Official Update Thread

[Cryptite]

As usual, lots of fixes of bugs, chasing away lag, and polish post update. Here's a catchup!

• Items popped off Item Frames in Towns will be sent to Town Escrow if they despawn.
  • "Because Minecraft", Items removed from frames have a tendency to go stupid places, into walls, etc. As a courtesy, we'll tag those items and if they should despawn because they get lost somewhere, we'll send them to your Town Escrow.
• In the Tab list for a fight, a couple changes to the X/Y in the headers:
  • Before a fight, the "Town Name (X/Y)" will show Players Registered/Total Possible Players
  • Once the fight starts, X/Y will then represent Players Alive/Players Registered.
    • Basically no longer useful to see "potential players" once the fight is started.
• Some "partial" blocks like soulsand/farmland/path blocks, etc no longer cause player blood drops to fail and then just drop redstone.
• Land Mine Modules on Radars spawn fewer mines, but still quite a bunch.
• Player kills in Yellow Wilderness will now only broadcast to nearby players.
  • These will typically be hotspots for pvp, so there's no point in spamming everyone with those ganks.
• Loads of Tab fixes, polish. Also was causing basically all the lag.

 

[Cryptite]

March Conquest Update
Not a big one, but some necessary changes

Alignment Synchronization
Meant to do this with the tab update​

The ability for towns to set alignments for each other that are not the same is leading to some confusion and isn't something we want to be possible anymore. Since things like Radar Modules, Flying in Territories, etc are actually managed in part by your alignment to another town, it's awfully weird to think you have somebody as friendly who has you as neutral/hostile; especially when you get dropped out of the sky suddenly in their territory.

We realize most use the alignment system just to manage nametag colors and while this is an understandable use of the system, it is not a good enough one to keep it as is. From now on alignments will remain in sync. If a town sets you as hostile, you will both immediately become hostile to each other. The only way to promote relations will be for both parties to accept the change (similar to alliance joins, etc). The whole "alignment hostile -sync thing at midnight" will go away, and is weird, and people get spammed a lot.

As well, towns in an Alliance can no longer independently control alignments to other towns/alliances. Alliances will have alignments to whole other Alliances. As always, Alliances are meant to basically just be big towns, and independent alignments within an alliance is whack.

This update is not yet out but will release in the next few days.

Module Updates
Spectral/Buff stronk, Laser needs a buff​

• Spectral - Spectral Lockdown lowered from 90s -> 60s.
  

  • 1.5 whole minutes of not being able to get a charge is too much​
• Buff - Buffed Golems' health has been reduced from 250% -> 200% extra health.
• Laser - Players taking Laser Damage now also do AoE damage to their nearby allies for a percentage of the target's damage.
  • Radius/% damage are still being tweaked.
  • Laser is terribly weak in any sizable fight whatsoever, we think it needs some more excitement.

Other Updates

• Towns/Alliances that lose their final Territory will then no longer be able to attack any territories for 48 hours. (includes Neutrals)
• Fixed Fishing Tournaments being a refuge for gank fights. All sanctuaries should act like the Docks in terms of combat.
• The cooldown for healing Golems with Iron Ingots has been moved from the individual player to the golem itself.
  • AKA Golems can only be healed once every 1.5s, regardless of who's doing the healing.
    
• Coming Soon: Battle Zone Chat
  • We're already limiting Battle Zone death messages to those participating in the fight. It's inconsistent and confusing for uninvolved players to have public chat reacting to battle deaths that they cannot see. As such, anybody participating in a fight will have their public chat redirected to a chat zone that all participants in the fight can see. You will still be able to use /p to fire one-off messages to public chat if you'd like, otherwise it'll default to the Battle Zone chat
• Coming Soon: Certain blocks (mostly inventory blocks like chests/furnaces/craftingtables, etc) and Water/Lava will no longer be able to be placed/poured in Battle Zones.

 

[Cryptite]

Town Alignments
Become friend or foe!
​

As outlined in the previous post, Alignments can no longer be different between two Collectives (the term we internally use to represent a town OR an alliance). As well, you cannot edit alignments to individual towns in an alliance, only a whole alliance.

All currently set Alignments have been wiped. Everyone will need to re-set all their alignments!

