Author Archives: Zigg

This week we finalized the Bank, a new structure in Spawn where you can sell any item available in our shops. No longer do you have to walk around to every shop just to sell many different items, as this can now be done with a few clicks of a sign. Access it with the warp ‘BANK’ or via a warp sign in one of the Warp Centers.

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A word on performance

Lately we have had a massive influx of players to our server, which has put our server hardware to the test. It turned out pretty quickly that it is not capable of handling multiple players concurrently exploring, and I am sorry for the inconvenience this has caused. In an attempt to reduce lag I have changed many settings in the config file for Paper MC, and also just recently reduced the view distance from 12 to 8. The server always generates 12 chunks away from you in every direction with this value set to 12, regardless what your own client view distance is, so you can imagine that this can impact performance a lot. I also changed a setting that reduces the rate at which chunks are generated, and another setting that blocks you from entering unloaded chunks.

We’d love to hear from you regarding performance after these changes.

The server has finally been updated to 1.14. The reason it has taken this long is I’ve been pretty busy in May and early June, and an attempt at updating to 1.14 a few weeks ago left many plugins broken, which I simply did not have time to deal with. Anyway, that’s now a thing of the past, and you can expect a few updates to our spawn town using all the new blocks and items that were added to the game.

In other recent news, we have started working on a proper in-game tutorial for our server which we feel has been needed from the very “launch” (re-launch) of SunnyShadowz in December of last year. The reason for this is that the advertising post of our server barely touches the surface of every feature to keep it as short as possible. The idea is to give every player access to this area at all times so you can go back as many times as you want to check up on information.

We have also been hard at work on a new area of spawn, the name of which has not yet been decided. Vigilant players may have seen the structure below in the distance as it is right next to Central Park. This district will be larger than what can be seen below. That is just the main attraction, but there will be much, much more to see when it’s all done, not to mention many more reward signs. Note that the castle itself and the surrounding area is very much work in progress still, and it is so big that no screenshot really does it justice!

More smaller updates:

• The Ender Dragon now properly respawns in The End after placing four End Crystals on the portal. If you are unaware, it used to be broken. We are not sure what fixed it or caused the issues it in the first place, but it works as it should now.
• When you reach the required playtime for promotion you will now automatically be promoted to the next rank, up until VIP+.
• When you die you will respawn on your bed if you have slept in one.
• Every single shop sign in spawn now has an item frame attached to it.
• AFK notification timer increased from 2 minutes to 5 minutes (you still get kicked after 10 minutes).
• Magma Blocks increased in price from $3 to $25 per block.

The /back command used to be available on our server, but abuse in The Quest led to it being removed. Since then we have not really attempted to solve the issue the command brought with it, until now.

So then, the command is back, but not without a few fixes. You cannot use the command to go back to the Quest world anymore, nor can it be used to go back to your death location, anywhere. This is because we believe it has a significant impact on the tension of the vanilla Minecraft experience. If *back on death* were enabled you could return to a fight in an instant, retrieve your items and continue fighting, or escape. This would be especially unfair in ranged PVP. We hope this is understandable.

Another problem with the command was that it only worked between warps and death locations. If you used a warp sign, the last location would not be saved. This has also been fixed, so now the command works just as one would expect – every time you teleport the last location will be saved.

Lastly, the command has become a VIP only perk.

Hope everyone had a relaxing easter break!

Just an update on what has happened since the last post!

Performance

We have switched from Spigot to Paper, which is a lighter implementation of Bukkit than Spigot and should help with server performance. Please report to us if you find any issues that weren’t there before, or if the server actually feels more responsive now!

Fail

Since launch, the main survival world has been running on Easy difficulty somehow. Only one player reported it so I have a feeling it did not bother many. Meanwhile, I was thinking we should increase it to Hard – pretty bad timing. The difficulty is now Normal!

Future

In terms of the future, we are thinking of changing the way you buy and sell items in our shops. As we add more and more items, it will become increasingly annoying to buy and sell all your junk chests, and anything for that matter. I will make an educated guess that most players don’t sell their junk chests because it’s not worth the effort for the mere hundreds of $ or so they are worth. 

