We’re looking for your opinions about our network, if you have time we’d really appreciate if you fill out the survey below:

So just a quick update to inform everyone of some changes we’ll be making to the server chat. Just so you don’t panic when it all looks different 🙂

First of all, we’ll be shortening the rank prefixes, and removing the prefix for the default rank. The colours will remain largely the same.

We will also be replacing the red [x] with a small flag symbol, which will be moved to the start of the message.

And the final change in this is that we’ll switch to using the full server names, in place of S, C or PS in the chat. This should hopefully make things more accessible to new players.

Below are some example screenshots of how the chat will look:

General Chat Format

New rank prefixes

A bit of random chat (as an example)

These changes will be implemented on Saturday 16th September.

Here are the winners of ClownerCraft’s Temple Contest:

First Of all, other than the first second and third place winners, only one plot managed to score more than 40 points, Congrats to
LapisPebble in plot 6, with a score of 49

••• Third Place: UghBionic in Plot 1•••

••• Second Place: Deathwithagrin in Plot 11 •••

••• First Place: groudzero in Plot 16•••

Congratulations to those that won, your prizes have already been awarded.

You can download the world file for this contest here.

Well, here we go again; a brief overview of everything we’ve done in the past couple of weeks:

What we’ve done:

• Fixed /sort
  Supporter, VIP and VIP+ members can now use /sort to sort their inventories and chests once again. Unfortunately this doesn’t work on shulker boxes yet.
• Corrected some permissions issues affecting Modreq (/report) on Creative and PureSurvival
• Cleaned up our block logging database.
• Parkour!
  Yes, theres now a parkour course in the hub, which was built by our wonderful build team.
• And, of course, we’ve seen the return of regular build contests – starting with the scaled up contest. We’ve also started to offer world downloads for the build contests – these will be posted with the contest results. You can see the upcoming contests at any time by visiting the contests page on our website

What we’re still working on:

• The scavenger hunt, which opens in a few weeks time, is currently being setup. xLilly and Kori are leading on this, and are bringing some interesting new features to it.
  Many players enjoyed the scavenger hunts we originally ran, and this new one is both bigger and better. (and harder to cheat on). Keep an eye on the forums and in game announcements for more information.
• The website guides. We’ve now got a homepage for the guides section, which you can see here 
  This page is still work in progress, as are most of the individual guides. Please bare this in mind as some information may be incorrect.
• We’ve started planning for a new /warp examples, which will cover a range of building themes not just the modern style we currently have.
• Changes were made to how our JVMs handle garbage collection, the aim to be to keep the TPS more stable. For those who didn’t understand that first sentence, work is being done to reduce overall lag on the network, with the main focus being on the survival server.

As always, we welcome your suggestions, comments or any issues you wish to raise, on our forums.

It’s that time again, we have some winners from the Scaled Up Contest!
We had some amazing entries to the contest, although there were a couple that were real nice but didn’t meet the theme.

In Third Place:
•••• Ightrril: Plot 14 ••••

In Second Place:
•••• Katisal: Plot 22 ••••

In First Place:
•••• GrumpClump: Plot 13 ••••

Your prizes have already been given to you.

And, to be extra special – you can download all the builds from this contest! Click here to download the world file.

So, this is gonna be a new thing. We’re going to try and somewhat regularly post updates as to what things we’ve been working on or done behind the scenes.

Being this is the first one, I’m going to cover a lot of the more major things over the past few months, as well as mentioning some other projects we have lined up, and projects we’ve had to put on hold.

So, first off: What have we already done?

• Updated to 1.12
  • This doesn’t seem very major to most people, but unfortunately this takes an immense amount of work. Our network has 18 servers in it, as well as the proxy server. Each one has to be updated (or setup to allow the newer protocol) and this takes time. A huge part of the problem with updates is sadly that they break things.With the server having been around for over 4 years, we have a range of plugins we use, and some of them are no longer developed. In those cases we have to either find a replacement or if we can’t find one – we then have to fix it ourselves. When we have a dedicated developer this isn’t too bad – but either way it’s a lot of work.
• We overhauled our mod request system, kinda.
  • Having had 1.12 break the Modreq plugin we had used, we decided – after it was quickly patched so we could get by – to completely overhaul the whole thing and develop our own.I will say this was mostly Scarabcoder doing the work here – and actually making the plugin. But the process did involve the admins working out how we could improve upon the existing system, as well as testing it to find bugs and issues.And then, of course, we had to roll this new plugin out across the network. So that’s uploading it and setting it up on 18 servers.

