Posted December 23, 2019 Merry Christmas Sklotopolis!The Sklotopolis staff team wants to wish everyone of our players a merry christmas and a happy new year. As promised Santa will arrive at New Hope on Novus and Haven on Liberty in the afternoon (CET). But as usual you also can collect your gift from a christmas tree which you can craft yourself. This years christmas gift includes two items, something useful and something decorative, we hope you will enjoy your presents. Thanks for being part of our wonderful community, considering this is a free time project for all of us you are the only reason why we are still working on this success story and improving it every day. Thanks for being a part of our unique server adventure. 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted December 23, 2019 Santa has arrived Merry Christmas! 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted January 6, 2020 (edited) On 6/6/2019 at 8:52 PM, Sklo:D said: Sklotopolis Official Android App We are proudly releasing the official Sklotopolis Android App which has been created by our Developer @Michielbos. With the release of our own official Android App Sklotopolis is performing another big step ahead. Sklotopolis is one of the biggest Wurm Unlimited servers and has never been wiped since it's opening on 1st November 2015. This step is another landmark in a series of very important and serious changes, come and see how a professional Wurm Unlimited server looks like, come and travel through the wonderful world of Sklotopolis. Android App Features: Displays the current status of the different servers in the Sklotopolis cluster Links for easily accessing useful Sklotopolis-related webpages An event calendar which displays upcoming events in local time Notifications for events and happenings like unique spawns Overview of all uniques that are alive or recently slain. Download the App here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.michielbos.sklotopolisapp Screenshots: Did you know? Sklotopolis is the only Wurm Unlimited server with an official Android app, keeping you updated about living uniques, events, player counts and more! Download our app today https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.michielbos.sklotopolisapp Edited January 8, 2020 by Sklo:D 3 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted March 2, 2020 I have been playing on this sever for a few days now I am really impressed. I love all the personalization and mods you guys have built into the server it makes the game much more enjoyable for the casual player. 4 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted March 2, 2020 Just now, Kegan said: I have been playing on this sever for a few days now I am really impressed. I love all the personalization and mods you guys have built into the server it makes the game much more enjoyable for the casual player. Hearing this from an experienced long time player like you are is a very big compliment for us. Our work will continue, even if WU has been abandoned. Thanks for the nice feedback have a great time on Sklotopolis. 3 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted March 5, 2020 Been here since Nov 2015. Great place to be. 5 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted March 27, 2020 (edited) Did you know? Sklotopolis is still the only server you can see PMK tabards WIHTOUT needing a client mod, server-packs or anything else to view them. Just log in with your vanilla client and enjoy the wonderful colorful tabards from the different PMK kingdoms. Edited March 27, 2020 by Sklo:D 2 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted March 31, 2020 (edited) I have been on the Liberty server for a week or two, and must say I am enjoying the frontier feel. I actually get to places that seem untouched rather than feeling like a tourist. The default start point still has a lot of wilderness but is also somehow crowded. The portal to the southern spawn point is handy, and the area is much less crowded. However, I think the two portals are oriented 90 degrees apart and it seems to have messed up my sense of direction completely. My deed is due west of the southern spawn camp but in my head I keep thinking of it as NS. However, I reckon the bounty for guard towers has resulted in far too many towers. I can't even really use them as landmarks, because they are just everywhere. McDonalds would be jealous. The live map is hard to read at small scale without turning them off. I think the skills and timers are well balanced. I don't know about the economy yet, but the kill & bury bounties seem reasonably fair. I am already spending too much time on WO, now I either have to divide my time (WO and two WU servers) or invest more of it. I am hooked, though. Edited March 31, 2020 by TheTrickster Fixing brainos. My English is better than this. 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted March 31, 2020 3 hours ago, TheTrickster said: I have been on the Liberty server for a week or two, and must say I am enjoying the frontier feel. I actually get to places that seem untouched rather than feeling like a tourist. The default start point is still have a lot of wilderness but is also somehow crowded. The Portal to the southern spawn point is handy, and the area is much less crowded. However, I think the two portals are oriented 90 degrees apart and it seems to have messed up my sense of direction completely. My deed is due west of the southern spawn camp but in my head I keep thinking of it as NS. However, I reckon the bounty for guard towers has resulted in far too many towers. I can't even really use them as landmarks, because they are just everywhere. McDonalds would be jealous. The live map is hard to read at small scale without turning them off. I think the skills and timers are well balanced. I