Everything else

New perks have made their way to our donation packages! Specifically, the highest tier package now gives you access to a command which places the item you are holding on your head, along with a command to change your in-game nickname. All tiers now give those that have linked their Minecraft account with our Discord channel (/discord link in-game),  a Donator role on our Discord channel (in the future this may make its way onto the server too). The /money top and /ontime top commands have also been moved down to the first tier donation package.

Anyone that has already donated should receive these new commands automatically.

You can find our store at the following link: https://sunnyshadowz.buycraft.net/

We have rewritten the description of the griefing rule in an attempt to make it more clear, as well as modified the list of blocks you are allowed to destroy and steal. Notably, the cheaper blocks have been removed from the list and will now count as griefing if destroyed.

We suggest everyone reads it through, and if something is unclear we urge you to let us know.

As mentioned in a previous post, we are in the process of updating the price of most items in our in-game shops, but we have decided to make it an iterative process instead of waiting until all prices are updated and then applying the change in-game. What that means is that all items that have been updated up to now have been applied in-game. The drawback is that some farmable items that have the new system applied will seem less valuable than other farmable items that use the old system, and we apologize for this. Getting all farmable items updated is a priority.

Even with the new system in place there will be exceptions, such as items that are used for spawning bosses (Wither Skeleton Skulls) and items that are otherwise extremely rare (Shulker Shells, Elytras). Elytras have been increased to a price of $300,000 (from $100,000) to encourage finding these the vanilla way.

In other news, 1.13 items are on the way to our in-game shops, look out for another post soon!

Since our re-launch we have observed new item selling behaviors that has led to players earning vasts amount of money, a lot more than we anticipated was possible through our shop. One such item was the Magma Block, which you previously could sell for $198 per block (now $3). Magma Blocks are very easy to find in The Nether (similar rarity to Andesite in Overworld) and we overlooked this completely, only looking at the alternative way of getting Magma Blocks, Magma Cream. We are not ruling out the possibility that more such items exist in our shop, and that is of course a problem.

Furthermore, we noticed Prismarine Shards were being sold at a vast rate as well, however that was due to a very effective Guardian farm. We consequently lowered the price of Prismarine Shards from $75 per piece, to $50, as well as lowering Prismarine Crystals from $250 per piece to $125. The former was lowered based on the cost of Iron Ingots at $64, as we believe an Iron Golem farm is yields a lot less Iron Ingots than a Guardian farm yields Prismarine Shards and Crystals. The latter was lowered based on the drop rate of Prismarine Crystals compared to Prismarine Shards.

This price is subject to change, and in fact, as of now a lot of prices are subject to change, because for a lot of items we have not considered the effectiveness of farming them and only the chances of finding them. Ideally, each farmable ingredient should be based on the amount of blocks of each type used in the farm, how much the farm yields per hour, how much time the farm takes to set up, how much player interaction the farm requires when it is complete and how hard the blocks/items required are to acquire. Since some farms can be of indefinite size and still function well, such a formula is essential to avoid incorrect judgement of how efficient a certain item is to farm. A player may have spent 100 hours building the largest Iron Ingot farm in existence, and may make loads of money, and that should be deserved and not punished. At the same time, lowering the value of an item because it is extremely easy to farm, will allow any player to purchase that item for a lot cheaper than you would expect considering how hard it would be to find that item normally.

With enough research and documentation to justify pricing, the latter of which we have not really done at all, we hope to be able to come up with fairer pricing for all ingredients currently sold in our shops. This re-evaluation of pricing will take some time and ask all of you kindly to bear with us!

/ SunnyShadowz Administration Team

We have decided that the gap between the default beginner rank and VIP is too big, in terms of what gameplay options are available to you and taking into account the total play time required to get promoted. To resolve this, all new players can now place two warps and have access to all warp commands VIPs had previously. The catch is that only VIPs and above have access to our official warps. Furthermore, every player now has access to every parkour course, some of which were previously limited to VIPs and above (this may change in the future when more courses are added).

Moving up the rank tree, VIP+s now have access to inviting every player of a particular rank to their warps, instead of having to invite players individually.

The play time requirements for VIP and VIP+ have also been reduced.

…which means the server will soon finally go live! I have a lot of university work left to do this week, but hopefully during the weekend we can get started on fixing the stuff that broke when moving from 1.12 to 1.13, as 1.13.2 should be stable enough now for converting pre 1.13 worlds. This assumes that a bukkit update for 1.13.2 is released before the end of the week, because at the moment there is no ETA.

In other news, the issue with our warp plugin has been fixed and warp limits now work!

I will update this post when we have more information.

Update 29/10/18: The bukkit update was released last week and thus we are ready to begin fixing the stuff that broke in the transition, however I can’t say when it will be complete as university is still taking up a lot of my time. I am still using dev builds of many plugins so again, it is safer to wait than to get everything going immediately. As soon as I can give an estimate on release, I will update this post.

Update 13/11/18: Since the 7th of November our internet has been cut and thus the progress on getting the server up and running again has been stalled. Our internet should be back by tomorrow or the day after, but I still cannot give an estimate on release.

Update 19/11/18: All shop signs have now been updated and the new survival world has been created.

Update 23/11/18: Over the past week I have been trying to port forward our server computer through our new fiber net to be able to connect to it from an external network. However, I have found out that our ISP is most likely running something called CGNAT, which basically means the public IP address you use to connect (sunnyshadowz.no-ip.org automatically resolves to this address) identifies multiple end users instead of just one. The benefit of this is that an attacker will have a much harder time breaching the network, but it also means you cannot port forward the traditional way and hosting a service becomes much more troublesome. I have contacted our ISP about this and hope to receive a response soon. Bare with me…

Update 25/11/18: Our ISP kindly gave us a free public IP address, meaning we will soon be live!

When 1.13.1 rolled out in August there were still vanilla bugs, at least on the server side of things. One in particular means your chest contents could suddenly disappear, pretty bad I know. So, we are waiting for 1.13.2 which will hopefully fix all issues and make creating a fresh 1.13 world and having players use it less risky, in terms of reliability. There is no guarantee that all of our plugins function in 1.13 in every regard either, as we are currently using dev builds for several, so that’s another reason to wait.

Unfortunately, even if everything was stable today, we’d have to wait, as the warp plugin we use has a bug which prevents us from setting a global warp limit. This means players can place 10 warps in each world, instead of 10 warps total regardless of the world you place them in. The developer for the plugin is working on it.

When 1.13 is stable for bukkit servers, all we have left to do is replace a couple of shop signs that relied on the old ID system, set up the new world, fix a couple of command blocks which broke, and then everything is good to go! Really excited for the re-opening of SunnyShadowz!

In case you still haven’t read all the new pages on our website, it would be a good time to do that before we launch, which is hopefully within a month!

If you played on our server half a year ago you will probably not believe how much we have changed. From quality of life improvements to the expansion of spawn, there is simply too much to cover in one blog post, thus I am happy to announce we still enjoy Minecraft, a lot. Stay tuned for the full details, planned sometime during Minecraft 1.13!