The notable other big change to this feature is the introduction of our new Confirmation GUI:

​

There are quite a few big and consequential things you can do on Loka that currently are just a small [Accept] [Deny] chat message which is very easy to just click "yes". Town Aligning is the first of many future prompts we will use this new GUI for. Whenever there's a lot of information worth presenting to a player about a "Yes/No" type of action, it's helpful to have a non-chat-based window to read when making big decisions. Other examples of things that will use this new GUI will be things like requesting reins, forming/joining alliances, etc. Suggestions are welcome as well.

In terms of global notifications, we will globally publish when collectives become enemies, but all other changes will only send to online members of the two involved collectives.

There is a new Alliance Perm for Editing Alignments as well. You can individually control which town(s) can change alignments to other towns/alliances.

/town align list has been polished up a bit, and is sorted by alignment. This will become entirely a GUI in the future.

Ok that's it go forth!

 

[Cryptite]

Shrine Changes
Bring more friends!​

Shrines now scale with the amount of players doing them. There's not too much to report other than a few mechanical changes:

• Shrines scale with nearby players (caps at 6 players). More mobs will spawn and the shrine's overall health will increase, but will drop more loot overall including in the final Loot Bundle that spawns.
• Extra shrine loot dropped is not 1:1 for each extra player cause that would be cray.
• Shrine mobs no longer immediately drop their loot when killed. Rather, every 25% of the Shrine health, a loot bundle will spawn in the area with the collected drops of all the mobs killed.
• Conflicts with double-drop buff should be resolved due to this change as well.

This is the first pass of helping alleviate the bottlenecked nature of Shrines. We would like to look into adding a variety of Daily Quests as well that could reward pot materials, etc so we can spread players out a bit more than a few hotspots in the Nether.

Things may be tweaked a bit over the coming days as we keep an eye out.

Go Forth!

 

[Cryptite]

New Store and Updates and Bugfixes and Stuff​

• Loka has a New (WIP) Store! We've migrated to Tebex (you probably know it as BuyCraft) in order to better accept payments from our international community. It's also a better tool for the job and is a very mature system which is just neato.
  • Many members of our Spanish-speaking community have requested to be able to use paysafecard. It will take some time for us to get this payment option approved (a number of weeks likely), but as soon as that option is available for purchasing orbs, etc, we will notify everyone.
  • The current store buttons on our website redirect to the relevant Orb/Subscriber offer in the new store, so nothing to worry about there.
  • If you are a current subscriber to Loka, you are welcome to continue that subscription through PayPal; but at some point we will likely cut off the PayPal method and require players to migrate over to the new store's subscription service.
  • Visually we are still working on the store and integrating it to our new website (coming soon!).
• Reports now notify again. We fixed some stuffs and now you should start hearing about changes to your reports once again.
• The Alliance Permission for calling reins should now work.
• Regen should hopefully better handle placed-water/lava now.
  • It used to just turn the placed liquids to air without a block update, and, well, that's stupid. So now it should set to air and start draining normally.
• Slightly reduce the radius around Shrines at which bundles are spawned.
  • This might result in them being on top of Shrines more often, so that's fun.
• Work towards Server Sharding is underway!
  • TL;DR server sharding is splitting Loka into more pieces. Right now the entire survival experience is one server; sharding will make it so Ascalon/Kalros/Garama etc are their own servers. This is useful in, for example, big Balak fights which currently compete with the server resources it takes to run the other major towns on the server. In the end Balak could have its own dedicated server to ensure maximum performance is preserved for fights there, etc.
  • This will not look like anything for a long while. There may be points at which cross-network communication starts to change, but the vast majority of this work is under the hood.

 

[Cryptite]

Town Zone Updates
A few minor, but heavily requested additions

​

• You may now preview Town Zones!
  • Either in /town z list, or when right-clicking a feather.
  • You'll see a [P] button for Preview; click it to see an outline show by Flame Particles (be sure to have your particles on!)
  • Right click on an area with no zones, relog, or change worlds to stop the preview.
• You may now test town zones as a specific member level with /town z test!
  • Useful if you want to see what a level 2 member, for example, can do in your town.
  • Type /town z test without a level to reset this or relog.
• You may now delete town zones from /town z list as well.

Short and sweet, but hopefully helpful.

Go Forth and fix your zones!

 

[Cryptite]

Hi there! Loka-Chan here!​

Over the years Loka has become more and more complex. To attract new players we need to simplify the server to make it more accessible to our ever increasing younger player base. As a result we have stripped back spawn to it's original look. This should help prevent players getting confused by all of the distractions our current spawn entails. To assist with this we have also removed reinforcements from conquest as it was just too confusing for a lot of people. It's hard enough keeping track of who is on your side at the best of times and reins muddles everything further. Hopefully this means players of all intelligence levels can play and enjoy Loka without being overwhelmed.