don't know about the economy yet, but the kill & bury bounties seem reasonably fair. I already spending too much time on WO, now I either have to divide my time (WO and two WU servers) or invest more of it. I am hooked, though. Thanks for your nice feedback. If you are lost make sure to type /gps in chat to see your position on our livemap. (Open the Livemap URL in your browser) 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted March 31, 2020 5 hours ago, Sklo:D said: If you are lost make sure to type /gps in chat to see your position on our livemap. (Open the Livemap URL in your browser) Oh, no, I couldn't do that. It would break the immersion completely. I am happy to look at the map decipher where I am from that, but I wouldn't want something to just draw me in on the map. Besides, getting lost is not as unfun as it may sound. "Forced exploring" is a fair term for it, and finding my way is a good way to help me build my mental map. 2 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted March 31, 2020 1 hour ago, TheTrickster said: Oh, no, I couldn't do that. It would break the immersion completely. I am happy to look at the map decipher where I am from that, but I wouldn't want something to just draw me in on the map. Besides, getting lost is not as unfun as it may sound. "Forced exploring" is a fair term for it, and finding my way is a good way to help me build my mental map. Sounds like a very funny experience. Good luck on your adventure through the wonderful worlds of Sklotopolis. 2 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted April 6, 2020 (edited) Update We are fishing once more! The old fishing system has been completly recoded in the programming language Kotlin and is now activated. You need old fishing rods or old fine fishing rods to fish the old way using also the old parts as before the fishing change. The new fishing system is completly untouched from this change. You can now choose the system you like Dirt dug on vehicles is now going directly into the vehicle. Dirt created while leveling on vehicles is also going directly into vehicles. During leveling on vehicles the dirt in the vehicles is used. Also dirt form crates inside the vehicles will be used for leveling. There have been reports that a small minority of people is doing their best to use multiple steamids in raffles and so on, so we had to put in an IP limit for raffles and unique loots. You can no longer use more than 2 steamids per IP from now on. Sadly the 3rd party voting website we are using is getting more and more unreliable forcing you to view ads and often doesn't register your vote correctly in the API, so we have to decrease the voting bounty to 15c. In compensation we are working on a referal system, which will reward people who brought new players to Sklotopolis. Both the refered player and the refering player will receive a reward. Next things we plan to look into is distant rendering and 3rd person view on the client side. We will see how things work out, can't promise much at this point. Edited April 6, 2020 by Sklo:D 5 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted April 8, 2020 (edited) We are fishing The old fishing system is finally BACK! Edited April 8, 2020 by Sklo:D 5 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted April 9, 2020 Inside Sklotopolis - A Development Blog Sklotopolis has always been using modern technology to provide both a fault tolerant and stable systems for our players. But of course even our system is not perfect at all, there are outages and other errors that happen even on Sklotopolis. The Sklotopolis network is a private cloud environment hosted in Frankfurt (Germany) and has access to modern DDOS protection, fault tolerant network connections and a battery backed up power supply. So in theory there isn't anything which can go wrong, is it? Well of course there is, hardware outages, errors in the Wurm server application and human errors like scripts which fill up the disk space can't be prevented completly. For these cases we are using an enterprise monitoring system giving us insight in all our servers, as checking them by hand would be an impossible task, there are far too many hosts and services inside the Sklotopolis network as we could check them every few minutes. This is where our monitoring system kicks in! Icinga and Open Source monitoring system used by small and big companies all over the world. With the help of Monitoring with Icinga we can view all details on all our servers 24/7 auto updated. There is no manual task needed, everything is completly automated. As you can see in the picture below not just the state is monitored but also the delay between the connections to make sure there are no lags or connection drops generated by our environment. Next we not only can investigate the connection, but we can view everything that's going on on the server, RAM usage, CPU load, Free Disk Space, Users logged in, Security Updates available and much more. The picture below gives you an insight into what we monitor on every our hosts to ensure the best possible availability and performance for our players. But sometimes things just go wrong and then we need to know what went wrong, Icinga provides very powerful tools to track the history so we not only can see all the incidents that happened in the last hours, days or even years but we also can monitor the exact values which the different monitored services had in the last time. This makes it possible for us to exactly track down why there was a certain lag spike, why a server might have crashed or if there was an attack onto our system. All that is displayed in fancy charts which can be accessed easily, giving even unexperienced people a good overview of what could have happened. Monitoring is a very important part of Sklotopolis if things go wrong we are informed via E-Mail and Smartphone about something bad happening. We don't just want to wait until something went wrong and players are contacting us, our goal is to already have an answer when players are contacting us about a problem, because we have known it just seconds after it happened. And this can only be achieved by using an enterprise monitoring system for our servers which is what we use Icinga for. I wouldn't want to run a server environment without detailed, fast and clear monitoring. Icinga is free and open source and can be used by anyone. 