Someone out there surely loves us.

According to your hosting datacenter, the attackers hit us with a 492Mbps attack. But this time we were prepared. The traffic got filtered in about 30 seconds thanks to the awesome data center techs, and the server is fine and dandy.

Apart from the occasional disconnect of random players, that is. But when Internet pipes get tangled, weird things happen.

Get a life people. Read a book. Go out and have a walk in the park. Get a girlfriend.

Wolves and Ocelots can now be bought from the vote shop villagers. Same seller that was selling the other eggs now has both.

Squid eggs were previously only available for spacecoins. After saving up and buying in large volume, the villagers decided to sell them too. So now you can get Squid eggs from both shops: the spacecoin or the vote shop.

Remember, all these 3 despawn if you go too far or leave your island. So be prepared with bones, meat or fish to tame the wolf or ocelot right after you summon them or you risk losing them.

Also, kill the squid for it’s ink sacs right after summoning as they despawn if you go too far or leave your island too.

Enjoy.

Remember seeing the “This is not your animal” from the Animal Protection plugin?

Well, you won’t be seeing it anymore. The message, that is. The animal protection remains, minus the annoying messages.

Seeing as some players rightfully had issues with the thunders coming from the arenas, decided to disable it for now. I agree, with all 3 arenas going on at once it was pretty scary. Or annoying. Or both. Thunders everywhere.

Enjoy the peace of your skyblock as thunders between wave spawns in arena are now a thing of the past.

The authentication servers at Mojang are down for the moment, so you can’t login and play on any Minecraft server. Hope they will solve their problems soon.

A quote from Daniel Frisk’s Twitter, chief arhitect at Mojang:

There seems to be some kind of attack on our servers. DDoS is for losers who can’t hack properly.

Source: https://twitter.com/danfrisk/status/269883097317769216

Oh the irony… Should I feel humbled that we seem high profile enough that DDOS kiddies attacked us mere minutes before Mojang, or sad that said kiddies have no life?

To prevent the type of attack from last night where someone used bots with hundreds of hacked Minecraft accounts to connect and spam the chat we’ve added a Captcha challenge at login.

When you log in, you will see a message like this:

Simply read the question in green and then type the answer in chat. Then press enter.

I’ve marked the areas with the question and the response with red rectangles in the image above.

Donators and known players will not see the captcha challenge at login.

Enjoy the added safety!

Our server is currently sustaining a DDOS attack. We’re working with our hosting provider to block the source of attack as soon as possible.

My apologies if the game might be a bit laggy.

I’ll update this notice when the attack has been completely isolated.

UPDATE: The attack has been completely isolated with the amazing help from our hosting provider. The server’s up and running, and we added some additional protection measures. I’ll post about it soon.

In the tutorials section for today I’d like to remind you of 2 lesser known skyblock commands.

The first one is mostly for bragging rights:

/played

It will return the time you’ve been online and playing on this Minecraft server.

Ever had this player that annoyed the crap out of you, and you simply wish they’d stop? It’s simple, and you have the power to do it yourself:

/ignore PlayerName

So say there’s a player named superannoyingdude, you do /ignore superannoyingdude and that player can no longer message you, nor you see his messages in global chat.

About a week ago due to the number of incidents with people killing animals on skyblock islands they don’t own and aren’t a member of, we’ve made a Minecraft plugin to prevent it.

And because you are so smart and creative, you’ve figured out you can still kill them with snowballs. Or with a bow and arrows.

Not anymore. We’ve just applied an update to the farm animal protection plugin. Now it is no longer possible to kill ’em on skyblock islands you don’t own by any means including: bare hands, melee weapons (sword, pickaxe, etc.), snowballs, bow and arrows or splash potions.

The plugin protects the following animal types: cow, sheep, chicken, pig and mooshroom. So keep them in a pen with a protected door and they should be safe from intruders.

Of course members of the same island can kill the animals on their own island. As with everything else, don’t invite strangers or people you don’t trust to your own skyblock.

Enjoy!