501warhead

On the topic of "Fishing": So, in yesterday's Nexus 1.1.5 update I applied a limit to the "Grapple Rods" that fishers gained post legendary. This change, as fully expected, upset a majority of users who currently possess this level of fishing. Many were confused, as this breaks the mentality that I strive for "Don't remove something without giving an equivalent back." So, right off the bat I'll alleviate some fears - Grapple hooks are a (lot) worse than I had intended. I'll be changing the values around today, so it's at least halfway decent. (ideally four-five blocks leap, where as right now you'd be hard pressed to get one block, let alone two.) So the question on everyone's mind is; "Why?". Essentially, "Grapple hooks" were too much. They weren't abused extremely, it wasn't some knee-jerk reaction to someone hopping a wall - it was a calculated and thought out change. The reason is quite simple - when a small benefit added to the end game tiers of a skill becomes the only reason that the skill is used, to a point that people are dropping real world currently in order to switch their skill to it (granted, I know a lot of you abused the cooking oversight to gain the experience to transfer.) it became too much. I won't lie to you and tell you "fishing is a tier one skill", it's far from it - probably, even with the old grapple hook, still one of the least used professions (with stonemason being bottom-tier). However, fishing should not be about gaining this perk. There are uses to fishing, as I'm sure a handful of you who actually use the skill know, although it isn't the same as say, lumberjacking or mining. Obviously, if I left fishing as it is and never touched LotC again, this change would be terrible. But, that isn't my plan. As some of you may have noted, I pumped out a lot of changes yesterday - and I intend fully to continue with them (granted, probably after Christmas with the family). I have a todo list I'm working down, and near the top is a host of skill reworks and new mechanics. Fishing has gotten some of the least love, as it's always been in an odd spot - not terrible like stone masonry, and not too good like blacksmithing. The luke-warm spot, where it doesn't get a lot of attention even though it needs it. Later in the post I'll get to what I'm planning skill-wise. Alright, now as the title suggests I've devised a new racial buff for High Elves - tiered at PvP, as they were the ones mainly lacking it. It is, as follows; Arcane Affinity It is the mali’aheral who have long viewed acts of violence to be cursed. However, being so closely attuned with the arts of the arcane, the usage of magic, the race of the Mali'aheral have gained some small mastery of it in even their combat. Blows from weapon or fist aren't as strong as their counterparts, but are made up for with a small additional burst of energy that most armor won't guard from. Due to the cursed nature of violence, this burst is stronger when using golden weaponry. High Elves now have a portion of their melee damage converted to magic damage. Normal: 20% of damage is converted to Magic. (If you were to hit for 4 hearts, you would do 3 and a half hearts of normal damage and a half a heart of magic damage) Golden Weapons: 50% of damage is converted to magic. (If you were to hit for 4 hearts, you would do 2 hearts of normal damage and 2 hearts of magic damage) To be noted; This damage is applied before resistances. Gold & Thanhic leather will protect from it, and some races have additional magic resistance (Constructs have 80% magic resist, and other high elves have 30% magic resistance still) And now, onto skill changes! At the time of writing, this is what is currently planned. I'll be reviewing (and likely implementing) Jistuma's Herb-gathering plugin for all of you alchemy users. For tinkering, I'm working hard on getting a functional "Ice-box" which will allow the storing and preserving of cooking ingredients (raw meats, vegetables, etc.) ((Hopefully this will assist with breeders)) For fishing I'll look into getting fish to stack, to alleviate the annoyances. Additional, fishing-only treasure system (some of the rarest casket drops will be easier to gain from fishing, as well as some unique items.) Perhaps I'll revisit my custom enchantment idea for enchantment (and fishing, maybe? :) ) Additional mining benefits both from stonemasons and being a stone mason Perhaps some blacksmith-stonemason interaction. I have an idea or two. Additionally; Working (right now) on getting NPCs into a not... atrocious state Some exciting changes to auction houses! Anyway, that's all for now. I'll leave you all with this and get back to the grind. Hope you enjoyed, and enjoy the changes! EDIT: To be noted all changes listed here are WIP and will be seen later in the week, likely (including the racial buff) -- 501warhead, Lead Developer

Hey now, no spoilers or shaking the box. You've got to wait until Christmas!

