Org Minecraft Server

[Tuuvi]

Regarding the old backup, by itself the single overworld map doesn't take up a ton of disk space without a map. It might be feasible to put that world online just like Mineworld so that people can still access it, though disk space constraints would mean that I couldn't put anything more than a very basic low res map of it up.

Before I consider using a major mod pack like FTB or Tekkit, I'd like to have some more conversation about the topic. I do like the idea of mods that add new features to the game and fill in some gaps that vanilla is missing, but I also feel like a lot of these mods have gone way too far beyond vanilla. It seems like in a lot of them the tech tree itself is so massive that people simply focus on climbing the tech tree and don't have anywhere near as much interest in building structures. How do others feel about this? Another factor is also that a crapton of mods means we need a more powerful server, which means I need to pay more, which means my wife might murder me in my sleep.

Based on what I've seen watching FTB and Tekkit videos the modpacks don't disable vanilla crafting recipes, so players would be free to choose their own play style and the extent at which they take advantage of the content added in the mods. In vanilla minecraft I don't make much use of redstone, while other players like to build complex redstone contraptions.

Chipping in with my two cents, I've always preferred to have things as vanilla as possible. Stuff like TreeAssist and MobCatcher helped reduce monotony, but didn't fundamentally alter the nature or resource gathering. I can't help but feel that if we had industrial-style mods we'd all soon be swimming in resources, and essentially playing creative mode sans flying. Whilst we had a lot of assistance in the previous server, at the end of the day if you wanted to build something big you'd have to put in some effort beforehand, and I quite liked that.

The resource gathering machines in FTB and Tekkit require a lot of materials and infrastructure in order to build and use. Quarries, for example, require gold and diamonds to craft, and then need engines to power them, pipes to transport the mined materials, and furnaces to smelt the ores into ingots. So you still have to put in a lot of effort and do some vanilla mining, but then the process of mining is automated so you don't have to spend hours on end monotonously mining cobblestone in order to build anything large. Personally I think the process of building the infrastructure looks like fun in and of itself.

[Vinitharya]

I concur with Tuuvi. I'm the worst kind of engineer, the one that enjoys neither math nor physics, but the specific mods I mentioned means that it won't matter. If I put in enough effort into strengthening my infrastructure, I can build all of the things I've always wanted to without cheapening it by giving myself the blocks for free. The ceiling for improvement is put extremely high in doing so.

And, if, say, TC wants to build another glorious palace of Nether Quartz, he doesn't need dozens of man-hours (his or others) spent mining and mining and mining. He could plan it and place it, spending more time on aesthetics and design.

[BSmith]

I've been playing a little bit of Galacticraft this week and am starting to enjoy the added functionality and learning curve of added machines and resources. I could be convinced to give a more featured mod a chance. My only concern is that the server would advance in pace and scale faster than a more vanilla world would, and we would be at a similar place as TinCow was with things not being much of a challenge anymore much more quickly. But that is a longer term concern and could be outweighed by the newfangled additions a good mod might bring.

[Vinitharya]

I've been playing a little bit of Galacticraft this week and am starting to enjoy the added functionality and learning curve of added machines and resources. I could be convinced to give a more featured mod a chance. My only concern is that the server would advance in pace and scale faster than a more vanilla world would, and we would be at a similar place as TinCow was with things not being much of a challenge anymore much more quickly. But that is a longer term concern and could be outweighed by the newfangled additions a good mod might bring.

Right, that's why if we did something like that, we would be pretty damned careful with the ones we would pick. As few as possible, to keep costs and latency down.

[TinCow]

And, if, say, TC wants to build another glorious palace of Nether Quartz, he doesn't need dozens of man-hours (his or others) spent mining and mining and mining. He could plan it and place it, spending more time on aesthetics and design.

Without all the hours of work, it wouldn't have been much of an accomplishment.

[TinCow]

Please ping the following servers and post your results:
texas.prominecrafthost.com
uk.prominecrafthost.com

[Sigurd]

Please ping the following servers and post your results:
texas.prominecrafthost.com
uk.prominecrafthost.com

[BSmith]

texas.prominecrafthost.com:
45ms

uk.prominecrafthost.com:
112ms

Let me know if you need more than the time and I can post a screenshot.

[Tamur]

texas.prominecrafthost.com:
38ms

uk.prominecrafthost.com:
118ms

0.0% packet loss! :)

[Nigel]

texas.prominecrafthost.com
175, 180, 176 ms


uk.prominecrafthost.com
173, 65, 64 ms

[TinCow]

Ok, here are my plans and thoughts at the moment.