The solution is a GUI for buying and selling. However, we don’t want to remove the requirement of being in the vicinity of the shop selling a particular item, so to access this GUI, you will have to be in the shop selling that item (which is currently the case). There you will find all items being sold at that shop on one screen, making it much easier and simpler to buy and sell items than finding the correct sign, especially since not all signs have space for an item frame.

This is not set in stone yet, but we are thinking about removing the shop vicinity restriction for selling and allowing players to sell all items in their inventory in one go, at a certain location in spawn (Bank?). This will make selling much less of a hassle for everyone.

Adding new items should also be easier as they could be added directly to a config file, instead of having to add them in-game.

Let us know if you like this idea!

1.13 items have finally made it to our shops, and yes, that includes the Trident!

You can find most items in the newly built Aquarium, but some (Trident & Phantom Membrane) can be found in the Wizard Tower instead.

We have also made a second pass on item pricing, and have come to the conclusion that taking into account all aspects of a farm (building difficulty, efficiency, size etc.) and coming up with a formula from that information is simply too difficult to do and would most likely take months to accomplish.

With that said, we are still in the process of looking through all ingredients and documenting why they have that particular price and updating prices of certain items to be more consistent (for example, previously String cost half as much as Wool, and Rotten Flesh cost four times less). We are actively trying to make sure that pricing of items such as foods correspond to the food points and saturation of each, that pricing of armors correspond to the durability and defense levels etc. The only thing we are “scrapping”, is a formula that would have been applied to all farmable items based on farming statistics for that ingredient. We thought this formula would be objective at first, but the reality of it is that any formula has to be based in one way or another on the difficulty of obtaining an item in the world when you start fresh. This makes it biased since every player has their own opinion about how easy it is to get a certain ingredient, and our previous system was just that, based on our perception of how easy each item is to get. Therefore, we want to improve on the old system instead of throwing it out and starting anew, and to get there we encourage you to get in touch with us if you think the nerf of any item, not just farmables, is not justified.

With that out of the way, enjoy a photoshoot of the Aquarium!

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The plugin previously used to vote for changing the time of day and the weather has been swapped out for two separate plugins that fulfill the task equally well, if not better. Check out the command reference on our website for the new commands. This is to allow a completely new plugin to function correctly: a vote reward plugin, finally!

From now on you will be rewarded one voting point for each website you vote for our server on every 24 hours. There are four websites you can vote on, meaning you can get up to four voting points per day, which translates to one diamond in the vote shop. Consecutive rewards are active, meaning you get bigger rewards the more consecutive days you have voted. Voting each day on at least one of the voting websites for an entire week, will grant you $10,000, while if you do this for an entire month instead, you will get a much bigger $100,000. These rewards are subject to change.

Access the vote GUI with the /vote command.

Regarding QOL, the in-game map in spawn has been updated with named banners, giving away the locations of our item shops along with multiple points of interest!

Finally, and this is more of a “bug fix”, the mob spawners for cows and sheep have been removed with only the pig spawner remaining, as those spawners spawned pigs even though they were labelled as cow and sheep spawners. It is possible to change the type of mob spawned by right-clicking the spawner with a spawn egg, but consequently we have removed the horse spawn egg as that is simply overpowered. The spawn eggs that remain are pig, sheep and cow.

A new area has been built by one of our staffmembers, DragonProto: the Quarry! No items are sold here, but don’t let that deceive you, because there may be a few new secret signs hidden…

If you have trouble finding it, walk left of the Cathedral entrance!

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The chat channel previously known as “Multilingual” (command /m) has been changed to an English only channel and renamed to “English” (command /e). The “Global” channel is still the default channel but you can now speak any language there, which makes a lot more sense given the name. Also, you can now choose to leave even the Global channel, meaning you can mute public chat by typing both “/leave e” and “/leave g”. This includes any messages sent from Discord in any of the synchronized channels. As a reminder, to rejoin any of the channels, simply type “/g” for Global and “/e” for English, and to see all messages sent in a channel without setting it as your target channel for sending messages, you can type “/listen e” or “/listen g”. By default you receive messages from all channels.

All relevant commands can also be found in our command reference.