...for bugs, it seems. but first and foremost! Adding a little bit of holiday cheer - /bread has been updated to represent the current season. Spooky pies? In December? So seven days ago. For a bit of enjoyment, when running this command have your sound on :). That is, of course, if you enjoy Christmas. If not, Bah Humbug. Alright, on to the topic at hand - if you or a loved one has recently had issues with this, then please contact 8 type two commands and screenshot the results. The first is for documentation and debugging purposes - /menudebug. This will spit a lot of stuff out into your chat log if you're having an issue, although there is the possibility that nothing happens and you're told you don't have a menu. Don't panic, if this occurs or does not occur is irrelevant, just screenshot the result (all of it, if you can) and send it to myself or Telanir in PMs or make a bug report post. Secondly, and do take this next one seriously because I do not garentee you will be fine if you run this command this one is aimed to "fix" your issue. It could, for example, fix you but wipe your inventory or worse. Also, it could not work - all part of the debugging process where we isolate issues. If you aren't certain you want to take the risk then don't, wait until a restart. If you can run this command, it would be of assistance. The command that is intended to fix the menu issue is "/menufixme". As with before, if you run this command please document VIA screenshot or any other method the results. Replicating this issue is difficult, so we need YOUR help. Again, this has a possibility of not working - if it does not work then that is good for us as developers. If the command fails to work, please document that in your PM or post. It's actually probably the most important thing you could do. Thanks for reading and have a wonderful weekend. -- 501warhead, Lead Developer

It'll integrate with existing mechanisms, but it'll make it easier to submit a claim. We created the system you mentioned in our previous map and it caused a lot of problems, likely the amount of nation-independent plots will be few and far between. Up to the moderation team how they want to handle it, it'll be mainly Moderator controlled.

Please read the above post! If you don't have any feedback then don't worry about it. This isn't a debate between WG/Territories

I should clarify! This is not set in stone. This isn't a debate between WorldGuard and Territories, this is "I'm designing a plugin! I need feedback :)". A vote between Territories and remaining flat World Guard will probably come later, showcasing the benefits of Territories. I think you'll like it, personally. Thanks for the feedback for everyone voting and posting! Particularly @DrakeHaze/Omnyaxle, excellent ideas.

Greetings on this fabulous first of November. So! This is a Your View on the upcoming Plugin; Territories. (This will be up in N & A for a bit for attention before being shifted to Your View) To give a brief understanding of What is Territories?; Territories will be the "Region Manager" system for LotC, similar (but with Key differences from) to Nexus-Regions. This will (and has been) coded from scratch with some things to be kept in mind and right now is about half-way complete. I, unfortunately, have nothing to show off here as the coding has been a vast majority of under-the-hood mechanisms (to a point that I haven't even put it on a MC server for debugging yet, just fleshing out the code base). Territories takes the concept of Nexus-Region's ability to give region owners fine-tuned control over their region but shifts the focus away from Claimable plots. While there will be claimable plots the mechanism and focus will be taken off of a multitude of individual plots and adding more mechanics and control to existing claimed plots. Note; Nations with expansive plot networks are already supported in Territories and will be able to be controlled from a central location (likely a rebelling mechanic will be added behind the scenes for moderators to be able to use to assist factions which want to go this route of RP in a valid manner) So, basically I need feedback. While the Code is very much coming along well there are some key things that are still subject to change and need to be fleshed out, and they should be in the poll above. Below I explain each question and why I have asked it. Should Territories have a passport system like Nexus-Regions (User has build perms but doesn't count to plot size)? Previously in Nexus-Regions a user could align on their persona to a main plot but could go and request passports to other plots so they could actually build on other plots but they didn't add to the population total for said plot (which gave benefits to the plot for the higher population they had) Should plot membership be based off of Personas or Players? This question basically states; Should a player be able to join only one plot (to add to it's count) or should they be able to join one plot on each of their personas? Should Region Owners have the ability to turn off PvP (With a ~48 hour cooldown)? In Territories region owners will have a lot of customization when it comes to flags such as leaf-decay, region greetings, mob spawns, etc. but the biggest one that is on the table is if a region can toggle PvP on/off within their region. Obviously this could be abused so it would be on a cooldown for turning on/off and monitored (likely against the rules to run into a PvP deny region during PvP and against the rules to turn off PvP in the middle of a raid/other PvP engagement). Should Regions Decay (if a region doesn't have x population over x time it unclaims)? Basically, in Nexus-Regions one of the very large issues was something dubbed "Plot Sniping" - where a region would become unclaimed either randomly or by someone leaving it or by it naturally decaying and someone would grab it instantly. This frustrated a lot of players, so I put the mechanic on the chopping board for you to decide. Now; some writing questions for those of you who want to write. Do you have any feature requests? There's already a lot of cool small things I've taken the time to code that I'm excited for you to get your hands on, but I am one man! What do you want? What were some of the things you liked from Nexus-Regions? What were some of the things you disliked from Nexus-Regions? Basically, as this is a successor to Nexus-Regions it still takes some points from it. What did you like about the previous iteration? What did you hate? Important Notice: This isn't a debate between using the plugin I'm designing and World Guard. This is me asking the community for feedback to making a system you might want to see, closer to completion I'll showcase the plugin and ask which do you prefer. For now, if you just want WG then don't worry about voting/posting.