6 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted April 12, 2020 Happy Easter The Sklotopolis staff team wishes every member of our community a happy easter. Thanks for being a part of our great world, without you all this wouldn't be such a successful story, which we can develope together. The easter bunny arrived around New Hope and Spawn Camp West on Novus and around Haven on Liberty dropping shiny little easter eggs on it's way. Good luck in the egg hunt #stayhome #staysafe 3 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted April 15, 2020 (edited) Picture of the day A beautiful beach on Sklotopolis. Picture taken by ninetynine. Edited April 15, 2020 by Sklo:D 5 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted April 21, 2020 (edited) A quick review; This server is arguably, The way it's meant to be played. That statement might ruffle a few feathers but i believe the assessment to be sound. Even with the comparitive freedoms that a WU server offers, be you casual or committed, the game is extensive enough to keep you hooked for years and possibly, allowing you to experience more of the game than you could before. (we can't all afford to pay multiple subs if we want a priest and we can't all afford more than 1 or 2 deeds, on sklo this matters not) 4 deeds per steamid per server (8 max deeds), no priest restrictions other than 1 religion per char.. (your main can also be a priest) I'm discovering more of this game, thanks to the sklo model. aspects i would have remained ignorant of in WO due to my financial limitations. I hesitated with WU for years, the reason i left minecraft was because of map wipes, private servers are not reliable, if i wanted to start over, again and again, i'd still be playing Empyrion. However, it is my opinion that Sklo is one of the most permanent servers in the WU network. I have no fear of loss here. The staff are very supportive and the systems are very evolved. I played WO for over 6 years and I recommend this server. If you have any questions (i have missed alot out), feel free to send me a PM. Edited April 21, 2020 by Steveleeb 4 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted April 21, 2020 7 hours ago, Steveleeb said: A quick review; This server is arguably, The way it's meant to be played. That statement might ruffle a few feathers but i believe the assessment to be sound. Even with the comparitive freedoms that a WU server offers, be you casual or committed, the game is extensive enough to keep you hooked for years and possibly, allowing you to experience more of the game than you could before. (we can't all afford to pay multiple subs if we want a priest and we can't all afford more than 1 or 2 deeds, on sklo this matters not) 4 deeds per steamid per server (8 max deeds), no priest restrictions other than 1 religion per char.. (your main can also be a priest) I'm discovering more of this game, thanks to the sklo model. aspects i would have remained ignorant of in WO due to my financial limitations. I hesitated with WU for years, the reason i left minecraft was because of map wipes, private servers are not reliable, if i wanted to start over, again and again, i'd still be playing Empyrion. However, it is my opinion that Sklo is one of the most permanent servers in the WU network. I have no fear of loss here. The staff are very supportive and the systems are very evolved. I played WO for over 6 years and I recommend this server. If you have any questions (i have missed alot out), feel free to send me a PM. Thanks for your kind feeback, glad you are enjoying your time on Sklotopolis. 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted April 22, 2020 9 hours ago, Sklo:D said: most permanent Nitpick I know, but that isn't a thing. You have permanent or not permanent - it is an absolute. That said, yes, Sklotopolis seems to be standing the test of time. Although, I would rather see some level of upkeep on deeds, or some other measure that ages abandoned deeds out of the game. It's a pretty crowded server for not a lot of active population. I have seen many a half-done farm or abandoned villa that locks up land and resources. I am not sure how the "Bounty just for being online." works but I don't think I have received anything just for being logged in. If that were functioning and was enough to cover upkeep, it would create a nice balance. As long as you are active, you can pay upkeep and remain active. If you aren't active, eventually your deed will fall. All it takes to keep it open is some regular activity, otherwise someone else gets to take it over. Not "deed it or lose it" but "use it or lose it". Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted April 22, 2020 (edited) 55 minutes ago, TheTrickster said: Nitpick I know, but that isn't a thing. You have permanent or not permanent - it is an absolute. nothing is permanent and there are many wu servers. what word should i have used? perpetual, enduring, lasting? Permanence is more than just an absolute, it's a feeling. A confidence. a comfort. a potential for investment. I'm keeping this short so as to not steal attention. I'll keep an eye out for a different reply to your post because im too bias and believe sklo is near-perfect. sorry, perfect is an absolute as well, oops another oxymoron. I know what u mean, ghost deeds everywhere. I still believe someone else would be more qualified to counter your argument because i feel used to the system now and wouldn't have replied had you not pulled me up on the objectivity of the P word. Minor mental irritations are all but invisible to me, after 6 years in boot camp, sklo is paradise.