v3.5 — Release

The network protocol moves to 3.5: v3.5 needs the updated modpack, and v3.3 and v3.4 clients are refused at login. The hub and the recovery screen carry new data, so a mixed server and client could not read each other.

Interface

• The Wiki in the Game: Many players never open the wiki, so it now opens in the game. It has a Wiki tab in the hub tab strip and a key (K by default). Pressing the key in the world opens the wiki, at the held item's page when one explains it. Pressing it over an item in an inventory, or in JEI's list, bookmarks or recipe screens, opens that item's page, and such items say so in their tooltip. The pages are the website's own, fetched from the wiki repository at build time, so the wiki stays the one place they are written. The sidebar keeps the site's order. Links between pages stay in the game, and anything else opens in the browser after the usual confirmation. Tables, notes, block quotes and lists are laid out to fit the screen. The site's voxel diagrams are drawn in the game, including the switch that hides the near wall, and so are its shot-count charts. Mermaid diagrams are bundled as images the site renders for this. Which items a page explains is set in the page's front matter (items:). Analytics counts each opening, with how it was opened (hub tab, key, held item or pointed-at item) and the item, and each page shown, as wiki.opened and wiki.page_viewed events, so its use can be measured. Needs the updated client.

• Arriving from the Sky: Joining the server, the view now opens high above where you stand, looking straight down. It drops in three cuts, each with a rush of air and a brief flash, and eases into your own eyes. It takes about four and a half seconds. With Distant Horizons the camera starts far higher, up to 600 blocks, so the distant land is in the shot, and the fog is pushed out while it plays so the ground below stays clear. Only the camera moves: you stand where you logged in, can act at once, and any key or click ends it. The server allows it only when you are not combat-tagged and stand in the wilderness, your own nation's land or an ally's. It is off with reduced motion, and has its own switch under Effects in the MoveEarth settings. Needs the updated client.

• Recovery Screen Rebuilt: The recovery and dispatch screen predated the hub tabs and had fallen behind the other screens. It was a fixed 760 by 430 layout, so at GUI scale 3 and above its lower buttons fell off the screen, and it closed to the game rather than back to the hub. It now fits the screen like the hub tabs: it moves to a smaller GUI scale when needed, keeps the hub tab strip, scrolls, and returns to the hub's war section when closed. The recovery tab is laid out in sections:

  • Status: the state in words, the support time left in hours and minutes of open time, who took the capital, the rival and a support bar.
  • Recovery protection: what it actually does, which is to stop your own nation starting sieges or offensive dispatch. It does not stop others attacking you, and the screen now says so. The settlement truce that does stop them is shown beside it, with its time left.
  • Objectives: each one with its share of support, how far along it is (the seal countdown, reinforcement health or block counts as the episode measures them) and how to meet it.
  • Recovery fund: the pool, the aid your nation has used and reserved, and a donation amount that now goes down as well as up.
  • Dispatch contracts: each one shows the parties, the side, the target, the participants, billing in open time, which approvals and consents are still missing, and why it ended. The buttons are worked out once for both the label and the action sent. A button labelled to end a contract could previously send a funding or subsidy request instead, and buttons for rows scrolled out of view still took clicks. Participants can withdraw consent, and only the employer's side is offered employer approval.
  • War history: each entry shows how long ago it happened and which objective it records.
  • Switched-off features: when the recovery fund or dispatch is off, the screen says so instead of offering buttons the server refuses, and the contract form keeps to the server's time limit and leaves out pay when paid dispatch is off.

  Results now show green or red, buttons wait for the answer to the last action, and Escape closes an open dialog first. The hub's recovery page lists the truces and protection on your own nation. Needs the updated client.

• Warehouses on Maps: Maps and atlases now show every Warehouse you have been near, beside nation territory. A Warehouse in range is drawn in the colour of its force field: red where stepping in calls out the guards, orange while they fight, blue when entering does nothing. Ones you found earlier are drawn as a plain outline where they stood. The server still tells each player only about Warehouses close by, so a map shows only what that player has found. Each client remembers them per server and forgets one that is no longer there when it next comes close. Needs the updated client.

• Who Cannot Be Attacked, and for How Long: A nation whose capital had fallen once looked like any other target. Nobody could see the settlement truce that keeps its land from being damaged until they were refused. In the hub, the relations list now marks every nation under that truce, with the time left. The same badge covers nations with outposts held by the truce, and nations whose cores your side failed a siege on and may not attack again yet. The peace and truce page lists all of them alongside the peace truces, together with your own nation's truces and recovery protection. Times are open time. Needs the updated client.

