Only gear slots.
    • If you take all your armor off, Invisibility is restored, and updated to account for the time elapsed since you got Invis.
    • So, if you get 1m Invis, put armor on and 15s later take it back off, you'll have 45s of invisibility left.
    • Joining/Leaving Battle Zones will properly reapply/remove Invis as appropriate; so normal rules of Invis will go into effect if you go out of a battle zone.
• Alliance Leadership can only be transferred during truce.
  • It gets wonky, and it also is cheesed sometimes when players toss Alliance leadership back and forth throughout the month. As with most other things in the Conquest Cycle, when Truce drops, it's really meant to solidify the landscape for the month so everybody knows who's where, who's leading what, and the like.
• Balak Buffs can now randomize to any tile
  • Instead of just the inner ring of tiles, all the tiles are available for buffs when randomized. This is just more fun, more RNG, and means more battles in, you know, the other tiles we never see action on.
• Golem Protectors' respawn time has been increased from 35s -> 45s.
  • After a wipe, way too many charges can be placed by the winning side way too quickly. This isn't likely, or meant to completely undo that, but it might buy one more warp for a side from to time.

Module Updates
We have some far bigger meta ideas for modules in the future, including more unique attack modules. But, for this month, gonna shake things up by moving some numbos around.​

• Slow Module - Standing in the slow pool now also blocks pearling for the duration of the slow.
  • Presently, you get 7s of slow when standing on Slow blocks (prismarine).
  • Now, Ender Pearls go on an immediate, refreshing 7s cooldown for as long as you're standing on the slow blocks as well.
• Spectral Module - No longer purges Invisibility (because above) and no longer shows players below 50% health.
  • It now just tags charged players.
• Buff Module - Increased the health of golems from 200% -> 300%
• Lingering Death - Decreased the length of the bleed from 7s -> 5s
• Debilitating Aura - Golems now do DBA only when meleed, rather than randomly with an interval.
• Lingering Death and Slowness communication - We would like to communicate to players in a far more obvious way that they're standing in LD or Slowness. Without the Loka Sound Pack, it's hard to tell it's happening and we could really use better communication here. We have some ideas for this, but they aren't implemented yet and will likely come soon.
• As for the other modules: Laser, Vicious Attack, and TnT; we're leaving them as is for now. Coupled with previous changes for targeting and the like, we're gonna see how they favor in the balance when viewed with the rest of the changes as a whole.

Go Forth, and be seen!

 

[Cryptite]

Lingering and Slow Module Lasers
If you see these lasers near you, look down

​

• As mentioned in the previous post, in order to improve communication of things happening on the battlefield, both Lingering and Slow modules will fire a laser at the ground where they have a growing block pool.​
• The lasers continue as long as the pool is growing and stops once they do.​
• Aside from some other bugfixes, this is the only big change for this morning.​

 

[Cryptite]

Item-Pickup LOS Fix

This didn't use to work​

• There was an unintended issue with the last item-pickup LOS update in which you could no longer pick up items "that your feet could see (vanilla behavior)".
  
  So, situations like in the above vid should now work properly while retaining the fix of blocking picking up items "through solid things".​
• Meanwhile, Group Prayers have also been fixed and now support simultaneous, different group prayers in different locations (if you're into that kind of thing)​
• Also various performance optimizations.​

 

[Cryptite]

• Fixed Laser Modules targeting own-team mercs during reins fights.
• Fixed a few outliers where players at the end of a fight where a TGen is neutralized causing people (usually mercs) to suddenly be kicked out of the battle zone. This might address a few of the remaining oddities of post-fight-end Battle Zone thingies, but they haven't all been fully explored just yet.
• Hopefully this fixes problems like SilentStorm getting annihilated by his own side's laser module, logging off, then logging back in in the Dark Forest. It was No Good Very Bad Day for the lad.
  
  
• A chronic 1.13 Paper bug has been patched that was causing animals to disappear mysteriously. Hopefully this means less reports of animals being gone suddenly!

 

[Cryptite]

• Removing players from towns now, like, works actually
  
• Maps in VS now display properly as a vanilla, unfilled map instead of whatever real map it is.
• Fixed/increased the rate of Ghast spawns in the Nether
• A few various Void Storage fixes
• The following blocks now count as Road Blocks for towns:
  • Granite
  • Polished Granite
  • Andesite
  • Polished Andesite
  • Diorite
  • Polished Andesite
  • Red Sandstone
  • Mossy Cobblestone
  • Sand
  • Red Sand
  • Clay
  • Cracked Stone Bricks
  • Mossy Stone Bricks
  • Netherrack
  • End Stone
  • End Stone Bricks
  • Prismarine
  • Dark Prismarine
  • Prismarine Bricks
  • Red Nether Bricks
  • Quartz Blocks
  • Terracotta
  • Glazed Terracotta
  • Concrete
  • Concrete Powder

 

[Cryptite]

• Fixed a bug in which getting into combat prevented you from disabling Elytra Flight. This was only meant to cancel you starting flight, not stopping it (or landing).
• Fixed LOS bugs preventing you from picking up items that were in/on soulsand and snow.
• Few little Religion bugs, etc.