Nice to meet you all and Go Forth!





















Art by NightaChan

 

[Cryptite]

Bugfix catchup, mostly from oldest -> newest.

• We no longer show a majority of death messages from /kill due to spam.
• Fixed players not dropping gear when they were red-tagged in some sanctuaries (like Fishing Tournament zones, etc).
• Fixed instances of heal potions not healing you when using them in sanctuaries during big gank fights.
• Fixed some instances where Industry Input/Output holos wouldn't show up.
• Tossed out the Custom Crafting plugin we used to use in favor of our own again. /rb is back and works as it once did.
• Fixed a variety of regeneration issues.
  • There should be less lighting issues all over the place (though some still exist).
  • Fixed water aggressively invading the Nether.
• Hopefully fixed some Ender Dragon loot issues, so dragon is back again.
• Fixed attacking somebody on Rivina counting as a continental attack
• Fixed bugs involving buy/selling heads on the Market.

 

[Cryptite]

Been awhile since we've had a big bug catchup. The vast majority of work has been on Sharding Phase 1 which has released! There have been some bugs from the update as is expected but overall it went very well. Next up on the immediate list of Sharding Updates will be sharded /c train. This is the least potentially-destructive sharding test and also will be nice to have since it will remove the occasional issues with lost inventories, xp, etc.

In the meantime, pretty much all updates were fixes from sharding or handling of reports. Today however there are a few changes/updates that were discussed with the LCRs last night surrounding some player suggestions/feedback. So let's do it!

• TnT Minecarts now behave like Loka Ender Crystals
  • They are no longer 1-shots. They do up to around 8 hearts with falloff based on distance from explosion.
  • You can no longer kill players in Sanctuary Areas with TnT cart explosions.
  • Height fallen, shooting arrows at them do not modify their damage in any way. If they explode, it's the same behavior/damage no matter what triggered the explosion.
• TnT Minecarts can now be used in Battle Zones.
  • Since they're now consistent with crystals, it's fair to let them come back. So this might be interesting.
• Flying is now possible in ALL Battle Zones, regardless of where.
  • This includes Rivina, Balak, and fights in territories/continents with otherwise-disabled flying.
  • If you exit a battle zone, you can still fly as long as you're within your 20s BZ grace period of returning to the fight.
  • If you enter a town you will still be immediately dropped to the ground, cause that would be unfair.
• Radars are now subject to their owners' Vulnerability Window
  • They cannot be attacked if outside vuln window. Golems won't spawn and you'll be notified if near one when they can be attacked.
  • Ultimately it's just not fun to wake up to your radars all gone because you're asleep. Recent radar changes were meant to instill confidence in spending the money to have them in the first place. It's more sensible to at least have the option to protect them provided your vuln window matches your general activity.

Ok go forth!

 

[Cryptite]

Conquest Training - Sharded!
Also has menu!

​

• /c train is now Sharded and has a GUI where you can see how many players are in either your Town or Alliance.​
• Kit management for c train is also in the GUI.​
• Training now has its own chat that is automatic provided you're in public chat:
  ​
• There isn't a GUI in-training yet, but will come in a future update when we add more configuration mechanics to training as a whole.​
• Training is now what I'll call "lightly sharded", in that it is technically a standalone server but does not share very much in what will be "full sharding" yet. What this basically means is that cross-network chat like town/alliance/religion works, similar to pvp server, but a lot of the "You're in Loka" stuff isn't in yet. This includes:​
  • Getting global messages about things happening in your town​
  • Alerts like Inhibs placed on you​
  • Ability to /m players anywhere on the network.​
  • Cross-network "requests", like town invites, etc.​
  • Management of things like in /c status, etc.​
  • "Feeling like you're still on Loka", though /c train is more like being in a PvP match so it won't probably feel like it anyway, so there.​
  • Shared player-state (echest, inventory, pot effects, etc). Though also not something applicable to training.​

Training will just be receiving constant updates as a lot of the sharding work will be using the Training server as a sort of guinea pig since it is most allowed to explode without corrupting things, etc.

Train Forth!

 

[Cryptite]

Sneaky Player Changes
An addition to our suite of anti-griefing/raiding/hacking measures

​

Hacked clients are everywhere, lots of people have them, we detect/ban players for using them for their more obvious features. That said there are things hacked clients, and also vanilla minecraft can do to give players information they shouldn't otherwise have, because "Minecraft Things". As a result some hack client features are hard to detect and ban for. In today's update case, it is the ability to see players through walls walls/blocks/etc. We've made a fairly notable update to Loka's anti-"Minecraft Things" suite of tools that we felt addressed this issue.