Gameplay

• Carried Uranium and Clean Water Actually Switch On: The v3.4 radiation from carried uranium and washing in clean water never ran on the server. MoveEarth looked for Mekanism's entity radiation capability on Mekanism's API interface, where it does not live, so the lookup failed and both features turned themselves off with a warning in the log. It is now read from Mekanism's own capability list, where it is registered. Server-side only.
• Structure Storage Filled by Its Template Opens Too: v3.4 opened the loot chests of structures in the wilderness by the loot table they carry until first opened, but some structures fill their chests and barrels in their template instead, with no loot table: Create: Structures Arise towers with emeralds and diamonds, its underground base with barrels of crops, MVS campsites and pumpkin piles. Those stayed locked with the nation storage message. Storage that stands inside a generated structure is now recognised as well, under the same conditions: outside every nation's territory, recorded as no nation's, and not on a vehicle. It is remembered once opened. Server-side only.
• /event and /live Work for Everyone: Ordinary players could not use /event, so could not claim event rewards with /event claim, nor /live. The server's Bukkit layer gives every command without a stated requirement a minecraft.command.<name> permission, and since nobody has that permission it is left to operators. Both now state that every player may use them, as the other player commands already did. The event screen's claim button was not affected. Server-side only.
• Tutorial: the Wiki and the Atlas: The first-session tutorial gains two early goals. The first is to open the wiki, with the K key or the hub's Wiki tab, which also says that K over an item opens its page. The second is to keep the starter atlas in the hotbar until it has drawn a map, with a note that maps show nations' territory and Warehouses. A player who said they had not known where a nation's land was had never had a map to look at. Players who finished or skipped the tutorial do not see it again. The wiki goal needs the updated client.
• Starter Kit Includes an Atlas: Nation territory is drawn on maps, yet few players had one, and many did not know maps showed it: after a war, the side that started it said it had not known the land was claimed. The starter kit now includes a Map Atlases atlas with 32 blank maps, so it starts mapping from the first step while it sits in the hotbar. Server-side only.
• Honey and Slime Without a Blaze Burner: Making honey from sugar and water, and slime balls from dough and honey, needed a heated mixer, and with no Nether a blaze burner is out of reach for most of a season. Slime balls go into the Map Atlases atlas, so the atlas that shows nations' territory on its maps was out of reach with them. Both mixes now need no heat. The amounts are unchanged, so honey glue and super glue still cost the same. Server-side only.
• How Thick the Capital Wall Is: The closure check only says whether a wall is whole, so a nation with a single skin of wall around its capital learned that one breach would expose the core only when it happened. After every closure check that finds the capital sealed, the server now counts the layers of wall at the thinnest point: the fewest reinforced barriers anyone must break to get from the outside to the core. It looks out to the edge of the capital's territory, so an outer town wall counts (capitalWallSearchRange, 80 blocks at most by default), and 48 blocks above and below; getting past that is going over or under the wall. When that is below the target (2 by default, capitalWallLayerTarget, counted up to 4), three warnings follow. The hub home lists it near the top with the weak point's coordinates. Members who manage reinforcement are told once when they log in. Every member online is told at once when a siege breaks a layer. Capitals only; outposts are not counted. The hub warning needs the updated client; the messages are server-side.
• Settlement Truce Explains Itself: Shells, bombs, charges and core hits on land held by the settlement truce after a fall did nothing, and said nothing, so attackers took it for a bug. The attacker is now told the land is under the truce and how long is left, at most every few seconds. Server-side only.
• Local Chat Holds on the Server Too: On the live server some players' chat arrived from any distance as a plain <name> message line, without the distance, nation and role in front, while other players' lines showed them at the same moment. The server's Bukkit layer can deliver chat three ways besides the one local chat applied to: to each player directly once a plugin has looked at a message's recipients, as raw text once a plugin has changed the chat format, and as a disguised line to a player whose view of the sender is hidden. Local chat now applies on every one of these, so whichever way a message travels it is heard only within the radius and shows who sent it from where. The first time a player's chat takes one of these ways, the server log names the way, to show what sent it there. Server-side only.

Operator Tools

• Running World-Generation Post-Processing Ahead of Players: Generation leaves blocks, mostly water at aquifers, carvers and river banks, marked to be updated the first time their chunk runs. Pregeneration only makes chunks, so that work waited for the first player to come near and then landed on the server tick all at once: a profile from the live server showed it taking 28% of the tick while players moved into new ground, with spikes past a second. /moveearth postprocess start [radiusChunks] [now] walks the area inside the world border in a spiral and does it beforehand. Each saved chunk is checked on disk first, off the server thread, and only fully generated chunks with work left are loaded; nothing is generated. A ticket brings each one in with its neighbours, the post-processing runs, the water is given three seconds to settle, and the ticket goes. How many chunks are in hand at once follows the server's tick time. Progress is saved, so a restart resumes without skipping chunks. Without now it only works while the server is closed. status shows the progress and stop cancels it. Server-side only.

Stability and Security Fixes

• Raid Airships Go When Their Raid Ends: Raid airships were often left in the sky after their raid. A raid removed its airship once, by id, when it ended, and that missed three ways: running raids were kept only in memory, so a restart left every airship with nothing to remove it; an airship stored away because nobody was near could not be found; and pieces shot off became bodies of their own that nothing tracked. Each raid airship now carries its raid number, saved with it, and pieces that break off are given the same number as they split. Every five seconds the loaded bodies are checked and those of a raid that is not running are removed; one that is not loaded goes as soon as someone comes near. Airships already left over from earlier raids are recognised by their name and cleared the same way. A body a player has made their own vehicle with a vehicle core is kept. Server-side only.
• One Broken Vehicle No Longer Loses Every Vehicle: A loaded Sable vehicle lives only in memory: loading takes it out of its save file, and each world save writes it back, all of them in one loop. After the crash below, a half-assembled vehicle with no blocks was left behind, and at shutdown it could not be written. That ended the loop, so every vehicle after it was never written back and the rest of the level's save was abandoned, and on the next start the server's vehicles were gone. Each vehicle is now saved on its own: one that cannot be saved is skipped and logged with its id and name, and every other vehicle and the rest of the save go ahead. Server-side only.
• Server Crash When a Vehicle Split Off a Single Protected Block: MoveEarth keeps some blocks where they stand when Sable lifts a body: ore deposits, territory cores, market stations, storage wreckage and other nations' reinforcement. It applied that to every Sable assembly, including a body splitting apart or being assembled from inside another body. When the piece splitting off was a single such block, for example storage wreckage left on a destroyed vehicle, the set Sable was given was empty, and Sable crashed the server moving it. Those rules are about lifting blocks off the land, so they now apply only to assemblies from the world; splits and assemblies inside a body move every block as Sable decides. Should a lift from the world ever be left with nothing to move, every block is lifted instead and the log says so. Server-side only.