1.13 Update (Survival World Reset) – Progress Update

Posted on June 27, 2018 by TheClowner

Just thought it worth updating everyone with where we’re at with the update. Including some answers to questions we keep getting asked.

If you haven’t read our previous announcement about the update & Survival’s world and economy reset – please click here and read it now…

First of all, it will still be a while before we update, even if Mojang release 1.13 tomorrow – we’d need at least another couple of weeks to finish things off and get things working. We’re trying to do as much as we can before the release so that we can update as soon as possible – but things take time, and unfortunately so does real life.

There are of course some bits we need to do once we have the release update (ideally spigot will release a pre-release version for 1.13 too – but that depends on time). It’s very difficult to give an estimate on how much time we’ll need, especially as we still don’t have an official release date for 1.13.

The Progress

Most of our work has been focused on finishing off the new survival spawn, and warps – and we’re now at a point where (apart from the server shop and example rank builds) everything ‘important’ to the server has been built.

Theres also been more work on setting up the new custom terrain, but this is still not entirely finished (and wont be until we can add the new 1.13 ocean biomes etc). If anyone has any suggestions for new biomes to add, or anything else – please do share this on the update discussion forum thread or discord channel!

I’ll put in some extra screenshots (already shared on discord) for those interested:

As you will have noticed, on top of this we also updated the server’s icon and MOTD to match our new updated branding. Other branding will slowly be updated as we work through it, including the server website – although this is not a priority for us right now.

Common questions

These are some of the things we’ve been asked often – most of which have been answered in discord or on the forums/in game, but this gives everyone the chance to see our response:

Will explore have custom terrain?
We hope so, it depends if we have time to prepare all of that as well as the main world. If not for this update, we will get custom terrain for explore for it’s next reset afterwards – and this will hopefully include plenty of structures & biomes to ‘explore’

Will the nether/end have custom terrain?
No, the nether and end will stay vanilla, for now.

When will this happen?
We can’t give a specific date, we expect the official update will probably release around the middle of July. We aim to have the new world available about a week after the update’s release (if not earlier) – but we will post a more definite time once we are able to.

Will tokens reset too?
Nope, tokens are staying as they are, the economy (/bal) on survival is resetting – not tokens.

Can we get mob spawners we’ve bought back?
Yes, just ask a mod and any mob spawner bought from token shop can be removed and returned as an item. Create a ticket (/report [message]) and someone will sort that for you.

How do we transfer our stuff to the new world?
There will be at least a 2-week crossover with both the current and new world accessible, during that time your inventory will be shared between them so you can just ferry items back and forth using your inventory and ender chest.

Will player shops like duck be allowed?
Initially no. After the reset and update we want to ensure the new shop and rentable shops in the new spawn are more actively used. We may allow players to create their own shopping malls and alike in the future – but for now we’d like to make use of the rented shops around the new spawn.

Will I keep my rank?
Yes, none of the server/network ranks will be reset. You will keep your build based ranks as well as Sup/VIP/VIP+ memberships.

As before, if you have any questions, suggestions, or feedback about the update, please post it in this forum thread, or in the #update-discussion channel on discord.

 


Minecraft 1.13 Update is nearly here! D: (World Reset)

Posted on June 4, 2018 by TheClowner

The ClownerCraft network is planning some significant changes to go along with the 1.13 update, many of which are things we’ve been working on for a while – and this was a convenient time to release them.

Please be prepared for the network to have some downtime around this update so that we can implement these changes.

Please be aware we currently can’t give an accurate time/date for any changes, as we have to wait for both the official update’s release, but also for some of the third party mods/plugins we use to update. Generally, we can update the network about a week after the official update. 

The big news is that, unfortunately, our main Survival server is going to have a world reset.

We never really want to reset the world, but sadly there are times where this becomes necessary – and since the current world is starting to fill up and encounter lag issues, we’ve decided now is the best time to do this reset.

Second to that, we’re going to be resetting survival’s economy as well. This is to help ‘fix’ it, and we will also have a new server shop.

We are more than aware that a lot of you will be unhappy about these resets, and you’re not alone – but sadly we’ve run this world since the 1.7 update, and it’s starting to cause a fair few issues for the staff, as well as impacting on the server’s performance.

We will be providing a world download so that players can keep a copy of their builds. Please see more information below about how the reset will actually work.