 

[Cryptite]

• Removed all Lava particles that play during the Core's lava-floor attack. Magma blocks are more than sufficient to see what's happening and Lava particles are extremely laggy.
• Extremely reduced the amount of particles that play over the Soulsand core attack. Same reasoning.
• Adding missing entries in Battle Logs for pure-damage Conquest attacks (lasers, tnt, living bomb, etc). This may make things more accurate but Skuhoo gotta fix that, so

 

[Cryptite]

Mob Spawning off at Town Level 10
It's all the entities, man​

• In order to further combat TPS loss, and make the server run more smoothly as a whole, all towns level 10 and over will have permanent mob spawning off inside of their town territory.
• This is no longer toggleable, and /g mobspawning has been removed.
• Due to the nature of how we prevent mob spawning (for perf reasons), you'll need to step outside of your town territory physically in order for mobs to spawn.
  • Technically speaking, It's cheaper for us to prevent a player even trying to spawn monsters by first checking their territory/town location. The very last event before a mob spawns is when the server has done all the calculations to find a valid spawning point for a mob. We have the ability to cancel spawns before any of this expensive checking is done, and do this as often as possible.
• The (now deprecated) level 17 town perk of toggling monster spawning will be replaced with something good soon.

 

[Cryptite]

Been a few bugfixes over the past 3-4 days so this is just a catchup of what's been fixed up to this morning

• Fixed bugs in which temp builders could inappropriately mess with Void Storage
• Added symbols for attackers(⚔) / defenders (☗ ) in Conquest battles in various ways to better tell them apart.
• Fixed a variety of bugs surrounding Conquest Locks and Reins fights. This should resolve the remaining issues where people who warp to fights get bounced back to spawn.
• Fixed an edge-case bug that caused players to drop their gear when killed in a Conquest fight.
• Fixed endermites being able to double-explode as a living bomb. They should pretty much just vaporize now.
• Many, many more performance fixes across the board. Things are getting better and better.

 

[Cryptite]

Yesterday's Warping Bug

• Yesterday's bug in which players couldn't warp seems to have been the result of a case where during the LAST reins fight, they were attempting to warp to the fight when it terminated. This normally cleanly kills the warp, but didn't and seems to be why the players were stuck trying to warp to that invalid/ended fight.
• We're not 100% sure we fixed the bug because it was extremely difficult to reproduce.
• However, in testing we did discover a few oddities that were fixed here and there. Primarily, however, one thing of note was that warps (to both inhib/tg) weren't really cancelled immediately when the fight ended, but rather in some cases 5-6 seconds later.
  
  The current change is that at the exact moment the Core is destroyed, or Inhib's last lamp is destroyed, all potential incoming warps are cancelled immediately.
• This hopefully fixes the issue, but we have also added a lot of logging information so we can better track it down if it happens again.

Meanwhile

• We've been talking to various sides of the current fights, and amongst ourselves about how best to address Reins Warp Chicken and would like to get a solution in by tomorrow morning's restart.
• Slow/Lingering modules will now try find a good solid block under where they land to grow from, rather than landing on tall grass etc and borking out.
• Various fixes, perf updates (still going extremely ham on these).

 

[Cryptite]

Calling Reins Resets Warp Timers

• We asked around on all sides and the best current option has now been implemented.
• At the exact moment Reins is called, the Warp Timers of BOTH sides are reset to 0.
• If you have a warp already going, you will simply be able to warp again immediately after the warp goes through.
• We recognize there is still potential for cheese here, but all sides agreed that this was roughly the best and least complex change worth trying for the final days of this Conquest month.
• This change is live.

 

[Cryptite]

Shrines
Activity stirs in the Nether

​

• Shrines have been spotted around the nether, each seemingly representing a certain kind of Nether Mob.
• As its mobs are killed the shrine will lose power and eventually deactivate for a short period of time.
• The intent here is to provide another (and more stable) way to access Blazes, Ghasts and Magma Cubes.
• The Dreadfort remains the most efficient way to farm these materials, but we wanted to provide players with multiple options when farming mobs.
• We will be looking at ways to possibly introduce similar mechanics elsewhere on Loka so keep an eye out.

Elytra Changes
It's hot in the Nether, you see​

• Couple with the release of Shrines, elytras now take heat damage in the Nether just like the caves on the resource isles. This should make Elytras a little less op and, well, it's hot.