Ignoring the hacked client usage for testing, players who are sneaking and do not have Line of Sight to others will be explicitly hidden from others. This is the plugin-level hide which blocks the player from your client entirely (same as how being vanished for admins works). Similar to how Loka obfuscates health (blocking health indicator mods) and other things, we felt this was a worthwhile addition to the Loka Experience™. Players have come to expect levels of protection on Loka against many things other servers don't touch and we think this is a good change. There are some "see-through blocks" that do still hide players, but we feel this does the job in the majority of all cases.

May your gank-fight hide and seek games be more fair.

• This is the majority change this morning besides some Void Storage fixes. The only other update is that:​
• Splash Damage Potions, etc no longer combat-tag players in Sanctuaries.​

Sneak Forth!

 

[Cryptite]

A Grinding Update
Not particularly a Conquest Update, but it do be that time of the month​

After plentiful discussions with some Lokans about grinding, one of the primary issues that came out if it was many people were too fearful to go to the nether to grind due to the risk of ganks and losing all their stuff. Our long-term solution to Nether grinding is to expand the nether and add more places to obtain the resources at varying risk levels and drop rates. This will spread out resources over a much larger area, supporting larger player numbers. However, due to other Dev/Build team priorities, the "Big Nether Update" is still quite a ways off. As a result we've made various changes to some mechanics/drop-rates in order to make do for the time being:

Introducing Unstable Items
These will begin to show up more places in the future
​

We've had this feature planned for a long time as we knew we'd want to use it in future Resource Gathering Areas where we knew players would want to gather resources, but didn't want PvPers to have a complete and total lockdown. Turns out the Nether was the first logical place to introduce these.

• In Yellow Wildernesses, which have Keep on Death inventories, Unstable Items will still drop off of you if you die.
• Unstable Items cannot be placed in Town Chests, Ender Chests, and cannot be used in crafting.
• They can be placed in Shulkers.
• In order to "Secure an Unstable Item", which removes the Unstable Tag, you must return to either your Home Town (or tempbuilding town) or Spawn. All items in your inventory/shulkers will automatically convert to regular, original items at that point.

The Nether is now a Yellow (Keep on Death) Wilderness
Except the Dreadfort. That's still a Red Wilderness (drop all items on death).​

Unstable Items and a (mostly) KoD Nether is meant to reduce the overwhelming risk associated with even going to the Nether at all. The Nether shouldn't be a complete end-game only area where only good PvPers stand a chance to thrive. While you still have the risk of death, since it is the Nether after all, at least you do not stand to lose all your gear. This will hopefully encourage more people to go there and lessen problems where alliances have just a couple of members grinding. There will still be incentives to world PvP as you can get unstable resources that others have gathered and people can still red tag themselves in the Dreadfort should they wish. Making the nether a straight yellow wilderness where nothing drops was debated and would eliminate even more of the risk, but we felt the current implementation was a better middle ground as it still promotes some PvP. We will see how it goes and potentially reconsider this option if the current implementation doesn't have the desired effect.

The Balance Changes
Shrines are faster, drops are greater, more risk but more reward if you grind the Dreadfort​

• Nether is now KoD, Dreadfort still Red Wilderness, and the following items are now Unstable:
  • Blaze Rods
  • Gunpowder
  • Ghast Tears
  • Magma Cream
  • Wither Skulls
  • Glowstone
  • Nether Wart
  • Nether Quartz
  • All Loot Bundle items
• Blazes now have a small chance to generally spawn in nether.
• The cooldown on Shrine mob waves reduced from 60s -> 30s.
• Shrine "offline" time reduced from 20m -> 10m.
  • Basically Shrines can be done more frequently now so it's not one team basically "using up all the shrines" as often.
• Blaze Shrine drops increased by 33%.
• Ghast Shrines drops increased by 33%. (both tears and gunpowder)
• Blaze Drops in the Dreadfort increased by 60%.
• The radius at which mobs are spawned near you in the Dreadfort has been reduced significantly. This is meant to reduce vast quantities of mobs always being around, even if you're a room or two over, and thus hopefully be less FPS laggy.
• Increased Enderman drops in The End by 75%.
• Balak's Mob Drops buff has been decreased from 50% -> 25% chance to drop 2x items.
  • Simply put this buff was seen as a requirement to get and was unbalanced in terms of how powerful it was compared to some of the other buffs.
  • The Radar version of extra drops is still 50%.
  • This closes the gap a bit between what everyone can have, and what only the top town on Balak (or whoever has that buff) can have.
• Lastly, there is more content coming in the form of Daily Quests that will also provide pot materials, but not require going only to the nether. The PvE team is hard at work on them and they are very close to coming out. An update about that will be posted when it releases.

