Before getting into it, we would like to wish everyone a happy new year! Hopefully, 2021 rids us of that thing beginning with ‘C’ everyone is talking about, or at the very least, diminishes it.

Onto server news.

• The Nether and End portals which broke a few months ago have been fixed, so we have removed the temporary warps ‘NETHER’ and ‘END’.
• Server hardware has been upgraded. It is still a 4-core processor, but quite a bit faster, accompanied by much faster RAM (also still 16 GB). Everything else is the same. How noticeable the speedup is, depends on how you play Minecraft, but we estimate that it is not noticeable for the vast majority of players.

That’s it for now!

All forms of griefing except claim griefing is now allowed. Please see the updated rule about griefing here. Anyone that has been griefed prior to this article is eligible for restoration.

Regarding homes, we have also disabled the /oldhome command. If you have still not placed your new home and have lost access to your base, contact anyone from staff and we will sort it out.

Lastly, both Nether and End portals have stopped working since 1.16.2. While we look for a solution to this we have temporarily added warps to the Nether and the End. The warps are NETHER and END respectively.

After one of our longest maintenance breaks ever, the server has finally been upgraded to 1.16, and with that a long list of changes! The most important parts are marked red.

The poll from our recent article turned out very positive, so starting with the biggest change, we are moving forward with our transition to a claim-based survival server.

The implications of this are many:

• Claims block all form of block destruction, meaning you can no longer dig into a player’s base, replace all the blocks behind you and steal their things. This used to be a legitimate way of raiding, and we understand that some players may be upset about this. However, block destruction is the only action which is blocked. This means you can still PVP, steal from exposed containers, open doors etc. inside of claims. Our previous article outlines our reasoning behind adding claims, in case you missed it.

• You start with 625 claim blocks (a 25×25 claim area). This is a modification to the configuration we defined in our previous article, where we stated you would start with 2500 claim blocks (a 50×50 claim area). 50×50 is actually quite large and after testing around in-game, we realized that having new players be able to create 50×50 claims right from the start could cause difficulties for players to explore.

• Claims can be placed next to each other, meaning you can effectively create one big claim if you work together with other players.

• Claim blocks cost $10 each and can be purchased once you reach the rank of VIP. This means that going from 25×25 to the originally planned 50×50 starting area costs $18 750. Reaching the maximum claim area, 400×400 or 160 000 claim blocks, costs approximately $1.6 million.

• To prevent a situation where large portions of the wilderness are riddled with claims created by players that have not been online in a very long time, your claim will expire after you have been offline for three months without logging in once. However, if you have played on our server long enough, you should never have to worry about the expiration date. Therefore, once you have purchased 10 000 claim blocks (the difference in claim blocks between a 25×25 and a 103×103 claim area), your claim will never expire. This equals a cost of approximately $100 000.

• If you have not created a claim, the first chest you place will automatically create one for you, with a four-block radius around the chest. This automatic claim is special in that it will expire already after just seven days of offline time. Once you expand the claim in any direction by just one block, the expiration time will extend to three months.

• You can choose whether or not to enable explosions in your claim. The default setting is to block all forms of explosions.

• Fire does not spread or deal block damage within claims. This cannot yet be toggled by the player.

• You can invite however many players you want to edit your claim, or you can only allow players to build in specific areas, so-called subdivisions, created by you.

• All sizes of lots have had their price reduced by a significant amount to match the price of claims in the wilderness. Small lots now cost $32 000, while big lots cost $130 000. This reduction should make them more appealing given their extra layers of protection over claims, while also making them easier to acquire for the average player. Everyone that purchased a lot for the original price has been refunded the difference in price.

• Starting from September 10th 2020, griefing will be allowed everywhere where you have build access. Due to the significance of this change, we are allowing a long transitioning phase to give players time to log in and protect their areas without having to worry about getting griefed in the meantime.

To actually create a claim from scratch, you need to equip a golden shovel. To get information about a claim, equip a stick. The plugin should give you all the necessary information you need to proceed from there. Equally, if you place a chest and have not yet created a claim, the plugin will prompt you on what to do.

All commands related to claims can be found in the default commands reference.

If you have any feedback regarding the configuration of claims, we would love to hear it!

Phew, that is quite a lot to digest, but there is more!

