Minecraft 1.5.2 Update

We've just updated all the Walls and our Survival Server to 1.5.2.

Please let us know if you have any problems in the forums.

Enjoy  

Survival Games and PVP servers will be updated over the weekend.

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Intel Strike! now on Punching Blocks

The Farlanders have been releasing some great content on YouTube and have just released their brand new PVP map, Intel Strike!

We've been lucky enough to be one of the first communities hosting the new map which you can find on pvp1.punchingblocks.com.

Check it out, it's a lot of fun while being extremely frustrating at the extreme precision that the TNT falls near you.

As always, if you have any troubles please let us know in the forums.

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Survival Server 1.5 Reset Saturday 9pm GMT

It's time. With the Minecraft 1.5 update becoming available and the need to regenerate the nether so we can easily find Quartz, we're going to reset the Survival Server map.

To have some fun with the change over, we'll be having a little pre-reset event where TNT and all block damage will be enabled and we'll provide players with some explosives to have fun with for about an hour before we shut down the server and launch the new map.

This event will take place at 9pm GMT (link to world clock)

We're still looking for a good seed to use for the new world (leave you suggestions in this thread or the Survival Server forum) and those attending the event can help us pick a final seed.

Don't worry if you are not white listed, we will disable the white list for this event.

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Survival Games now available!

It took us longer than expected but the team is proud to finally present the Punching Blocks version of Survival Games!

Today, we have two servers up and running with our handcrafted Survival Games plugin. This plugin also ties into a lobby/map voting system – something you’ll need as we’ve installed every single Vareide Survival Games map for maximum variety.

If you have any problems or want to suggest a tweak, give us a shout in the dedicated Survival Games forums.

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Minecraft 1.4.6

We've just completed upgrading all the servers to 1.4.6. Please let us know in the forums if you have any trouble as there have been some fairly major changes to the minecraft server we use (Bukkit) that could lead to issues with the plugins particularly on the survival server.

Enjoy and we here at PunchingBlocks hope you have a great holiday season.

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Punching the Devs #5: New Servers Listing

As part of our continuing efforts to make the servers and website more efficient and more useful, we're happy to share our new server listing!

As you can see, it looks very similar with a few key changes.

First, the back-end providing this data to your browser has been rewritten to be more efficient. There are too many changes to list out here, but an important one is that items on the page only change when the data changes. This gives the listing a "live" feeling. (And cuts down on browser queries to our server.)

Second, we added player status heads! These heads are dynamically severed from bodies on the back-end and shown on this page to help you visualize who's on what server. (You can see the owner of that head by moving the mouse over it.) You will see further linkage and improvements in this area when we roll out our upcoming leaderboard feature.

Third, we understand not everyone wants to see a sea of heads on the screen at load so we tuck away these details. You can use the expand/collapse button located to the right of each server to show/hide the heads.

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Punching the Devs #4: PVP

We have something fairly big to announce this week... PVP servers.

We're starting off small with Hypixels new QuakeCraft map and while it's running completely without modification now we will likely add some slightly changed mechanics to automate the server even further.

Check out the QuakeCraft video below and you can find the first pvp server at pvp1.punchingblocks.com and like always the server details are listed on our servers page.



We're already looking into other PVP servers such as Vampire Survival... but more on that soon.  If you have any issues, thoughts or ideas, check out the new PVP area of the forums.

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Minecraft 1.4.4

We've just updated all the servers to 1.4.4. Let us know if you see any strange issues. Enjoy.

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Punching the Devs #3: It's about time...

[This is part three of a Sunday evening (Pacific Time) series of posts that share a peek at what the Punching Blocks developers are, working on.]

We're now back from our very quick vacation to Seattle (some of us didn't have to go far - Rafael lives in Seattle) and we've spent the unwinding time to update all the servers (including the survival server) to 1.4.2.

Please note that the Minecraft Bukkit server code is still only a beta release and there could still be major issues when playing.

Now that we've made the jump to the 1.4.2 code base we can continue our big push towards leader boards and premium accounts so that we can make game types like our upcoming "Build Wars" (code name) and Survival Games even more fun by being able to track your current score.

If you have troubles with the new update, please let us know in the appropriate forums and we'll look into the issues as soon as we can.

See you next Sunday.

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Punching the Devs #2: <chirp chirp chirp>

[This is part two of a Sunday evening (Pacific Time) series of posts that share a peek at what the Punching Blocks developers are, or in this case not, working on.]

So, last week I talked up a new game type we were working on. Well, we picked a horrible time to start the blog post series as starting Monday, everyone will be tied up with Microsoft's //build/ event in Redmond, WA.

Sorry about that.

Stay tuned for more though!

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