    The change didn’t make a lot of difference to how you create and check tickets, but it did have a large impact on how we manage and deal with tickets.

• We rebranded.
  • This was a big deal. When I say we rebranded, we decided to change the network’s name – and remove “LogistiCraft.” A lot of people probably didn’t notice much of a change, but basically – we had to go round every server of the network, the website, teamspeak and forums and change anywhere that said LogistiCraft.This was done to try and remove some confusion. We never really needed to have a separate name for the minigames side of our network – and so we changed it.Changing the network to being entirely “ClownerCraft” also meant we changed the way the paid ranks work – and now Supporter, VIP, and VIP+ activate on every single server in the network.

    I mean, a lot of this should really have been this way in the first place, but sadly we do have to spend time fixing old mistakes.

• We fixed some exploits with WorldEdit on the creative server.
• We (well, I did…) wrote an announcer plugin to replace the individual ones on each server. So now announcements go out to all servers simultaneously.
• The server’s also recently seen a lot of tweaks and updated to the way it shows up in the multiplayer screen. You can now see some detailed information about the number of players on by hovering over the player count. (This was a custom written plugin).
• Theres also little things like Global Join/Leave messages, and the first join message. It’s just nicer for everyone to see.
• The website homepage has been changed, with a new description of the server. We also improved the accuracy and performance of the status widget.
  • A lot of the changes to the website recently are with the aim to help improve how we promote the server. Theres been a lot of optimisations made to try and boost our search rankings, and make the site load faster.
• And naturally, theres been plenty of little tweaks and fixes, or restarts because of crashes.

Things we’re currently working on:

• For a while now, we’ve been trying to create a guide to several things on our website. We started this a long time ago (with the rocket editor guide), but it’s not been a high priority.We now have a few completed pages, but we’re not ready to launch the whole thing
  Some of the completed guides:
  • Guide to Ranking Up
  • Rank Guidelines
  • Economy

  We eventually plan to add several pages to help improve buildings, as well as a library of interior object designs, and guides for most of the plugins we have on the server. We already have a guide to the Rocket Editor (VIP Perk). If theres something you think would be useful to have in this set of pages, please do post a suggestion on our forums

• Replacing the shop plugin.

  1.12.1 broke ChestShop, so we’ve been trying to get an alternative working. We’ve been testing a few different options and think we’ve settled on one now. Just checking that theres no unexpected problems with it before we put it live on the server.

• A new server. Yeah, we don’t want to announce this one officially yet. We’re really not far off from finishing it though.

Future Plans

We have a few other minigame ideas that we plan to eventually make a reality, along with some additional servers. We’ll announce these when we’re ready.

Projects on hold

Sadly, there are some things we’ve put a fair amount of time into that we’ve been unable to finish for various reasons. More recently the loss of our developer has meant we’ve had to shift our focus to working on projects which do not require custom plugins.

• Carnival. A lot of you may have seen that name before. We announced this server quite some time ago. It’s a very custom plugin heavy concept, and so it’s development has been slow.We had put more time into this recently, and with the help of the build team – most of what it needs now is plugins being written.

  If you don’t know – carnival is in essence a funfair, with working rides and attractions. So far we have a ferris wheel, and two rollercoasters that work, and a number of other rides built and waiting for plugins.

  You can have a look at some pictures of it as it stands now:
  

That about sums it up right now, theres probably the odd thing I missed.

~Clowner

Well, this is never fun.

We’ve been having some drama related to some of our staff members and a small group of players.
For a long time, the admins haven’t really connected well with the community, and this is partly down to the nature of our roles. As admins we are the ones fixing things in the background, updating the software – keeping the server running smoothly. And often, this takes up most of the time we can spend on the server.