It is true that this would complicate things. . . a whole lump some of reforms in magic lore and the integration/coordination of this new system efficiently seems like a lot. The real issues behind this is the mechanics involved with magics in the face of PvP. Everyone seems like the issue is that "Hey, why can't we mages actually have the upper hand in these situations when it would be in our advantage?" when in reality the real issue is "Why aren't the PvP rules of a roleplay server guarding roleplay?" What I am suggesting is reforming the rules concerning PvP. I am sorry to any passionate, mouse slamming people who absolutely love PvP but this is a roleplay server. This isn't made for running up to people, emoting two times, and then suggesting PvP when it's not in your favor which seems to be the case quite often. PvP is ultimately proper in war claims and skirmishes but outside of that, it isn't. Focusing on that issue would resolve this one as well. Magic would be more prominently RP'd with if the lore wasnt considered an over complicated mess where someone is given the legal rights to what many consider power gaming with no actual way of telling if they're not because the post doesn't actually describe them well enough for an average player to understand their limits. The audacity to blame it on the lore? Is that really what you said? Alright, it's not like I've coded two whole versions of the magic plugin by now and scrapped both not because I got bored of it or I didn't want players to have it (xd). I scrapped the plugins because there is no way the playerbase will ever enjoy it, and there is no way I could feel even decent about putting a, in the grand scheme, a terrible piece of work on the server. It's not like I've gone through and written several pieces of magic lore myself which I consider decent. You seem to have this idea that I've never actually interacted with lore on my own and have no room to blame the lore. I have every room to blame the lore. I've been in chats with people who have given full detailed theories about why our lore is bad. We've had public votes in the past about removing magic lore and starting from scratch from the likes of PtahWithin and Lagomorphia - and that poll, to my recollection, showed most players favored a magic wipe. If you guys take anything from this post at all go read this guys post in full. I'm actually not trying to set a fire, but it's burning anyway. I merely wished to point out the issue and see what players thought - most seem to agree having it dead is good. Funny enough the plugin I just scrapped was the second iteration of a plugin. You may recall my conversations in GM chat(s) about it but I was coding a plugin that went along that very same lines. About two months ago I scrapped it as well because it wasn't very fun to use, craft, or interact with. None of the things I could think of could solve that fact and so in the end the system just wasn't compatible with LotC and was shut down. Lag Please see the previous post where the last person who mentioned Lag got addressed. It'll be the same here, you have absolutely no idea what processes take up the portion of the server's CPU. Please don't make points you can't back up in any way shape or form.So half of our server's combat is just for some singular character's progression?And magic is already considered irrelevant in many places. Basically, what I read here is "my character is getting pvp defaulted give me a plugin please". This post isn't about your specific character. This post will never be about a single player's character. The magic plugin isn't about a single player's character. It's about adding something to the server to promote a mechanical representation of Magic. That's the goal, to give magic a tangible feel on the server. Yet there's an issue with that - what I just said. It gives magic a tangible feel on the server. That in itself is the problem - allowing such a monstrous mass of a mess a physical, tangible way to influence the server mechanically is the problem. So, naturally that's half of the reason it was scrapped.

I guess I did give that feeling of "do or die". If I don't feel something is worth putting on LotC I don't continue development on it, so the plugin isn't functional to let players test. And coding a new one from scratch without any promise of it ever going on LotC...? Probably not the greatest idea ever. Yes, it was common knowledge. It's just never been verbally spoken.