And that's all! Hopefully this makes the Nether a bit less out of reach for many players and increases them inhibs.

Go Forth and Gather!

 

[Cryptite]

The majority of the time since the last update post has just been fixing a ton of bugs that have popped up of late. Some were newly introduced from Unstable Items, others became more prevalent due to the high population we've had lately (good thing!). A couple things have changed however:

• Combat Tag Change
  • If a Red-Tagged player attacks a Yellow-Tagged player first (starts the fight), the Yellow-Tagged player will no longer have their tag upgraded to Red just because they fight back.
  • If you were in the Nether grinding and a Red-Tagged player started attacking you, you were effectively forced to not fight back and simply die if you didn't want to drop any gear. That's obviously quite unfair.
  • So basically, if you're Red-Tagged and want to now pick a fight with a Yellow-Tagged player, you risk losing the fight and your things, so choose carefully!
• Turtles
  • Turtles can no longer be bred on Rivina (actually they were never supposed to). However, the drop rate of Turtles dropping scutes on Rivina was increased from 10% -> 50%.
• Nullifying Potions now correctly block Splash Slow IV pots. As well, they will not block you pearling. You can only splash people with Turtle Master to give them slow + resistance + pearl-block.
• Fixed some instances where Industries would roll items you cannot produce (due to biome ownership) and, rather than try a new roll would just stop. Overall this means some industries should produce a little more for you now.
• Seagrass can now be broken within the TGen area if needed (like during fights, etc).
• Otherwise, just a whole ton of bugfixes and stability fixes. This is unfortunately pushing Sharding back, but many of these bugs are quite critical and simply need fixin'.

Go Forth!

 

[Cryptite]

Still fixing bugs, some minor changes:

• Players who log out "over the void" in The End will now be instantly killed.
  • You will log back on already dead.
  • Only applies in The End and does not apply to Gliding players (elytra flying)
• Land Mines
  • Invisible Land Mines can no longer detonate.
  • Dying to a Land Mine will no longer delete your gear. Some may fall in the fire and burn, but it will no longer all instantly vanish.
• Fixed one last way to hotkey-swap items into a Void Storage chest that it didn't belong in, which would delete the item when you close the chest.
• Fixed quite a few problems causing Regen not to happen, so that's good.
• The Arcanum will no longer try to turn Chests into Output chests
• Fixed a variety of crops that could be grown where they shouldn't be (Potatoes, Carrots, Sugarcane, etc).
• The permission check to place TnT in a town was turned off I guess? idk. See if that works now...

Go Forth!

 

[Cryptite]

"July" Conquest Update
More ways to get pot mats, change to shield behavior​

It's not entirely a Conquest Update but it is the beginning of the month so we'll call it one. Not much to address here as the majority of work being done lately is simple bugfixes, tournament support (great work Fruitopia!), and sharding work. Otherwise, a nice chunk of content from the PvE team is finally ready and a notable change to shields to address some recent concerns from the community. Let's hop to it!

Shields
When disabled, 2x cooldown, bigger durability hit.​

• When disabled by an axe, the cooldown of your shield being disabled has been increased from 5s -> 10s.​
• Additionally, when disabled, your shield will incur about a 5% durability hit.​

The aim of changing shields is not "to nerf them because they're op" because by that logic, we would nerf prot IV, swords, strength pots etc. In general we do not care what the meta is (shields being essential or not), as we stick fairly closely to vanilla combat. Instead, the aim is to tweak them for the benefit of conquest, which is why Loka has a 33% damage increase in the first place. In conquest fights it's important that a decent chunk of players die each warp to help allow objectives to be completed and keep the action at a reasonably fast pace. High deaths also allows us to keep the warp times relatively low, allowing weaker pvpers/new players the chance to return to the fight multiple times.