<ignore - scroll up> Edited April 22, 2020 by Steveleeb Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted April 22, 2020 4 hours ago, TheTrickster said: Nitpick I know, but that isn't a thing. You have permanent or not permanent - it is an absolute. That said, yes, Sklotopolis seems to be standing the test of time. Although, I would rather see some level of upkeep on deeds, or some other measure that ages abandoned deeds out of the game. It's a pretty crowded server for not a lot of active population. I have seen many a half-done farm or abandoned villa that locks up land and resources. I am not sure how the "Bounty just for being online." works but I don't think I have received anything just for being logged in. If that were functioning and was enough to cover upkeep, it would create a nice balance. As long as you are active, you can pay upkeep and remain active. If you aren't active, eventually your deed will fall. All it takes to keep it open is some regular activity, otherwise someone else gets to take it over. Not "deed it or lose it" but "use it or lose it". 4 hours ago, Steveleeb said: nothing is permanent and there are many wu servers. what word should i have used? perpetual, enduring, lasting? Permanence is more than just an absolute, it's a feeling. A confidence. a comfort. a potential for investment. I'm keeping this short so as to not steal attention. I'll keep an eye out for a different reply to your post because im too bias and believe sklo is near-perfect. sorry, perfect is an absolute as well, oops another oxymoron. I know what u mean, ghost deeds everywhere. I still believe someone else would be more qualified to counter your argument because i feel used to the system now and wouldn't have replied had you not pulled me up on the objectivity of the P word. Minor mental irritations are all but invisible to me, after 6 years in boot camp, sklo is paradise.<ignore - scroll up> Actually there are (almost) no ghost deeds on Sklotopolis. All deeds expect some which owners noticed us with a good reason are disbanded after 90 days of inactivity. Feel free to check out our livemaps eg. https://andistyr.github.io/wu-map/ you will not find many deeds above 90 days inactivity if you even find one. Wurm Online with upkeep has a far bigger problem there are players bumping 20s in the upkeep and never log in anymore, which means the deed in this case will be a ghost deed for up to 20 months or 2.5 years. There are players dropping even more into the upkeep. So I think the real problematic system is the upkeep. Upkeep brings money into the pockets but it doesn't solve the ghost deed problem. The bounty for being online is in form of karma not in the form of coins anymore. Also I want to make something clear, as long as there are people playing on Sklotopolis, enough to make sure it is worth keeping it up, Sklotopolis will be up and running. One day when Wurm has suffered in history and nobody logs in anymore nobody will miss the server and it is safe to shut it down and make everything we worked on Open Source, including maps skills and so on. This day will come but I hope there are many great years to come until Wurm Online is discontinued. 5 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted April 22, 2020 47 minutes ago, Sklo:D said: Also I want to make something clear, as long as there are people playing on Sklotopolis, enough to make sure it is worth keeping it up, Sklotopolis will be up and running. One day when Wurm has suffered in history and nobody logs in anymore nobody will miss the server and it is safe to shut it down and make everything we worked on Open Source, including maps skills and so on. This day will come but I hope there are many great years to come until Wurm Online is discontinued. That is the only level of permanence that should be expected of any server host, and as another server host, we have learned a great deal from just observing Sklotopolis and their model, along with the many WU servers that have existed for years without shutdown. There is of course no guarantee with any server, but a server with a website, a real one, not one created by wix.com (lol), a robust discord server, and a long-standing history are the servers worth joining imo. Hell Sklo even has a moblie app. It ain't going nowhere and it's really quite innovative in its approach to the user experience in and outside of the game. It's a whole platform, and even the insights into managing the servers through Icinga for example are noteworthy praises to be sung for Sklotopolis. 2 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted April 22, 2020 Sklotopolis is always going to be on my top list of Best WU Servers. The server is probably the most professionally run and administered of any of the servers I regularly play, and I will always consider Sklotopolis to be my "home" server even when I like to experiment around on newer servers. It's really that good. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted April 22, 2020 (edited) Thank you all for your nice feedback. Post number 6000, time flies Edited April 22, 2020 by Sklo:D 2 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted April 22, 2020 Been playing on Sklo since Nov 2015. The way wurm should have been. Love it here. Awesome staff, Nice helpful community. If you are a new player on Sklo look me up and I will help you all I can. 🐴🐓 Lolabelle 2 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites