Documentation‎ > ‎Archived‎ > ‎News‎ > ‎

News 2012 Week 35

posted Aug 20, 2012, 12:58 PM by A. Wizard   [ updated Sep 3, 2012, 10:22 PM by Félix De Portu ]
New Arrivals


Please welcome all of Ravenkrafts new residents!
  • theonewhoskates
  • LeLurt
  • wanja93
  • Drezmo
  • ewbell94
Chapter One:  Mirrors on the Ceiling

"What is Ravenkraft?" you might ask.  What is our story?  How did we get here?  What explanation could there possibly be for a world where (very) ancient Babylon resides across the way from a modern industrial city and an Arabian-themed desert city.  

Well, let me explain.  The original residents of Ravenkraft came from a very different world.  The terrain features were so random, they could only be described as erratic  and non-nonsensical. The landscape was fractal in nature and there were no clear-cut oceans or seas, just a random mass of snow, water and dirt.   It was a world of three Kingdoms: Redonia, Irontown on The Cerulean Coast and Fort Hellspawn.  It was a lonely world.  Visitors to such a place came rarely and when they did, they reeked havoc on the undefended world.  Theft and vandalism was a common occurrence. 

Wizardofire, an apprentice wizard to say the least, was experimenting with some new strange types of magic.  It had no name in the land he was from, but he came to call it Chaos Mastery.  It allowed him to change the governing physics of the world.  These were exciting times!  Tediously, and with care, he recalibrated the world time and time again.  His limited skill and and such an undeveloped field of study left few options but with time, came results.  Soon, there were all sorts of new technologies available.  One might event say that it was overdone, but there was little worry at the time.  New techs brought great mining yields, flight and advance mapping methods.  

All seemed wonderful until the experimentation into advanced portal summoning came about.  The nether was only a recent discovery and it was a hellish place.  The wizard thought maybe he could unlock doors into more... desirable worlds.  First came a floating sky world.  It was fascinating, yet simple.  Further study yielded a way to link to an even more distant and place, space.  With much haste, the portal was created and the realm was flooded with eager miners looking for high-yield ore-extraction.  

Within a few days, the strain on the poorly-built portal was too much and collapsed.  Luckliy, no one was trapped on the other side.  Wizard tried to reopen the portal, but failed with his many attempts.  At first, it seemed the the incident was over.  

"No harm, no foul",  he thought to himself.  "Maybe, next time, I'll be a bit more careful", he said aloud as he laughed as he laid down to sleep that night.

He woke the next morning to find that his relief was a bit premature.  The entire world seemed to be melting to a central point.  Like a sand pit that engulfed the entire world.  It spiraled downward and lasted for days.  Ajent, Grimfanskarteef, and AntBurrito were all all saved by wizards protections spells.  Though, his efforts only saved the people, not the world, and so their protective bubble fell through into the pit. 

Their journey was mystical, almost indescribable.  The fell for hours, parts of the world, whole and in-pieces, fell all around them.  Pieces of landscape merged with others, it swirled and connected. It disconnected and fell apart over and over again.  Everything fell into a giant "well" then proceeded to float laterally toward a dark abyss.  As they approached the edge of this mysterious entity, everyone looked down and again, they fell for what seems like days.  In the distance, one could see only giant bands of light and larges chunks of the world as they plummeted downward.

Time dragged on and the group grew hungry and cold.   Each wondered to themselves if it had been a mistake to seek protection for the fall.    

"Are we just going to fall forever?"  Ajent asked. "We could die in here waiting for this to be over.  I feel like we just fell off the edge or a really large cosmic bucket and now we are sinking to the bottom of an eternal well.  Are we just going to drown?

It was about this time that, the world outside turned from black to blue and they stopped falling as quickly.  They stopped abruptly and found themselves in a brand new world.  They landed right in the water and thier bubble collapsed.  They looked around and and saw only a series of small undeveloped islands.  An archway appeared in the distance.  

"Well... we're not in Kansas anymore", Ant said jokingly.