The recent popularity of shields is problematic in that regard and undoes some of the benefits of the damage increase. Shields are able to mitigate all damage and their counter, axes, are relatively ineffective as they disable it for such a short length of time. A shield can also last an entire fight without breaking, making the trade-off for bringing it just a single inventory slot. These changes should balance things a bit better and bring back some kills/haste to Conquest overall. As always, we will continue to monitor fights and may make further tweaks in the future.

Nyx, Hell's Merchant
Content, people! Real content!


​

As has been referenced lately, recent changes to the Nether weren't meant to be the only thing to help with resource gathering for Conquest. Our PvE team has been toiling away creating a big chunk of quests that players can do to earn some pot mats.

Nyx, Hell's Merchant has moved into the War District in Aladra with her wagon and is ready to do business!

• Visit Nyx in the War District to do Daily Quests to earn potion materials and more!​
• There are over 35 Quests to do for her thus far (some more coming in the future pending some additional Quest Tech).​
• Every Day, Nyx will provide you one randomly-selected quest to do. The quest is random and is unique per player. Not all players receive the same daily quest each day, which will help to distribute people around a bit more.​
• The quests will have players exploring Balak and Rivina.​

Hopefully, there are now a good mixture of ways to get materials. Enjoy the new quests and...

Go Forth!

 

[Cryptite]

Just a bugfix catchup:

• Combat NPCs in docks are no longer invulnerable if in combat.
• Slowness Arrows are now properly blocked by having Debuff Resistance from Null potions.
• Fixed a bug in which removing sales you put up on the market would not return all of your items, some could be lost based on the state of your inventory.
• Greatly shortened the duration of invulnerability players have upon logging in.
• Liquids can no longer flow into town protection from outside of it.
• Players who /tpa to a town will now be given a big warning that raiding/stealing is against the rules (when there from a /tpa).
• Fixed Gold Digger/Altruist/Tycoon (and all exclusive titles) not working properly, being lost after reboots or spamming over and over even if the same person has it, etc.
• Added more cooldowns to limit lore/stattrack spams when certain people go ham on their inventories.
• Fixed (and still fixing) some incorrect behavior with Nyx's Daily Quests.

And of course breaking, then fixing lots of random things (because sharding).

 

[Cryptite]

The August Update
Mostly lots of BTS work
​

The vast majority of work being done is still related to Sharding and preparations for fun future content, etc. Most of what's below has been live for awhile with a few exceptions here and there. Let's hop to it!

Combat Invis
Quit tryna bait tags​

• If you enter an area with a lower combat-type than your active Combat Tag, you will become visible if you have invisibility.​
  • For example, having a Red Tag and entering either a Yellow Wilderness or a Sanctuary. Either of these will make you visible.
  • Like with the BZ Invis mechanics, your invisibility is removed, but stored. As soon as your combat tag drops, or you go back out into the same wilderness type as your tag, your Invis will be restored.
  • Per a discussion with LCRs, players were using invis as a way to trick players into getting combat tagged.

TnT in Towns
Safer!​

• The PLACE_TNT town permission now applies to priming TnT as well in towns (so players without zone/town perms can neither place nor prime tnt). However, because there are still many ways to activate TnT in Minecraft, TnT explosions in towns will no longer destroy:
  • Armor Stands
  • Containers (Any block with an inventory)
  • Item Frames
  • Dropped Items

Battle Zoney Things
Less boom, less griefs​

• Living Bomb (player & mite version) explosion damage now has falloff. The farther you are from the explosion, the less damage you take. This is now consistent with basically most if not all explosions on Loka.
• There is now a Blacklist of blocks that cannot be placed in Battle Zones. These are all blocks used mostly to grief the zone rather than act as legitimate fortifications.
  • We're not providing the exact list due to size reasons, but it's effectively all blocks that are "interactable/right-clickable", cause lag (emit particles) or are a liquid.

And the rest​

• Nether Portals can no longer be lit/made (no reason for it other than the rare aesthetic).
  • These were being used as traps which lock the player entirely out of playing, including even typing commands.
• /town leave now once again teleports you to spawn.
• You can now infinitely change your vulnerability window during Truce.
• Donkeys and Mules should now spawn around Loka (wherever horses do).
• We have completely removed the Citizens plugin in favor of our own system. This is both a perf boost, but also gives us a lot more control over NPCs in general. We're still smoothing out a few bugs with this but this is great news for future "things"!
• Minecart TnT explosions will no longer occur at all in Sanctuaries and if you are in a sanctuary, you are now also protected from any explosions occuring "on the edges" as well.
• Fixed a bunch of Banner of Conquest issues.

Go Forth!