Programmers and Developers work in the realm of impossibilities and improbabilities. LotC is already not vanilla MC. We don't work in Vanilla, we take MC mechanics and adapt them to fit the setting while still maintaining the integrity of MC (Or trying to). I firmly believe that if it was coded from scratch without any acknowledgement of existing lore it would be fully possible to code a reasonable plugin that was both elegant, fun to use, and likely just as "balanced" as MC PvP is on it's own. (which is not really balanced to begin with, to be fair) But the "strictly mechanic" part you mention is the issue - How is it even possible for me to code such a thing for the current set up? It's... really not. you hate plugins in general xd

No idea what happened to it's source.

That's the easy excuse to fall back on but it's clear there is an issue present. We consider Combat to be a core part of LotC both in Roleplay and Mechanically - however only about half of our combat is represented in a way that half the playerbase cares about. The other half of our combat system is entirely text and can easily be ignored which, in the current state of things, is fine in the end. As mentioned above - it's honestly just a big mess. I don't think it's healthy, while the existing playerbase wants to cling to it's magic systems because of how much has been put into it I don't think it's healthy or beneficial to the server's life as a whole. Having no idea what goes into the server's CPU consumption I thank you for taking the time to give me your insight on how much a plugin would contribute to it. Basically, don't try to bring up points that you can't back up.

The issue is it is actually such a mess right now - When you have moments in time that you have the stereotypical necromancer arguing on a point of lore that he shouldn't be harmed by holy magic you've got a lot of fantasy setting issues where things really conflict. It's a jumbled mess that has kind of just spiraled out of control and while certain players "understand" it enough (I hold myself at this threshold being a magic user for just over 3 years) I fear that the current system is way, way, way too extreme.