 

Now, those are the only horrible, but important, bits of news – we’ll move on to the exciting new things we’re adding!

  • We’ve been working on a new spawn for the survival server, and along side this is a load of other fancy things – including the new shop, more affordable player shops, an underground train line, swimming pool, gardens and many other cool things. Pretty much every server warp is being replaced with a new build, although some may not quite be finished by the time update goes live.
  • We’ve reworked all the information signs for spawn, and made a new fancy style – and we’ll slowly be updating other things to match this style – you might even get to see some of it before the update. It’ll be something like the banner below

  • Our new survival world will feature both vanilla and custom biomes, with a variety of landscapes to build with. Some of the custom ones are pretty cool – and of course we’ll make sure all the new ocean bits from 1.13 are in there. 😀  There will also be some custom structures in the new world.
  • After this update we will also start running our regular build contests and events again, which got pushed to one side to allow us to work on various things for the update.
  • We are also still working on our new hub, it’s just taking a while…

Also, for those who play pure survival – we will not be resetting the PS world, but the border will be expanded to include new terrain so you can access the new oceans. Creative will also not have a reset.

How the Survival reset is going to work:

  • Once 1.13 is released, and we have everything working on the new version – the new world will be run alongside the old. This will give everyone a chance to transfer their items – if you wish to.
    • During this time, the Explore, Nether and End worlds may be disabled to prevent overloading the server.
    • At this time the new server spawn will also open. However, the new shop will remain closed until the economy is reset.
  • The old world will then be removed around 2 weeks later, at this time the new shop will open and the economy will be reset.
  • A world download will be prepared (of the world just before the new one is added) This world download will be made available on our website after the old world is removed.
    • However, I would really recommend trying to get a world downloader mod to download your builds – as the server’s world is big, and your game may struggle to load it in single player.
  • Our new world will start off with a smaller world border (starting at 10k x 10k blocks) allowing us to expand the world in future.
  • Ranks will not be reset.

Again, we apologise that we’re having to reset the world – and do hope most people will continue to play and support our network.

If you have any questions about these updates, please post them on our forums on this thread, or talk in the #update-discussion channel on our discord.

~Clowner and the Team


ClownerCraft turns 5! (And some 1.13 news)

Posted on March 28, 2018 by TheClowner

ClownerCraft has existed for 5 years today (28th March 2018).

The fact that we’ve got this far is utterly amazing, and I want to thank all those who play and support our network!

In the past we’ve run little events to celebrate the anniversary… However the staff team and myself have got a little caught up in other things this year – particularly preparing for the 1.13 which is expected to release soon.

That being said – everything on our store is now on sale at 50% off until Monday 2nd April (ends 23:59 GMT). Visit our webstore

For those curious, we’ll be announcing exactly what our plans are in regards to the 1.13 update once there is an official release date. This is since some of our plans may take more time than expected, and we don’t want to promise anything we can’t deliver in time.

As usual with most Minecraft updates, we wont be able to update the server immediately. This is since we will be waiting for third party plugin updates, as well as updating those we’ve written for the network. We will start the process of updating once there is a 1.13 pre release. And as we normally do, the actual update will be staggered across the network – starting with Survival, followed by Creative and PureSurvival – the rest of the network will then follow.

We will update everyone with more information, and estimated times, once we have a release date for 1.13.

If you have any queries please post them on the discussion thread on our forums. We’ll try to answer what we can, but be aware we haven’t finalised everything for the update yet.

 

Thanks for the continued support

~Clowner and Team


Information

Posted on February 12, 2018 by TheClowner

Hi All,

We’ve just added a couple extra information pages to the server website:
Rules and an About page.

The rules page gives additional detail about what we do/don’t allow on the network, in the hopes of clearing some confusion and having less room for people to try and push the limits of what’s acceptable.

And, the about page gives some information about how we run and manage the network – including a section on what we do with money.

I feel it’s important we try to be as transparent as we can on a lot of topics, so hopefully this is a step in the right direction.

~Clowner

P.S. We tweaked the rules again and this will be reflected in /rules soon


Snipertown Update

Posted on January 22, 2018 by TheClowner

We’ve rolled out a few changes to snipertown recently:

  • Snipertown games 1 and 2 now have the updated kits and world which we setup in 3 before.
  • We’ve slightly rebalanced the kits.
  • We’ve added a Snipertown Lobby server.
    • Basically, instead of having the join signs in the hub you can now do /snipertown to get to them from anywhere on the network.
    • The signs in the new lobby also show some additional information about the game, how to play, and the status of each of the game servers.