• We have removed two redundant plugins from the server as the functionality of these is already a part of other plugins we use. The plugins in question handle homes and the economy. Regarding the economy, all the basic functionality you were used to from before is still there; some commands are just different. Regarding homes, however, we cannot transfer the home data to the new system. This means you are going to have to place a new home using the new system. You have until September 10th 2020 to do so before your current homes become inaccessible.

• The new command for setting homes is /sethome. To visit your home in the new system, use /home. To visit your old home, you must use /oldhome.

• The Nether has been reset to make way for the new 1.16 Nether biomes.

• Do you absolutely hate Phantoms harassing you because sleeping is almost impossible to do on multiplayer servers? This is no longer an issue as you can fake sleep with the command /rest which will stop Phantoms from spawning.

• Mail is making a return! You can once again use mail to send messages to offline players, which they will see once they log back in. The commands are /mail read, /mail send player message and /mail clear.

• Upon login, you are presented with the message of the day, which we will use to convey important and useful information. This should be less intrusive than our previous notification system, which automatically made you open a book every three days.

• Players of the Member rank now have access to all regular shop warps, which previously were restricted to VIP and over. The VIP Shop is still only accessible for VIPs. This means as a new player, you can warp to every regular shop in spawn which should make it significantly less tedious for new players to purchase items. If you are wondering which warps these are, have a look at Plugin information!

• Many smaller changes, such as hovering over player names and ranks showing unnecessary text along with the appearance of announcements and /rules.

• You can no longer be permanently banned for breaking rule §7 or §9 multiple times.

Poll: https://www.strawpoll.me/20463880

We have been discussing quite a significant gameplay change on SunnyShadowz recently and would like to hear your opinion. Since the last poll in February the idea has been refined slightly.

We are planning to add a wilderness claim plugin, and it would work like this:

• you start with a 50×50 (50 m^2) area (free) and can extend it (when you get the VIP rank) to a maximum of 400×400 (400 m^2) using in-game currency
• you can only have a single claim at any given time
• you can build to the sky limit
• the claim only protects from block destruction (PVP, animal killing, chest stealing will all still work)
• griefing will be allowed everywhere with no protection
• as a player of the Member rank your claim is removed automatically after an inactive period of two months (anything within the claim area will be accessible by all players)
• lots, both big and small ones, will become cheaper to match the price of claims

So why do we think this is a positive change? We have never allowed griefing on the server because we want players to be able to build whatever they want without risk of losing their work. However, this presents a higher load on staff since dealing with griefers is not always easy, especially for builds close to wilderness spawn. With this change, griefing will be impossible to do assuming you have placed a claim, and thus it will reduce our workload. You can call us lazy, but another aspect is that restoring griefed builds does not always restore it exactly as it was before the grief, depending on the methods used by the griefer. These inconsistencies, together with the increased workload of our current system, resulted in the idea of wilderness claims, and we would love to hear your feedback on it. There are multiple aspects to get right, such as pricing, how much you can extend it, how many claims you can place, how long before a claim expires etc. This poll will help us get an idea of your initial thoughts.

A question you may have is how lots will fit into the picture. The current price of lots would be too high compared to claims, and we are therefore thinking of lowering it to match the cost of a wilderness claim. That is great and all but why would you ever purchase a lot even at the same price then? Well, we think they might still be useful for shop-making, since they offer full PVP and stealing protection as well as griefing protection, as opposed to claims which only offer grief protection. We are planning to add many more shop booths and some kind of shop advertisement area in spawn too, which will be cheaper and safe alternatives to lots for selling to other players.

The server has been updated to 1.15. This includes a new spawn point to maximize your chances of finding bees! As always with new updates, please report to us if something is not working.

The book notification plugin we added last week has enabled us to convert massive amounts of information from our website to books which can finally be accessed from in-game. /help and /rules are two such examples, which are now a lot more readable and useful in-game than they have ever been. The /help command in particular now contains the complete command reference found on our website for every rank, with helpful descriptions for each command. We urge you to give them a try next time you log in, especially if you do not visit our website often. Furthermore, the news book that those of you that have played during the past week will have seen at least once is now accessible with the /news command.

Messages sent in any of the synchronised chats from our Discord server look a lot better in-game now. The mismatching rank colours, in particular, have been corrected.

You can now check your account balance with the /balance command, which is a new alias for the /money command. In other words, both of these commands now show your account balance.

Finally, we have added a new donation chat perk: special suffixes depending on which donation tier you purchase. Check it out below.

