As some of you have noticed, a new and completely rewritten version of the Skyblock plugin has been installed on the server since a couple days now.

Because there are really a ton of improvements, I plan to make a video walkthrough soon. In the meantime, here are some of the biggest changes:

  • You can now set your own island biome. It has a cooldown, so you can change it once every 12 hours. And you have to be somewhere on your island when you run the command, else it will not work.
  • You can transfer island ownership. Here is how. First you have to add the player you’re transferring it to with /island add playerName. Then you do /island changeowner playerName and follow the prompts.
  • Clearing and deleting islands by accident? It’s no longer possible, since you have to type a confirmation code before it’s actually deleted or cleared.
  • Some of the moderators can now remove protection signs from all islands. So if you need some help with those, you can kindly see if one of them can help instead of having to wait for me to come online.

Because WorldGuard, the protection plugin we used to use, wasn’t really designed to work with that many protections, and because we have over 100,000 islands, it was really getting slow. Very slow. So I coded our own protection system that is now built in Skyblock 2.0 and replaced WorldGuard.

With this change not only there was a big speed improvement, but there is also overall better protection for your own island. Things that were not protected before are now protected. Important stuff:

  • Liquid like water and lava no longer flows in and out of islands. So your neighbor can’t pour lava on your island anymore.
  • Pistons and sticky pistons no longer push or pull blocks across island boundaries.
  • By default, visitors are no longer able to do a lot of things they could in the past and were mostly used to annoy. But you can give them access to most, if you want.

You can give them access to certain things on your island, using the brand new /island flag command. There are about 5 or 6 flags, that control various parts of your island access. Things like redstone buttons, levers or repeaters are by default protected. So are doors.

Another important flag is the rideable flag, which controls if visitors can ride anything on your island, from minecarts to pigs and horses. By default it’s off, so nobody except you and people you add to your island can ride them.

Check out all other flags, they’re explained pretty well in game.

Before closing up, there are a lot of exciting new features ready and planned to be added to the skyblock and to the survival games servers over the next days and weeks. Effects? Wut effects? Enjoy 🙂