As always, any feedback or suggestions are appreciated – either through our forums or in the ‘suggestions-feedback’ channel on our discord!

Enjoy!

~Clowner & Team


The Official ClownerCraft Discord

Posted on December 24, 2017 by TheClowner

It’s open.
Finally.

ClownerCraft’s Official discord server!
Click here to join.
(I know right, it shouldn’t have taken this long…)

Our Teamspeak server will continue to run alongside our discord.

Enjoy! 😀


Warps GUI for Survival

Posted on December 21, 2017 by TheClowner

So, following on from the recent massive post about what we’re going to be working on now – heres one of the first changes:
We’ve now introduced a GUI for the warps on the survival server!

You can open it with /warps, and it has sub menus for getting to specific biomes and player builds.
We hope this will make it much easier to get around the warps.

Enjoy!
~Clowner


Your Suggestions! (and other things)

Posted on December 20, 2017 by TheClowner

Following our recent player survey, it's time we talk about the direction that we will be heading with the network. As well as feeding back about some of your suggestions.

Firstly, to everyone who filled out our player survey, thank you. Your feedback is really appreciated - and we do take a lot of it into account when making decisions.

If you ever have more suggestions, comments or anything else you want to bring to our attention please post it on our forums!

This is a long post, theres a TL;DR at the bottom if you don't fancy reading it all 😛

The Changes

We're a server network. We should act like a server network. 

ClownerCraft has been around for over 4 and a half years now. And we have grown a lot since we started, going from a 30 slot survival server to a server network with a whole host of servers within that. 

However, when we expanded into a network, some of the choices that I made may not have been the best ideas. One of which being the whole separate branding for mini games - which has now changed. (LogistiCraft is gone...) But along with this, we've always had the survival server as a main server, and I feel this may have confused a fair number of people. So we're trying to make the network work well with itself, making it easier to get around.

We're working on building  a new hub server, which will better match the ClownerCraft branding. This new hub will not only give access to all servers, but will include plenty to explore in itself. 

When we launch the new hub, we will be changing the way the network handles players joining. This will change so that new players will go to the hub server when they first login, and then after that you will login to the server you were last on. This should mean that if you mainly play creative or PureSurvival theres no need to join survival every time and then switch server.

As well as this we'll add more forced hosts, so that if you want to join a specific server every time, you can. (for example joining with the IP survival.clownercraft.net would always take you to survival).

Among the changes to how you join and navigate the network theres several small things we're trying to make work on all servers. This is to accompany Tokens, Modreq (/report), Bans & Punishments, The announcer and other features which already work globally across the network. One of the big changes in this is to the server rules.

While we aren't changing what you can/can't do on our network - we're rewording and reformatting the rules to work better. On every server you will be expected to follow a global set of rules, which will show up with /rules. There will then be additional rules relating to just that server, where appropriate. The updated global rules are below:

ClownerCraft Network Rules

This is a family friendly network. Keep the chat, your skin, your username and your builds PG. Racism, Sexism or any other discrimination is not tolerated.

Do not try to irritate or harass other players.

Do not advertise other servers in public/private chat.

Do not grief, steal or raid from other players!

Do not spam the server chat.

No cheating/hacking/exploiting. This includes using anti-idle machines.
Only cosmetic mods (eg Optifine, minimaps (which don't show player locations), etc) are allowed.

This updated set of rules will become active within the next couple of weeks.

A huge focus of this work on the network as a whole is to try and make things better for new players. We want to remove as much confusion as possible, and make it easier  to understand what our network is about, and how to do things on it.

Despite this work though, we will ensure we don't lose sight of the Building-Based history to ClownerCraft. We're about creativity - and we want to encourage that as much as we can. That's why we love games like SniperTown, which are exclusive to us because they were created by our community! We'd not be here without our community - so we'll be looking into more ways to get more of you involved in the minigames and extra game modes we add in the future.

Changes to how we moderate the network

I wont go into too much detail in this, but we have recently looked over how we moderate our network - and made a fair number of changes to how we expect punishments to be handled. One of the things which was noticed by a few players already was that we tend to use the recorded warnings without anything said in chat anymore - and this is a deliberate choice. It means every warning we give to a player is recorded, and so we can identify those who are constantly pushing the boundaries much quicker. 