I plan on using the host listed above, with the UK server. I'm sick and tired of unreliable hosts, so I'm going with major, long-established hosts that run a lot of Minecraft servers. The above was one of several of these I was looking at, and they responded promptly to questions I had and their server plans seem decent. I will be choosing UK Package 5 (2.5gb RAM). We are an international community and in this case the US gamers seem to ping better to the UK server than the EU gamers do to the US server (my own pings were 47 to Texas and 87 to UK). Package 5 is actually beefier than the system we had with Qoozio, with the exception of disc space. Disc space there is a lot smaller, and I couldn't fit the entire old server in 25gb. That said, disc space requirements won't be as large as they were before for several reasons

First, the world will be smaller. The previous world had a radius of over 6000. That number was not chosen because we needed a world that size but instead because at the time when I decided to fill out the entire world in a circular area, therother and I had already colonized our area out a very long distance from the center. As such, making a world with a radius smaller than that would have cut off our new homes, and I wasn't going to do that. There's no such situation for the new world, so I don't have to use 6000 as the radius. I've decided to make the world radius 4000. That should still be way more space than we actually need, particularly since the 1.7 map generation code will make a lot more land and a lot less ocean.

Second, additional disc space will be saved by removing internal world backups. I used to use a plugin to auto-create backups of the world every day at a certain time. I was originally using that when the server was still hosted in my house, and simply kept using it when I moved to a remote host. However, the new host keeps 7 days of backups on their own anyway, so I dont have to do it myself. In addition, this latest fiasco shows that backups kept on the server anyway aren't really of much use. Removing a week's worth of server backups will save a good 10gb.

Third, dynmap will take up less space on the new server. On the old server dynmap used up a massive amount of disc space due to the size of the world and the HD render. A reduction in world radius from over 6000 to 4000 will significantly reduce the map size. I also plan on fiddling with the HD image compression to try and get that map's space down even further. Finally, I plan on not using a Cave render for the new world, at least for a while. Without a Cave render, we won't be able to see what is under the ground and, as a result, we'll have to explore the old fashioned way to find the Strongholds and get to The End. That seems a lot more fun to me than simply knowing where everything is immediately.

With regard to the plugins to be used, I am going to start running the server with the same plugins we had when it went down. That means no FTB or Tekkit. Both FTB and Tekkit are simply too over the top for my taste and, since I'm paying for this thing, I get a veto on what goes on the server. That said, I will definitely consider additional plugins to increase automation and cut out some of the more tedious chores, as long as the additions seem at least plausibly balanced. If you want additional features like that, please go out and find specific plugins that you think would be fun on the server and post links to them here. I will consider every single one that gets posted.

I plan on purchasing the server and starting work on setting it up this evening when I get home. It will take some time for me to get everything installed and then to pre-generate the world and the new map. I will keep you updated on the progress, but I anticipate that the server should be ready for play by Saturday, possibly sooner.

[BSmith]

Is 1.7 available now?

[TinCow]

Is 1.7 available now?

Yes, Bukkit 1.7 was released a few days after the server went down. It's still only in development build status, with no beta or release build available, but I'm not going to wait any longer just for that. We need 1.7 to create the new world and if I don't run a dev build we'll be sitting around doing nothing for even longer. The server has already been offline for over 2 weeks and it's about time I put that to an end. We've run dev builds before without any significant issues, and I'll upgrade to a beta and release whenever they come out.

[Sigurd]

... That means no FTB or Tekkit. Both FTB and Tekkit are simply too over the top for my taste and, since I'm paying for this thing, I get a veto on what goes on the server.

Agreed.

That said, I will definitely consider additional plugins to increase automation and cut out some of the more tedious chores, as long as the additions seem at least plausibly balanced. If you want additional features like that, please go out and find specific plugins that you think would be fun on the server and post links to them here. I will consider every single one that gets posted.

I plan on purchasing the server and starting work on setting it up this evening when I get home. It will take some time for me to get everything installed and then to pre-generate the world and the new map. I will keep you updated on the progress, but I anticipate that the server should be ready for play by Saturday, possibly sooner.

I have looked into a few mods... and the only one to really catch my eye is the Red Power mod. I really like the block crusher and frames which enables you to make movable stuff. Too bad it got discontinued back at the 1.4.6 version.

[TinCow]

As a status update, the server is online and I have pre-generated our new world. It has a nicely flat open area around 0/0, and there's also a village relatively nearby which might be useful while we're starting out. Today I will work on getting the new map configured and rendered, and after that I will begin restoring our custom configurations of the individual plugins.

[Nigel]

Whow - does this mean we get a sneak preview to walk the first steps on new map?

Or do you need to have all he plugins installed first, before we mere mortals demi-immortals can get online.