A Personal Note

For the last several weeks, and for several more to come I, wizardofire, have been working on some rather important home projects.  Coincidentally and unfortunately, my work schedule has been shifted into the late-night and morning.  The work thing is only for another 2 weeks, luckily.  This means I have not been on as much as I was before.  There is no reason to think that just because I have been on less, that the server is any danger of being shut down or anything like that.  Eventually I plan to move the server out of the cloud and into my home.  This would mean less lag, better capacity and the potential for a bigger world. (with more accessible worlds).  If you would like to help make this dream a reality, please throw me a couple bucks.  I would really appreciate it and your name will get listed among the contributors on the About page.  Also...there are ads to be clicked.

PVP Events

I've created a new thread on the message board for people to make claim to an army.  Please remember that we are only going to get a decent turnout if we can agree on the rules.  We are removing potions from this next event because some people decided not to play last time because the disagreed with their usage.

There is actually much more talk about the Naval Battle in recent weeks.  Please be sure to pledge yourself to a crew if you wish to pirate some booty or make yer mates walk the plank!  If anyone would like to propose a set of finalized rules, it would help us greatly to make this a reality.

Origin Stories

Well I hope you liked the first chapter of the Ravenkraft story.  It is a setup to explain our world a bit and create a platform for our future events.  I don't want to ruin any surprises, but know that the baseline being created by this will explain all of our past events: our transition from world to world, access to the holiday event worlds, the Armageddon event, everything.  I want to help Ravenkraft to be an world of vast imagination.  A place that, if you would like, you can explain your coming to this world.  In these writings, I will tell the story of each world we came through, and how and why each transition happened.  I encourage faction leaders to nominate someone (who writes better than me) to create your own origin story for your faction. Where did you come from?  Was it earthly?  Was it alien?  Was it from modern times or a distant past?  Is your story based in another piece of fiction?  Write it all up and we can distribute these in books the city libraries and welcome centers.  I haven't figured out how yet, but I'm rather sure you can duplicate books like we did maps.

Hint: If you wish to write a book yourself, I recommend you write it outside the game in notepad, for example, and then paste it into the book.

Bugs in the System

With the 1.3 update came some wonderful new bugs along with the new stuff.  There is/was a bug that would put you in the wall while riding on a minecart and kill you if you had low health.  There is another where people were falling into the void after using nether portals.  I do believe this void bug is fixed in the recent 1.3.2 client update and I am hoping the others may have been fixed by today's Craftbukkit update (1.3.1 R2.0).

Upon learning that we were playing in Easy mode all along, we had a vote and most of use voted in favor of upping the difficulty, at least until we thought about the bugs mentioned above.  I have changed the difficult back to easy  for the moment, but in the future, I plan to run in normal difficulty.  

Notable Builds

Well, I hope I don't miss anyone, but here are some recent builds of mention:

  • Ethyria - A large Faction-Elysium city in progress to the east of the Main Elysium Isle.  It is distinguishable by its four large towers.
  • Warforge has merged with the Elysium faction.
  • Romduea - A modern-styled city build largely by Dougflournoy.  It has been connected to the spawn, Mercantile and Ravenport by a road in recent weeks.
  • New Edinbro? - A new city being built between Romdeau and Taconia by ccg94 and friends.
  • Irontown - A large castle and farm south-west of Romdeau and Mercantile.
  • Noname is now known as Pandamonium.  There is a giant Panda statue here.  Its pretty cool :)
  • Enchant R' US is a new shop In Ravenport selling enchanted items.  Good deals, great service.  Thanks TheFluffyBunny and LA (Lilrapboy)
  • Ravenport Auction House is now open in Ravenport.  Gil's old abandoned trade shop has been converted.  There are instructions in the basement for creating and auction, but the rules of a silent auction govern regular usage.  Put your bid in the book in the chest. with the item you wish to bid on.
  • The Templars are building a city on the sea west of Ravenport. Its quite a site.
  • The ORKz Shop in Ravenport has changed the stock and prices.
If you would like your creations mentioned in the news, please post something about it in the message board or send me an email.  Also, it helps when these things have names :)  Thanks, everyone!






Comments