We've also introduced new ways for us to deal with server issues, which should mean problems get fixed quicker and wont be forgotten about.

Among this we've also restructured how punishments should progress. 
This, naturally, doesn't really affect you as a player if you actually follow the server rules.

Discord

Yes. We're finally going to give in and setup an official discord. It may take some time though since, as you can see above, we already have a fair amount of things we're working on.

We will still run our TS3 server as well as Discord for now.

Tidying up

So, as said above a big focus of ours is to tidy up the network. We really want everything to really feel like it fits together. Because of this (as well as a lack of people playing them) we have closed CTF and will be closing our Survival Games server. 

We've kinda realised we're better off having a small number of really decent servers than a lot of 'meh'. This is also why we've rebuilt Snipertown in SniperTown 3 - and we'll be doing the same with SpherePVP.

Most people come to ClownerCraft because of our building-based servers, which is fair since that's how we started. So we want to keep creativity at the heart of what we do. We are really interested in what ideas our community can come up with, for minigames, other gamemodes or just builds. 

Your Suggestions

We had 67 responses to our autumn survey (as of 14th Dec 2017) - and we feel it's important we actually respond to the suggestions you all left. I will note though, that we can't take every single one into account, since often they might contradict each other and some may be less popular amongst the whole community.

I will also say that suggestions like "fix the minigames" or other vague statements don't help us much. If theres issues on the server, please report them either on the forums (forums are preferred) or to a Mod/Admin (with /report). When doing so please give as much detail as possible as this helps us to resolve the issue much faster. We don't usually have time to go through the entire network looking for issues - so if you spot them the only way we can fix it is if we're told about it!

Please be aware that a lot of the changes proposed will take time. Please be patient as we work towards implementing them.

As theres a lot of suggestions, I've grouped them into a few categories, please click on the category to see the individual suggestions, some of which have been split up and some are not included as they're covered by responses to others:

General
Staff
Survival Server
Creative Server
Survival/Creative Ranks
Minigames
Website & Forums
Voting

TL;DR

We've taken on board a lot of suggestions, and plan to keep our focus on being a building based server network. We're working on a new hub, as well as other projects.

A big focus for us is to make sure new players continue to play our network - and so we'll be making changes to how you join, and the information given in the hub/server spawns.

We're wanting to get a lot more people involved in the build team, as this will help us complete some of our projects sooner - so please apply on the forums if you are interested!

Any other suggestions, please post them in the "Suggestions/Issues" sub forum!

Most of these changes will take time to implement, as theres a fair amount, please keep an eye on the Server Updates section of our website to keep tabs on what we're doing.

Click Here to go to the discussion thread for this post on the forums!


Server Update: Closing Survival Games (20/12/17)

Posted on by TheClowner

We’ve now decided it’s time to close our Survival Games (SG) server. This is because few players used it – and we don’t feel it’s worth the time to rework it now.

We do have more new things in the works – watch this space!


Tokens

Posted on November 18, 2017 by TheClowner

So, Tokens are beginning to suffer from inflation.

And while this is probably going to be an unpopular decision – we’ve made a few changes to try and help balance them again:

  • Token rewards from gladiator have been reduced. 
    You now receive 1 token for each wave, with 5 after wave 15, and another 10 if you beat all 30 waves.
  • Tokens may no longer be bought/sold on Survival. 
    Selling of tokens to other players is no longer permitted. Access has been removed to /withdraw.
    Please deposit all tokens that you have in item form (Sponge named ‘Prize Token’) using /deposit <amount>
  • We will be adjusting the prices of items in the token shop over the coming weeks.
  • We’re introducing some new rules about what you can/can’t sell – be it in a shop or through auctions:
    • You cannot sell items obtained through a kit
    • You cannot sell items obtained through a rank perk (such as fireworks from the rocket editor for VIP)
    • You cannot buy/sell Tokens to other players.
      We will be looking into allowing you to exchange your tokens for $$ on survival. However you will not be able to buy tokens for $$. 
    • You cannot sell any of the special items bought from the token shop
      This includes player skulls, spawners, mob eggs, and the exclusive items.

I hope you aren’t put off too much by these changes.