 

[Cryptite]

Bugfix catchup! It's been over a month since the last update so figured I'd pop in with what things have changed/updated. The vast majority of work lately has been almost entirely Sharding work. The good news is we're getting close and are aiming to have it out before the month is over.

In the meantime, here're some notable updates over the past month:

Trader Neven
Say bye to the old Ore Exchanger

​

As Loka grows and scales, plans to migrate from the Ore Exchanger to something personalized had to be moved up. All players can now trade with Neven to get their shards in a personal GUI. Too many moderate amounts of tomfoolery were going on with the Ore Exchanger when it came to players messing with each other. So we hired a guy, and built him a lil' office.

Elytra Stat Track
Airforce, leggo!



All stats tracked are whilst flying. Distance flown pulls from your MC Statistics, as will many ST stats in the future
​

And the rest:

• Radars can no longer be placed underground and now require being on the surface with a view to sky (moderate light level).
• Conquest Locks are now a Big Scary GUI so that we can yell at you like 5 times before you lock. Because we're super-duper not unlocking people anymore, please read the damned thing.
• New Alliance Permission to manage Rivina Fight Participants. Use to just be same as the call_reins perm which, kinda dumb.
• As a result of #shardingthings, some /town commands now have tab-completion. The rest will continue to trickle in as sharding works. For the time being, it'll be a mixed of tab-completion and none at all, but it's a good start!
• Town Builders now have access to the Infinite Pearls/Rockets perks of their respective towns, when applicable.
• Fixed a few remaining Reins fight bugs like people with wrong armor colors, things going whacky when you switch sides in a fight, etc.
• Ender Pearl cooldowns now persist through relogs. Cheeky though...
• Hopefully fixed, or have almost totally fixed getting kicked out your duels "randomly"
• Just a whole ton of random things broken by sharding, then fixed by sharding.
• Quite an awful lot of performance fixes/updates due to Sharding making me look at my old bad code.

 

[Cryptite]

Loka's Gone 1.17.1!
Look underneath your town!​

As is tradition, we have updated (in time) to the latest version of MC. For the record, Loka basically will always try to update to the latest version of MC unless it has catastrophic issues which, these days, usually are resolved after subsequent patches (we skipped 1.14 entirely).

Originally we had been fully focusing on Sharding but decided we needed to change directions and fast-track the 1.17 update. Truce period is always an attractive time to push big server updates as it gives us a few days to smooth things out before the spice begins on Wednesdays.

Here's a nice Guide made by @Evil_X on updating your various mods to 1.17. Alright, let's get into what's new in 1.17!

Deepslate
It's down



We have retroactively converted stone to deepslate starting around y12 on all worlds (mostly). Just go down there and look!
Enjoy the new building materials.

Axolotls
They squeak, omg


Axolotls have been added to the Marsh in Ascalon and the Swamp in Garama.
They are Protected and require ownership of the appropriate biomes to breed.


Goats
Watch your step


Goats have been added to the Ice Mountains in Kalros.
They are Protected and require ownership of the Ice Mountains to breed.

Copper Ore
Wax on, wax off


Copper Ore can now be found and mined in All Resource Isles.

Everything Else

There isn't an October Conquest Update, but there are a few changes worth noting in addition to remaining 1.17 updates.​

• Due to the change in the way Fortune Mining works in Loka, all Iron Ore and Gold Ore that players have on Loka has been automatically converted to Raw Iron and Raw Gold.
  • This was to prevent a massive inflation of 2.2x of all iron/gold. Resource Isles now have lesser Iron/Gold to account for this awesome Mojang change.
• Powdered Snow was also added to the Ice Mountains in Kalros.
  • You can only gather this if you own the Ice Mountains, and cauldrons will not naturally generate Powdered Snow when snowing.
  • Powdered Snow will not be placeable in Battle Zones.
  • I'd've added a picture but it looks just about like normal snow, so.
• Most things you can "just craft" in 1.17 are available on Loka.​
• Aside from Deepslate, basically all of the other blocks that were introduced in 1.17 are not available on Loka. This is basically everything else new in Caves. They will be introduced in future content updates​

Other Updates/Conquest Updates

• Turtle Master Potions no longer work on Loka.
  • After a lengthy discussion with the LCRs, it was decided that any of all of potential ideas about Nerfing them were either not worth implementing or would nerf them enough that they would be considered useless anyway.
    
