Holidays have passed, and now it’s time to get busy again with a big round of bugfixes and enhancements.

MobArena has been receiving the most attention in this update:

• Skeletons have found their bows, and are now firing arrows as they were always supposed to. In addition, there’s a chance their bows are enchanted and fire more powerful blows (knockback and fire arrows are two of the possible enchantments).
• After much searching in the Nether, zombie pigmen stumbled upon a long forgotten stash of golden swords and decided to take them to battle. Since they found their weapons they’re more ballsy and immediately attack any players that are nearby.
• Tired of waiting for that person that’s always AFK? “Hit the damn iron block” sounds familiar? Well, we’ve listened and now each arena battle starts automatically – if there’s at least 1 person ready – 60 seconds after the first person joins that arena.
• Want to fight in the arena, but don’t fell like spectating to see when the battle’s over? Each arena announces when it is open, and you can join. Watch for messages like this one in chat:

If you’ve been used to farming the outer walls of the Pyramid Mob Arena, or teleported players there to take advantage of the PVP free zone to kill them, this has changed. That area is now protected and PVP is disabled in the entire Pyramid zone.

Several plugins have been optimized for speed, or otherwise modified to get them ready for the upcoming fireworks and enchanted books update. Soon(tm).

In addition to the previous protections, now is no longer possible to shear sheep or mooshrooms on islands you’re not a member of.

And… only white sheep can be dyed. If that sheep has another color, re-dyeing it is not possible for *anyone* including island members. This is primarily to protect those that buy lapis with real money and want to keep them blue from anyone else.

Enjoy a safer skyblock! 🙂

A few minutes after Mojang issued the 1.4.6 update we also updated the Minecraft skyblock server.

You can update your client to 1.4.6 and login to play. The fireworks will be enabled this weekend during a server wide event along with Nether portals opening.

Another round of fixes has been applied to the Skyblock Minecraft server. This time it’s related to the MobArena:

• It is no longer possible to join one arena while you’re in another arena. This will prevent a nasty bug where players lost their inventory items.
• Fixed an exploit that involved repeated spectating an arena while fighting in another, that eventually allowed players to keep their armor and weapons even after leaving the arenas.
• Exploding sheep in pyramid MA are back in business. Exploding business that is.

Enjoy 🙂

A lot of changes and bugfixes have been applied to the Minecraft skyblock server yesterday and today.

First the bug fixes and exploits that once were, but that are no longer possible:

• Using /back to return to MobArena and FFA PvP arena after you die in there is no longer possible. If you try to do so, it will teleport you to /spawn instead.
• Trading was possible in the MA lobby before a game started, so players working in a team could give each other a lot of diamond armor, weapons and potions, practically becoming invincible in the arena. This is no longer possible.

Changes and additions to the game:

• Snowballs now do 0 damage and do not push back players, animals or mobs. This behavior is server wide, so both at spawn and on player skyblock islands. They are purely for fun now, so fire away at will.
• Many performance improvements allow more players online at the same time and optimize the playing experience with 0 lag as usual.
• The Captcha plugin has been rewritten from scratch. It is now using a completely different technique to detect bots, and most players will never have to answer those pesky Captcha questions at login.
• The anti-spam and chat filter plugin has also been rewritten from scratch. It’s now much more powerful, and more intelligent. Prior to this, it was only kicking players. As a result of the successful tests in last days, banning has also been enabled. So my advice is this: if you see a message from the spam protection to stop spamming or you’ll get banned, follow what it says. It does ban if needed! Most players will never see a message from it though, so chat with no fear.
• Per players request coal has been added to the vote shop at spawn. This will be helpful especially to new players that lack the wood logs to make charcoal, so they can vote and immediately make a handful of torches.
• Gravel has been added both to the vote and the spacecoins shops at spawn. This has been requested many times, and I’ve rewritten the sand dupe protection to also include gravel dupe protection.

Last but not least, I’ve been working on the “Nether” in the past days and it’s about 50% complete.

It will bring an incredible, adrenaline pumping, high risk but also high reward experience. A piece of advice: start working out teams in advance, as what happens in there will be tuned for teams of 10 or more players and might require some degree of coordination between team members.

The goal is to have Nether Portals working in about a week or so, just in time for Christmas.

Enjoy, and safe skyblocking 🙂

Tomorrow night, Dec 9th at approximately 3 AM CST there is a scheduled hardware maintenance for both servers.

Both the website and the Skyblock server will be offline for up to 1 hour.

The start of maintenance will be announced in-game. I will update this post when the maintenance is over.

UPDATE1: 2:34 AM CST – The maintenance is nearly complete. The server will be back online in about 10 minutes.

The maintenance is now complete and the server is back online. Come and play! 🙂

Currently performing skyblock server maintenance. Server will be back online in 5 – 10 minutes.

UPDATE: The maintenance completed successfully. The server is back online.

Our server is up and running fine, however Mohjan’s authentication servers are down. This means you’re unable to connect and play on any Minecraft server. When they will solve their problem you will be able to connect and play on Skyblock.

From Tobias Mollstam Tweeter:

Working on system stability issues, trying to find the root of the problem.