Crate keys, barrier blocks, and land you can choose

The short version

A skill node was handing out crate keys hundreds of times faster than intended, and backpacks were giving out barrier blocks. Both are fixed. Excavator has been buffed back up after we cut it too hard, custom pickaxes now mine at the speed they always should have, and there is a pile of new land and spawner control on top.

The crate key bug

Fortune's Favor, one of the new Luck skill nodes, was meant to be a rare treat. It was set to a 3% chance per level, which at max level meant a crate key roughly every seven blocks mined. Five players generated around 16,000 Common Crate keys in twelve hours before it was caught.

To put that in perspective: a Common Crate is worth about 6,250 coins, and a block of ore is worth between 1.21 and 4.48 depending on the mine. One crate was worth well over a thousand blocks of honest mining.

What happened next:

• The rate is now 0.004% per level, about one key per 5,000 blocks mined. It is a genuine surprise again rather than an income stream.
• All unopened keys from the bug were removed, and 90% of the coins earned from them were taken back. Everyone kept 10%.
• The two other Luck nodes had the same flaw and were rebuilt. Ancient Sense and Prospector's Charm now multiply the normal find rate instead of adding a flat number on top of it, so they can never run away like this again.

Thank you to zombihex, ivanow88, maik492, Staaxxyy and borka_bg, who reported it. Every one of them received 1,000,000 coins for speaking up.

Backpacks were giving out barrier blocks

The Page 2 button inside the backpack was being saved into the backpack as if it were an item, then handed back to you as a real barrier block the next time you opened it. Once per open, forever.

Two things were wrong and both are fixed. The button is no longer stored as an item, and the locked icon is no longer a barrier at all. Every barrier that had escaped has been cleared from inventories, ender chests and chests.

A side effect worth mentioning: backpack Page 2 was never actually purchasable the whole time it was live, because the prestige check behind it was never switched on. That is fixed too, so Page 2 is now genuinely available at Prestige 5.

Excavator is back up to 60 blocks

We capped Excavator at 24 blocks in the last update. That was too harsh. It used to clear an entire mine layer, which was worth roughly three times your normal mining income and had to come down, but 24 made a Prestige 5 pickaxe feel worse than the gear it replaced.

It now clears up to 60 blocks per proc. Still a jackpot when it fires, no longer the whole mine.

Custom pickaxes mine properly again

If your Astral or Titanium pickaxe felt slower than a plain diamond one, you were not imagining it.

The Surge prestige ability was applying its own Haste on top of the Haste your Momentum pickaxe already grants. Minecraft hides the weaker of two identical effects rather than merging them, so once Surge ran out you could be left mining at Haste III while the server believed it had given you Haste VI. The two disagreeing about your mining speed is what made blocks take forever to break.

Haste now has a single owner. Surge contributes to it instead of fighting it, and the server corrects itself the moment anything else touches your Haste.

/spawner

Spawner upgrades were not broken. The menu that sells them just would not open, because it was on a shift+right-click that kept losing to another plugin.

There is now a /spawner command. Look at a spawner you own, run it, and the control menu opens: enable or disable it, toggle mob stacking, and buy speed tiers. The shift+right-click still works if you prefer it.

Stacked mobs die properly

Hitting a stack of mobs that were all on 1 HP only ever killed one of them, because each swing was consumed by a single mob no matter how hard it hit.

Leftover damage now carries into the rest of the stack. A stack sitting on 1 HP falls apart in a couple of swings, and their drops and XP come with them. A stack at full health is completely unchanged, because your weapon still has to actually get through each mob.

Land: pick it, and sell it

Two things players asked for.

Buy the parcel you are standing on. Walk to any empty parcel in a land world, run /land buy, and that specific one is yours. No more taking whichever plot you were assigned. It costs the same as any other extra parcel would.

Sell land to other players. /land sell <player> <price> while standing on the parcel you want to sell. They have two minutes to run /land accept. The coins and the land change hands in the same instant, so nobody can pay and get nothing, and nobody can hand over land and not get paid. Whatever you have built on the parcel goes with it.

Your territory counts as one property. A Medium or Big territory covers several parcels and none of them count against the limit, so upgrading no longer uses up your whole allowance. On top of your territory you may hold up to 3 extra plots, bought either way, at 500,000 / 750,000 / 1,000,000 coins.

> Careful: /land buy and /land upgrade are not the same thing. /land buy adds a plot and destroys nothing. /land upgrade medium|big moves you to a bigger territory and wipes the land you currently own. It used to be /land buy medium, one word away from the safe command, which was too easy to get wrong. It now has its own name and asks you to confirm. A lot of people did not know that.