[TinCow]

Whow - does this mean we get a sneak preview to walk the first steps on new map?

Or do you need to have all he plugins installed first, before we mere mortals demi-immortals can get online.

No one except me will be able to access the world until I've got everything configured properly, which could be tonight but certainly no later than tomorrow. However, the map render is currently running and I will post a link to it once it is done so that you can see our new world even though it won't quite be ready for construction. It'll probably be a few hours though until it is complete.

[Tamur]

Exciting news! Thanks for taking this on (again), TinCow.

[BSmith]

The anticipation is killing me!

[TinCow]

As a heads-up, I might not be posting the map today. The quick flat render appears to show a deficiency of a bunch of biomes. There is only one small Mesa biome at the very edge of the map, with what looks like a larger one starting just outside our border and thus inaccessible. There's also only a single tundra biome, also at the very edge of the map, though of decent size. I can't see any Ice Spikes or Mushroom Island biomes at all. It's possible that those would appear if I pushed the borders out further, but I'm concerned about going over our available disk space if I expand the map too much. At the moment I'm still waiting for the HD render to finish, at which point I'll know how much extra disk space we have for a map larger than 4000. If there's enough extra room I'll try pushing the borders further to see what else pops up out there. If that isn't possible due to space or if I do it and we don't get the missing biomes, I'm going to have to wipe the map and try it again. It seems a bit silly to do an entirely new map for 1.7 and then accept a version that doesn't showcase the new biomes very well, or at all.

[Tamur]

Ice Forest biome seems really rare. I have yet to find one in SP (though admittedly, that's with me running around in survival mode trying to find one while trying to survive).

I think it's well worth the wait and trouble though to have a map with these 1.7-specific biomes. Bummer it takes such a long time to render.

[BSmith]

Agreed. This is our chance to make it as perfect as possible. Let's take the time to do that!

[TinCow]

On closer examination, we do appear to have an large Ice Spike biome at the very edge of the map, half in and half out of the border. Expanding the border would thus net us the rest of that biome and a large mesa biome as well. However, no Mushroom island, which means no mycellium. I suppose we could live with that, and the central spawn area is pretty useful for our purposes, but I'm not really that impressed with the world in general and I'm leaning towards tossing this one out. Here is the map so that the rest of you can see it and share your opinions; the HD portion is still rendering at the time I posted this:
http://orgcraft.org:8123/

[BSmith]

I tend to agree. It would be nice if we had a decent mesa less at the edge. This one seems to have a ton of plains, hills and forest as well. Even the savannas are not all that well distributed. South of the center is awfully green. The villages are nice though. The one near the spawn looks nice and large and the is another one NW in the desert. Overall this is playable, but you are right that it lacks any real magic.

Could you manually add a mushroom island somewhere?

[TinCow]

Could you manually add a mushroom island somewhere?

I could, but that's a fair amount of work to salvage a world of dubious quality to begin with. Really, the only thing I like about the current world is the central area.

[BSmith]

Well, there's your answer then. I'd just go with a new world then.

[Vinitharya]

I could, but that's a fair amount of work to salvage a world of dubious quality to begin with. Really, the only thing I like about the current world is the central area.

QFT.

Dammit, but we're gonna get started on the right foot.

[TinCow]

I did some research, and due to the significant increase in the number of biomes that are now possible, it's actually very difficult to find a seed that has all of them within a reasonable radius of 0/0. As such, I've scoured the net in search of some decent seeds people have already discovered to save us the pain and agony of going through this with trial and error. I have come up with a seed that is pretty spectacular. The only downside is that 0/0 is in a desert. However, there is a nice flat area that's suitable for city building relatively close to the center, and the rest of the world is spectacular and has everything we want. So, I'll just move the spawn point towards that flat area and out of the desert. I guarantee we'll be satisfied with this world, so I'm going to get to work on putting it online now. The map I previously posted is now offline. I'll let the world generate overnight and run a fresh map on it tomorrow.

[TinCow]

For anyone who hadn't noticed, the map of the new (and final) world is visible here:
http://orgcraft.org:8123/
The HD render is still only about halfway done and has several hours left, but you can already see that there's a massive amount of very interesting terrain to play around in. The ironic thing is that, due to the rarity of diverse terrain like this, we probably would not have encountered anything this cool if we had simply cropped our old world and regenerated part of it. I liked our old world, but to be quite honest this terrain puts that one to shame.

I still have some more plugins to install and configure after the map generation is done, but I anticipate that the server will be ready for play by this evening.

[Tamur]

Very cool to see it, tons of variety. Looking at the map makes me want to go exploring across that mesa out east and into the crazy karst mountains. Looks like a great world!