Alright folks! Here we go. So earlier in the month I released an update wherein I made a bold promise. Now, those of you who have been present for a while will know that the magic plugin is one of those long standing things that has been promised many times but never actually fulfilled. Now, that's not for a lack of effort! On the contrary, I could probably release the magic plugin at the time of this post with a simple command and the MAT would be able to distribute sub-types to everyone who needed them and we would have a functional magic plugin. With this in mind you may be asking yourself what is this about, then? Well, to put it simply as of about a week ago the project has been scrapped. Some of you I know will jump for joy, while others will simply go "?". I shall explain why here, and I want to know your opinion on this matter as it's something that I (considering this is actually the second nearly finished magic plugin I've made) hold important as it's something I feel the server should have. First; the simple statement that explains it. Our magic lore currently does not and will not ever be capable of supporting a plugin that meshes with lore and is friendly, easy to use, and enjoyable to use. As a Developer the latter half is very important. It's part of a set of standards that have been in play since we began development of LotC with projects such as Personas, Banks, Shops, etc. Accessibility and Simplicity is one of those core principles we wish to encourage over most else, so that a player who has never been on LotC before can use the plugin without any prior knowledge of anything other than Vanilla Single Player. Developing with this mindset means there is little excess to deal with, players don't have to memorize a ton of commands, we develop with a straightforward goal and we achieve said straightforward goal. For all intentions this development mindset I (personally) feel is the best. This mindset is currently at complete odds against any form of "magic plugin" that we can produce. Our Magic Lore at the time of writing I would consider to be one of the worst things I've ever encountered and it took me in the realm of five years to realize it. I've always known it, to be fair - it just took this long and for me to see it for what it was to actually realize what the issue is. There is no particular person, group, or piece of writing to blame - it's just what is considered the "standard" when it comes to magic lore. We don't see a system as broken and needing a change - we're so deeply rooted when it comes to Magic that no one wants to admit that it currently is a massively malfunctioning system that cant sustain itself. The Norm is to, when we're bored of old magics or dissatisfied with them, make new ones and continue to add on to the great list of magic lore where old magics go inactive and die and the new ones live a short lifespan before dying again or the current generation dislikes it. At this stage it has become, to my perspective, a cancerous mass that has continued to grow and grow and now has rooted itself too deeply for anyone to see anything wrong with it. Magic suffers from over complication, excessive quantities of lore, and a lack of continuity (meaning a lot of lore in some ways conflicts with each other, breaks each other's lore, or completely ignores other lore). Now the question of the day; Why does this not work with a magic plugin? Here's the general gist; Guild Locked magics are the bane of the Magic Plugin. Guild locked magics add such a level of complication to writing a magic plugin that it blows my mind. It takes what might be an elegant system and completely busts it down into the dirt and throws away all the hard work. Catering to guild locked magics is on the near end of impossible because suddenly you have these questions; How do I make it so only x group gets x magic? what if x group dies off, all my work is in the gutter. How do I integrate MAT? All of these questions run through my mind as soon as guild locked is on the table or a group wants part of the plugin to themselves specifically. I could perhaps have an elegant learning system which allows for any player to be able to learn spells and then suddenly half of the spells I've written (which take a lot to write per spell) don't get learned by this system. Not only this but with a constantly changing topology of magic it becomes impossible to keep up with new magics and continues to go down the route of something we're trying to avoid as much as possible but sometimes have to do; mechanics disconnecting from lore. I'll talk about that in a second. So the question comes; "Well, screw the magic plugin then right? Why do we need it? Our system is fine as it is." That's just the thing; The system has proven that it actually doesn't work. Look in the recent past; just how many changes have we done to magic to "fix" it recently? We've gone from having a MAT to having no MAT to having a semi-MAT to having a full on MAT but it still hasn't fixed the issue - Magic is not relevant. Magic is only relevant within certain groups and outside of it the influence is non-existent on the world. This is what these systems aimed to fix. Hell, I was part of designing at least half of them - I remember clearly why we were trying them. They don't work. We theorized so much about "well if it was locked then people would treat mages better!" And while yes, this has occurred it isn't nearly enough. Instead of becoming more relevant magic has faded back into the halls of the secluded and while some might be open to newer players a vast majority of these magics are locked for the single reason that they are too complicated for a new player to roleplay correctly. That in itself is on the end of ridiculous. Furthermore, another point to be made is that currently a player who logs onto the server and doesn't want to care about the complicated mess of our lore doesn't have to. Due to PvP default, at the end of the day players who don't understand the lore don't have to understand it. However, let's say we do implement a plugin that uses current server lore. This player gets obliterated by for example a shade and has no clue what a shade is or does. They decide they want to be a shade or they perhaps just want to check out the lore to see if they have any weaknesses and halfway through the mess that exists they can't even understand it. Player that wishes to understand them fails and then just tries to probably unsuccessfully avoid x shade and then decides "this is bullshit" and bails, and the other player that wishes to be a shade doesn't get the lore and the current shade base rips him apart and he says "screw this". So, next solution. "Man, screw that lore! Just make something that doesn't care about the lore." Now we've circled back to the big issue; the disconnect mechanics have with lore. So, skills already do this as some might have noted just because supporting each character's RP with mechanics is on the end of insane if not impossible to reasonably do. However! This is not something we wish to encourage as it begins to break down after a stage where mechanics and lore might war over something and there is no clear winner. We don't wish to break down the servers theme even further with plugins that disconnect from lore, but in situations like this it's actually so difficult to work with existing lore in some cases. So, why make this? This is more to draw attention to the problem at hand and announce that the Magic Plugin is scrapped and will remain such for now at least. In the future we might try again with a different perspective, but for now it won't continue. I also want to hear your opinions - What do you think about this all? I'm not proposing any changes so don't pitchfork me about "wanting to remove mat or wanting to unlock magic" or something, I merely put this out as food for thought. tl;dr - Magic plugin is scrapped because LotC's magic lore is terrible and impossible to work with, I would like opinions on what you think. -- 501warhead, Lead Developer

old recipes will never work im afraid, must be bug reported/pmed to me. handled and closed

Also, would it be possible to just download one of those bukkit plugins that store a horse in a vault, basically just saving the stats, instead of redesigning the pet system? ? ? ? ? ? Did you not read my post? First, That is our breeding skill. I'm not going and getting a plugin to replace weeks or even months of hard work.Working with an off-the-shelf plugin is something we never wish to do unless we have to. Why? If it breaks, we have to fix it ourselves. Customization and unique features don't exist in this situation, if breeders "want something new" I tell them "too bad xdddddddd".We use an entirely custom nbt/attribute data system. This is basically one of the shining achievements of Arche/Sporadic and has been a wonderful boon to the Dev team in general to be able to use and while theoretically Attributes and NBT are all natural minecraft stuff we've had some issues with them persisting, if an error occurred where horses, say, re-spawned without stats and were slower than a tortoise whoever did it would be SOL.Most of these plugins will end up doing it in a simple, conventional way where the authors have to do the least amount of work for the most amount of publicity. This means that at the end of the day most of these will be sub-par, at best and not actually provide what we're looking for.Everything is persona based. This is good and promotes the gameplay style of LotC - introducing an arbitrary plugin that is player based is not good and getting it to work with personas instead of players would actually be nightmareish. These are a few, I think I could manage to list 10 or even maybe 15 points if I wanted to write a paper for English class, but i'll let you fill in the blanks.

