Philosophers Stone

Having received several polite requests from regular players to reconsider our policy regarding the Philosophers Stone and after some consideration and testing we have decided to give all players the ability to craft this item, however no rank will have the ability to hold it or use the right click functionality due to it's ability to be used for serious griefing.

Please note that because you cannot hold it you may have difficulty picking it up when dropped if you have empty slots in your hotbar.

Enjoy!

New Plugin - Experience for killing mobs

One of our plugins disables experience drops as an anti-lag measure, but whilst this helps server performance it does make experience much more difficult to obtain as killing mobs no longer gives experience.

Over the last two days several players have requested alternative means of gaining experience and I'm pleased to announce that after some testing we have now installed the SmartExp plugin.

The plugin is configured to give experience directly to the player when they kill a hostile mob, notifying them of the amount of experience awarded and their progress towards the next level.

Please note that this plugin will only award experience when a hostile mob is killed, no experience is awarded for killing animals (including aggressive wolves) or villagers.

Enjoy!

Daily Backup Downtime

We have decided to schedule a daily downtime to take a full backup and run some tests to check for issues, this downtime will usually last no more than 10 minutes.

This will take place between 19:00 and 19:30 with a warning being given in world at least five minutes before the server goes down.

Server back up and running

All the upgrades have been performed and the server is back up and running, though they will be running tests which may affect performance for a short while longer.

Thanks for your patience.

Firewall upgrade in progress

Our hosting company is currently performing the firewall upgrade and has decided to replace some other equipment at the same time to prevent further downtime later, I've been told this could take up to an hour.

It will all be worth it in the long run as these upgrades are aimed making their network more resilient to attacks such as DDoS and other network related issues, so please bear with us.

Downtime - New Firewall

Our hosting company is installing new firewall equipment between now and around 5 pm, the server will likely go down for around 10 minutes and their may be intermittent connection issues between these times.

It seems we chose a bad day to open the server!

On a positive note this should help prevent DDoS attacks against their servers in future.