However, recently, a small group of people seem to think that we do absolutely nothing on the network. And finding this out – is extremely hurtful to myself and my fellow admins. You may not see us very often, but we are there, we are working on things. And we are trying our best to make the server as good as it can be.

While we do have our shortfalls, we do actually get a lot done.

Now, most of this drama came out of a few miscommunications and some poor choices on our part. We’ve already recognised that we struggle with communication – and we are already looking into ways we can improve this. This starts with making sure theres a good way for mods to report problems that need fixing, as it’s very easy to miss things when they’re a message in a group chat. And this is one of the major reasons as to why things don’t always get fixed – no one tells us, or we just miss the message. If you’re a player and you notice something broken – you can easily /report it or post it on the forums – and this means that the problem will definitely be passed on and seen by our admin team.

While we do try to play on the network, we don’t often play the mini games extensively, and so often we rely on active players and our mods to highlight issues – like for example the problems with gladiator currently. (It’s already on our list, and we have started to fix some of the issues)

And please also be aware that one of our bigger projects at the moment is a whole new section of the website which will explain a lot of things about the server, and will also include some advice and guidance to help with ranking up. Because of this being on the website rather than the network (right now, we will be trying to transfer this information into something ingame too) we aren’t on the server while working on it. Theres already a decent amount that’s been done – some people have already seen the guides to ranking up on survival/creative. And our new homepage is already live.

I’ll admit this isn’t perfect, and we are looking at trying to be more active and get involved in the community.

Secondly, as a result of this we have lost a few of our team, and we are quite understaffed at the moment. If you want to apply for mod, now is probably the best time – and you can do that over on our forums.

For the time being, please be patient with our staff, they’re trying their best to keep on top of everything. By all means say hi, but try to remember they might have other things that need to be dealt with. You may have to wait a bit longer than usual for your tickets to be dealt with.

As always, we do really appreciate any feedback, and if you have any suggestions about how we could be more transparent, or ways we can make it easier to communicate with us, please feel free to message us if you see us online, or post on the forums. Just remember we can’t always respond immediately, as we have plenty of other things we’re already working on. And also some issues may require a lot of time to try and fix.

~The ClownerCraft Admin Team
~TheClowner, KoriCuore, Guinner, xLilly

The ClownerCraft network is currently looking to take on some more Moderators, as well as more builders and developers for our build team.

If you think you’d like to moderate the network, or just be involved with making new things happen, head on over to our forums and post an application in the Staff Applications sub forum.

Everything on our store is 70% off.

Ends 16th August, at 23:59. GMT

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Having had issues surrounding advertising on the server once again, I think it’s time I gave some clarity on the rules around advertising on ClownerCraft.

Firstly, I want to say that we are not in any way against our players playing on other servers, nor do we mind if you chose to start your own – what we’re not happy about is if you try to use our network (including TS and the forums) to try and get players for your server.

ClownerCraft got most of it’s player base from people finding the server through google or server lists. We don’t believe it’s fair for someone to make use of another server to try and gain players. Hence why we do not do this.* It follow then, that we don’t want people to be using the server, that we’ve put an incredible amount of work into keeping alive for 4 years, just to get players. It’s not only disrespectful to the people running the server – but often it will actually look bad on your server.

In regards to advertising – there are a list of things we do not allow:

Don’t give out your server’s IP, website, or anything else that could allow someone to join it on the network. This includes in chat, private messages, on signs, or in a book. This same rule applies to our Teamspeak server and the forums.

Don’t ask people to add you on out of game software (such as skype or discord) just to give them access to your server. Theres nothing wrong with keeping in contact outside of the game – but don’t do it solely to get players to your server.

Try to avoid discussing other servers on our network. I mention this, mainly, to avoid someone asking you for the details and then forcing you to advertise that server.

Hope that clears a few things up,

~Clowner

TL:DR If you’re trying to get a player, who’s playing on our network, to join your (or any other) server in any way – don’t.

*Just a quick footnote, it’s likely some players choose to go round other servers advertising ClownerCraft – this is not something we encourage, and if you are doing this – please stop. It can create a negative reputation, and that’s something we don’t want here.