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 🙂