Alright I cant edit my recent post so whatever just gonna double post (Sue me FMs) I specifically did not tl;dr because the detailed nitty-gritty was needed for people to understand, any other form of shortened, quick way of explaining it simply wouldn't do. About the extra stuff, there's actually additional things in breeding that I don't believe a single player has ever found. Mind boggling isn't it? These are actually some amazing mechanics and amazing rewards for those who wish to be experimental with their pets. Likely I'll be going down this route more or less to make the animals breeder possesses give more bang for their buck, so to speak and likely not in a linear way like increased stats/better drops or something. I'll probably pursue several new mechanics that will be enjoyable to find and enjoyable to use.

Alright, let me preface this with "it may be possible" - a lot of things via code are possible. It's whats feasible that I'm concerned with. I tried this actually in several different methods - I thought the same as you, it seemed simplistic. How hard could it be? As it turns out much harder than I anticipated. First, it requires a redesign of the Pets system entirely. Let me explain why - Entities, just like players, have UUIDs. These are the "safe" way to find and ID entities as their name can be changed with as simple of an item as a NameTag. Now here's why this is important - They are unique for a reason. These are generated to be one in 368 (that's 2,821,109,907,456 possible numbers). This data is stored in Minecraft itself and interfacing with what we call NMS (net.minecraft.server, the Server portion of MC) is rather limited and difficult at times. Basically, there is no standard way to grab and save Mob data in such a way that you can recreate an entity from nothing. All entities that are generated, from what I have seen (and have been testing with a lot) are autogenerated with specific data that we cannot change without basically going in and changing some stuff when it comes to NMS. Theoretically if I wanted to code a patch for Spigot that created such (which is beyond my level, it's just theoretical) then it might be possible but Spigot updates so many times and i'd have to patch Spigot with my custom code every time we updated the server. tl;dr It doesnt quite work that way.