 

[Cryptite]

Conquest Visual Improvements and Updates
Better communication, more predictable behavior​

• We've made a number of changes/improvements to some modules. Mostly visual, some behavioral.
• We've reduced the health of golems buffed by the Buff Module from 300% -> 250%
• Behaviorally, we made a change that applies to both Lingering/Slow modules since they are the same kind of module. The short of it is that both Lingering and Slow are more aggressive at shooting at players (basically fail to fire less often)
  • In more understandable terms, it's important to know the old behavior of the modules.
  • How they used to work was based off a 30s interval. Every 30 seconds, a module would attempt to find the closest available target and then fire at them if they could. If nobody could be shot at at that time, then the module would simply fail to do anything and then wait until the next 30s elapsed to try again. As you can imagine this could lead to a lot of instances where simply the module never seemed to shoot at anybody.
  • In the new behavior, these modules just work off of a 30 second cooldown. If they're off-cd and can fire at somebody, they will aggressively check (every 2 seconds) if they can find a nearby, enemy player that is in Line-of-Sight (LOS) and fire, then go on cooldown.
  • After this change, these two modules behaved a lot more sanely, firing at you as soon as you were close. This behavior is far more expected and arguably predictable. It also explains why these modules just seemed like they didn't work half the time.
• For the Laser Module, blocking the laser now makes a Shield-Block sound effect each hit.
  • In case you didn't know, you can block up to 25% of the damage of a Laser Module if you're actively shield-blocking (this has always been around)
• Otherwise, we've mostly just changed/updated the FX of some conquest stuff in order to better communicate what's happening, and to who on the battlefield.
• As of this post, most of these changes are pending the next server restart, but some things have already taken effect (like 250% golems).

Laser Module
More particles with more damage

Intensity of the Laser changes over time. Laser Module damage ramps up over time depending on how long you've been taking damage from the laser. It's a subtle visual change but it should at least better communicate if somebody's taking Full Damage from a laser vs just starting out.

On-Hit FX

Lasers always kinda weirdly stopped short of the player they were hitting. We just added some casual purple particles emitting from the player being hit by the laser so it's more clear.

Lingering Death
Smoke Particles for the Lingered

Players bleeding out from standing on the Lingering blocks will now emit black smoke particles, consistent with the rest of the visuals for Lingering Death. This should make it easier to see who's bleeding and focus them down.

Slow Module
See who's pearl blocked!

We really want to drive home debuffed players because knowing who's debuffed is not only important, but increasingly difficult the more players are in the fight. Players with ANGERY VILLAGER >:| particles over their head have been slowed and are pearl-blocked by the Slow Module.

Living Bomb
Ring of fire!

Added a ring of flame particles that denote the radius extent of the explosion. It's a small change but it better visualizes the size of the explosion when it happens.

That's all for now! Have any Conquest fight-behaviors or otherwise that confuse you? Can't tell what's going on in a fight? We're open to suggestions about more ways we can communicate battlefield events more clearly.

Go Forth!

 

[Cryptite]

• We've made some changes to Town Activity to better communicate activity and how it works. We're still not going to say exactly how long you must be active for, but the following changes were made:
  • In /g members, Active Members that count toward town activity will have a ● before their name. This is the official "Is Active" symbol.
  • Some were confused by the colors of members shown in the list. This hasn't changed. But for a reminder, the color only indicates time since last online. The members list is meant to give you a good overall view of the last time anybody played. Lots of red just means lots of players who have not logged in lately. Green/gray players do not indicate active. That's why we now have a symbol.
  • XX Members (X Active) should now reflect the same check the town does for activity.
  • Finally, you no longer need to log out to store a "valid active session". If you're on for enough time, your valid session will be logged automatically.
• Lastly, we think we've isolated the Void Storage bug in which Storage Chests get "stuck being viewed by a player" even if they're not around, online, etc. Hopefully that doesn't happen anymore!

 

[Cryptite]

There've been a few fixes/changes over the past few days so this is more of a catchup post:

• Like with the LOS changes surrounding picking up items off the ground, server-side LOS checks are now done to validate whether you should be able to enter a Vehicle (horse, boat, etc) in a foreign town.
  • In other words, you can't block-glitch to access a vehicle in order to phase through walls.
  • We only do this check in foreign towns (the only place it really matters because of build perms).
  • Given some Raiding shenanigans of late, we have made this change to be consistent with other changes to raiding we have on Loka. Given we already do various block-glitch and LOS checks, this is consistent with the changes, rather than a brand new feature addition.
• From Kaph's Collection of Minor Suggestions:
  • Bountiful Territories are now indicated on the dynmap with an Aqua border rather than yellow (which could be confused with unlinked territories)
  • You can use /rl <some chat message> to one-off talk in Religion Chat provided you don't use any of the normal arguments for /rl commands. If you don't it just falls back to /rl chat.
  • Given the use of Discord for town chat channels, we no longer send you the "Nobody can hear you in town chat" message.
• Fixed a bug where a name change prevented you from staying queued for ranked pvp for awhile.
• Fixed a thing that caused a server crash that one time.