Before I leave, a quick word on our road map. Keep in mind that anything listed here is subject to modification.

• We have plans for designating an entire area in spawn for player shops and trading, and a way to advertise your shops to other players via some “ad board” in spawn.
• The ability to create chat parties for you and your friends in-game, which may include party teleport commands etc.
• A fully-fledged introduction to SunnyShadowz for new players, which may be useful even for senior players.
• Creative world which is entirely separate from the rest of the server (i.e. different inventory), where you can build to your heart’s desire in free plots and where we might host building competitions in the future.
• Many new secret rooms and districts in our spawn town.

That is all for now!

It’s about time we give you a progress update!

Let’s start things off with the biggest news: a proper notification system! Finally! When you log into the server now, a book will show up containing all the recent news and updates we make to the server. This is a big deal because previously we had no way of letting every player on our server know in-game about any new updates and important changes. Of course, if you have joined our Discord channel or check our website regularly it has never been a problem, but we believe interacting with a server outside of the game should be entirely optional. We are not quite there yet though since it’s difficult to fit all the text in these articles inside of books, so the information in this in-game “newspaper” will be summarized. Finally, don’t worry about being spammed, because it will only be displayed to you once every 24 hours. This cooldown is subject to change as we keep experimenting.

See it in action

 

The second big thing is the addition of several new items in our shops!
The following items have been added: Totem of Undying, Ender Chest, Enchanting Table, Block of Redstone, Iron Trapdoor, Dark Prismarine Slab, Prismarine Brick Slab, Shield, Prismarine Slab, Gold Nugget, all types of Boat, all types of Stripped Wood and regular Wood, all types of wooden Fence Gate, all types of Stripped Log, Iron Nugget, all types of wooden Trapdoor, all types of Sign, Podzol, all types of wooden Door, all types of wooden Fence, Acacia Sapling, Dark Oak Sapling, all types of wooden Slab, Acacia Leaves and Dark Oak Leaves. Now that was a handful, but that’s not even all! All the wooden items mentioned above are located in a new shop building, the Carpenter’s Workshop (credit DragonProto), and some items have been moved from the Masonry’s Workshop to here. Some items have also moved from the Wizard Tower to the Masonry’s Workshop, so make sure to check out the locations in the price list next time you go shopping!

In August we nerfed Ender Pearls by a lot. The reason for this was that the previous most efficient way to farm Ender Pearls required a lot more work to set up compared to the new method introduced in 1.14. This means you won’t get as much out of these farms anymore, but on the contrary, Ender Pearls are a lot cheaper to buy now, and all items craftable with Ender Pearls have also been affected. This means End Crystal and Eye of Ender are cheaper and sell for less as well. As always we appreciate any feedback regarding changes like this because at the end of the day we just have a top-down view of the situation.

We hope everyone is having a wonderful summer!

This is an update on a few things that have happened during the past week.

To start things off, we have noticed a lot of players have placed public warps which everyone can access, unintentionally, and have therefore made a change to warp permissions. Members no longer have access to the command /warp set warpname, which places a public warp directly. As a Member you can now only place private warps with the command /warp pset warpname (see default commands for aliases). We have not removed the ability to make public warps however, it’s just that now you have to first make a private warp, and then publicize it with the command /warp public warpname. Once you reach VIP you will be able to create public warps directly, like you could do previously. Hopefully, this prevents any more players from accidentally placing public warps.

Moving on, the daily reward for voting on all four websites has increased in value from $200 (one Diamond) to $800 (16 Gold Ingots). We believe the switch from Diamonds to Gold Ingots is necessary as otherwise, a new player could receive four Diamonds upon joining and make Diamond tools immediately. Now you first need to figure out our shop system to convert the Gold to Diamonds! We would also like to clarify that the voting streaks do not require voting on all four websites, just one of them per day. If you do vote on all four now though, you will be rewarded quadruple the amount you were rewarded before.

We also have new shop items coming up. You can check them out on the price list. Any item marked green will be making its way into our stores soon.

That’s it for the changes!

On a final note, if you enjoy our server and would like to help us out further other than just voting for rewards (and donating), you can post a short review (both positives and negatives) of our server on our post on Minecraft Forum. The reason this helps is that it bumps our post right to the top of their server list, plus you let other players and us know what you think! You are not rewarded anything in-game for doing this, so it is completely up to you.