    We recognize this is a controversial change, but TM simply has no great counter when paired with Crystaling and additionally allows people to cheese things like the Wither Boss and any other future PvE content we might add. Like with God Apples, they have had to go the way of the dodo. I did enjoy watching the boom booms though.
• The massive exclusion zone around TGens/Inhibs where you can't break/place blocks and place shulkers is a bug. It's too big and will be fixed.

That's it! Enjoy the new stuff and Go Forth!

 

[Cryptite]

It's been awhile
But I was gone for like all of November so
​

While we haven't had an update post in a long time, plenty has been going on behind the scenes and so it's time to recap what's new/updated/changed since late September. A majority of October's work was Questing Tech improvements and changes to support the Nether's Eve content and the Arrival Server Event. I was in Europe for like 3 weeks in November so hence that bigol' gap of things. Anyway, leggo!

The Arrival and the Sundering of Aladra

​

Asymptonic's brief arrival inadvertently caused a cataclysmic chain of events to unfold in Aladra. Players witnessed the destruction of Aladra and helped save the citizens of spawn isle only to to be knocked out by a knife malfunction. They woke up an unknown amount of time later to discover Aladra had progressed (new spawn!).

Watch the prelude cinematic that played out right before Asy's arrival below!

​

As a result of this change, we have added Two New Player Generations (one was a retroactive change).

• Seventh Generation Players are those who joined after May 29th, 2020. This was the Regeneration Update.​
• Eighth Generation Players are those who joined before October 17th 2021 (the date of the spawn change).​
• We are now in Generation 9!​

Nether's Eve!
Lots of fun, but a lot of broken for awhile

​

Spooky, scary things are afoot once again in Aladra! Unfortunately there were a lot of bugs due to recent Quest Tech updates with this. As a result we never formally announced the content being available. In addition, I was out of the country during most of this and was only able to fix things on rare occasions. While it is December *cough*, we now feel confident that the quests all work now.

You have until Sunday Night, December 5th to do the Nether's Eve content before we switch back to normal spawn. Preparations for Yuletide are already underway!

/Trade has Come
No more spawn stealing 4 u

​

The Spawn Stealing rule is one we've always hated and wanted to remove. Now with /trade we're finally able to. In short, you can no longer drop items at spawn, and now should use the Trade Feature to safely trade items back and forth. You are still welcome to go to other continents' docks to drop items to trade, but those trades will be entirely unprotected by admins and you're on your own for shenanigans there.

• You can now /trade with players at Spawn (only).​
• As a shortcut, you can shift-right-click players to initiate a trade. The receiver can also shift-right-click to confirm for faster...ness.​
• We will be adding a couple extra features soon to Trading including Shulker Box previewing, and an ability to set a number of shards to trade as well.​
• We'll also add the ability to disable Trade Requests in the near future as well.​
• The rule about Spawn Stealing will be fully removed soon. Use /trade to safely pass items back and forth at spawn, or risk it for the biscuit in the continent docks.​

The last bits of Trade are being tested and once it's ready we'll tell everyone.

Turkish and Spanish Public Chat
A Work in Progress​

We're starting to try to see how best to allow our international population to be able to communicate with each other without constantly being yelled at for speaking their language in general public chat. At the moment, you can currently use /ch to toggle which public chat you want to be in. We are working through some ideas on how to be in multiple public chats at once for those who are multi-lingual, but want to be sure we do it in a smart way so we don't just go back to step 1 (wrong language, wrong channel = mad sentries).

Just a whole LOT of bugfixes
Too many things were broke and just needed time fixing.​

These are generally speaking in order from oldest to newest.

• Players who participate in a Rivina fight in some way are now permanently locked as a participant for the fight.
  • It was never meant for you to be able to swap out players constantly throughout the fight.
• Being on fire should no longer drop you out of the sky while flying.
• You can no longer take fall/kinetic damage in Sanctuaries
  • People were abusing this to fast-travel to spawn via splat. Amusing, but cheating!
• Players who are not direct enemies of Landmines can no longer blow them up in any way.
• We've begun to add more sounds to things on Loka. GUIs now have sounds, and we're trying to make sure notable actions throughout Loka's experience play noises in some regard. Fortunately Minecraft has been adding lots of cool sounds with each new patch so we are able/wanting to use MC sounds where possible, so that players who do not use our Loka Pack can hear things happen.
• Collectibles in /profile are now paginated (titles, etc) and should no longer be accidentally hiding some unlocked things for players.

Many other fixes, performance changes, and tweaks have gone in that are too innumerable to count, but hey, if you /reported it, you got a notification

Go Forth!