Hello! So, basically the day has rolled around where we will begin to reduce the global population of Horses as stated in this post here. Obviously as some of you have noted you might consider this a non-permanent solution considering "Wont it just go back up once you're done?" and yes, this was true. Obviously when it comes to development implementing more permanent solutions is likely the right route over just attempting to implement temporary, easy solutions. So in that mind several things have changed when it comes to breeding that breeders might have already noticed (very likely) but don't quite know how it functions just yet - Don't worry! We'll get to that. First, a further explanation is needed. So as showcased in the previous post I presented an image I had hoped most would read and understand why this decision was made. I'll relink it here for those who havent seen. But this time, I'll explain exactly what you are seeing and why it's significant. So, this is basically a detailed breakdown of server load. What this program, VisualVM, allows us as those who maintain servers is to tell which processes use the most CPU power. If either the RAM or the CPU cap out we will begin losing Ticks Per Second at a steadily declining rate and this is when most players experience "Lag". Multiple things can cause our (or any server's for that matter) CPU or RAM to cap out due to how Minecraft is coded, some examples of things that we can't really fix that do this are about over 100 players in the same loaded chunks. A few days ago we had been at the end of a long streak of crashes, one after another for a whole multitude of reasons. Isolating the issue(s) were getting harder and harder and it frustrated both myself and the staff team to try and narrow down exactly what was causing our issues. The server, on this particular day, got up to ~180 players which was nothing unusual but something unusual did happen. Suddenly, our TPS Dropped down to 15-16 and the entire server began to stutter in it's entirety. For a Vanilla MC server not running something absurd (which, for those who wish to cry out Nexus is laggy! I am here to tell you that none of our custom plugins use more processing power than either horses or even passive animals. The highest process from a plugin that takes the most process power is WorldGuard, and the custom plugin that takes the record is actually ArcheCore ('s SQL(ite)Handler for those who know/familiar with code) which handles Personas, Skills, and I would boast being one of our best plugins) the average TPS is about 18-20 as long as nothing crazy was happening. However! There was something crazy happening. Our CPU, as I checked it, was fluctuating between 200 and 250% usage. For a professional grade server (which we possess) this is on the end of insane. So, I sent Tythus a message and he looked into it. He sent me the said snapshot of the server at that time and breaking it down I noted horses were using an absurd amount of processing power. More than any one plugin on the server at the time and it boggled my mind - how does this even happen? The main sources, to break it down further, seemed to be horse collision detection and movement - which would mean it would be very much directly related to the number of horses on the server. Now, I'm (probably) not blind. I've seen several large farms myself and I knew they were a little on the size of large but as I began investigating on this day I realized several things. First, the normal horse farm was way, way too large. This was probably the most pressing issue. Secondly, horses didn't die. Now, I assume most people know by now that horses bred by high enough breeders can be labeled with the tag "immortal" because they actually were. I tested a sharpness 10000 (that's 200,000 attack damage roughly) diamond sword on one of Travista's horses (that were burning in lava, no need to pitch fork me Shrek, at least not for this) and it took 50 hits and kept on trucking. So, this issue was probably caused in part by the fact breeders actually cant kill horses. So now onto the fixes! What you came here for, likely. Simple notes; Horse breeding now scales negatively with the amount of Horses nearby. What this means is that for each horse you have in a farm past a certain point the stats will degrade in a multiplicative manner for each new horse bred. Stats will be normal for smaller farms.Resistance has been nerfed to reasonable levels across the board. Horses are no longer immune to death. Other stats remain untouched. (The resistance never was meant to go this high, Kowaman didn't anticipate when he added skills higher than Aengulic that some skills might scale too well without him knowing. Breeding is one of these skills)Resistance on all existing horses (should) have been retroactively reduced to reasonable levels. This is because death-immune horses are bad, mmk? Now! Most of the breeders might feel like they're getting screwed over by this change - removing content without giving any in return? That's a terrible design choice! Yes, it is. That is why we won't be doing it in this manner! There will be changes to breeding soon that will add the amount of content breeders have available to explore to compensate for this. I implemented the "fix" before the "addition" due to the necessity of it in the moment but fret not, there will be more to come in the future (for your benefit!)

It's not that the server hardware is bad, it's that the horses are taking up a massively disproportionate amount of resources. The server hardware may be bad as well, I have no idea. The server hardware has been kept as up to date as possible. MC is not a very efficiently coded platform. It's a great game, but as with any procedural generated, constantly changing game it tends to run slower than most are use to (Java doesn't help either in this end). Other servers combat this by having many different worlds and several servers hosting these many different worlds, as LotC is a single-world setup and can't be subdivided, we're at an impasse where better hardware =/= greater performance (Which, to be fair, we actually did a very large upgrade just before we switched the forums.). The solution at this stage is to, instead of trying to tac a bandaid onto the situation is to instead address the issue and not just try to skirt around it. Horses are currently one of the largest issues.

The issue isn't personal horses. We won't be killing someone's pet (unless the entire farm is tamed horses), we're cracking down on the excessive sized horse farms. I've seen in just 30 minutes of looking around several farms with over 30 horses in each. This is excessive, to say the least, and sad that it's considered the norm. Choose which ones you want to keep and get rid of the rest. We can consider a form of reimbursement, yes. At the moment the goal however is to reduce horse population count, not to increase it. We can't sustain current amounts and the route we're going right now will end up causing significant issues if not addressed.

Yes. It's a snapshot from https://visualvm.java.net/ which breaks down server loads into a readable format. The breakdown I am displaying here is the load having a significant amount of horses loaded on the server at once, showing how much of the main server thread it's taking up. In the end, it's not crashing the server but it is causing significant issues at peak times to have so many horses alive.

Hello friends and non-friends! Today we ended up having a bit of an issue as some might have noticed with a sudden influx of lag! As we aim to reduce it if at all possible we began investigating the source of said lag, to see if it was possible to do something about. So, today the APB goes out for horse farms. We will be purging horse farms significantly within the coming week. Any farm with over 6-8 horses will be gutted down to 4-6 horses if you do not handle this yourself. The deadline before we will begin in full will be four days, starting the 28th of October. For those of you who might not quite either believe this is an issue or are curious as to why this decision is being made, here's a readout of a snapshot of LotC during the heavy traffic. Thank you for reading, - 501warhead, Lead Developer EDIT: Updated with a little better explained image.