Reboot

There are two kinds of reboots: scheduled maintenance and game updates. In both cases, there is a warning 30 minutes before the reboot. There are further warnings at 20 minutes, 15 minutes, 10 minutes, 5 minutes and 2 minutes until reboot time. At the 2 minute mark, players receive any pending wages from labor that they have done since the last time they received pay. "Delayed by one minute" messages occasionally occur if the server needs time to complete an action prior to shutdown, and are not manually controlled. A Lead Ocean Master or Ringer can sometimes manually modify the schedule or postpone reboots if there is a very good reason for doing so, if they know well in advance, and if the reboot is lower priority. Last minute changes can not be made and reboots can not be delayed without advance scheduling.

When the server reboots, all ships at sea are automatically ported at the last island they passed, and any undivided booty is divided according to the crew booty shares. Occasionally, tournaments may be interrupted by ocean reboots. On those occasions, the tournament will not be recreated, nor will the reboot be delayed to wait for the tourney to end.

Scheduled maintenance

Periodically the server is rebooted. This only affects the ocean for that server, and the ocean is usually unavailable for ten minutes at the most. These reboots are timed to happen between 4am and 6am server time (depending on the ocean) but do not happen everyday. Weekend reboots are avoided where possible. Warnings are given at 180, 120, 90, 60, 30, 20, 15, 10, 5 and 2 minutes before the reboot. The text warning for a maintenance reboot is always as follows: "The server will be rebooted in XX minutes. This is a regularly scheduled maintenance reboot. It will be available as soon as possible."

If a blockade is running at a time when a server is scheduled to reboot, the reboot will either be delayed, or not happen.

• Cerulean, Emerald, Jade, Meridian and Obsidian, 4 AM PT
• Opal, 10 PM PT

Although it can change at any time, reboots will normally fall on Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays. Any unscheduled reboot during the week can cause this to change for the remainder of the current week.

Game updates

The server is taken down while the game update is released onto the server. This can take seconds or minutes, depending on the complexity of the update. The text warning for a game update is generally written by the developer taking the server down.

Game updates may also include fixes to problems noticed by the Ringers, such as tournaments not giving correct outcomes or incorrect seedings.

Historical notes

• Around the time the automated reboots were implemented, they caused brigands to stop spawning during the reboot warning window. This was changed to allow brigands to spawn during reboot warnings with release 2012-03-21.
• Ships that were at sea when a reboot occurred used to have their booty dumped overboard when they were sent to their last island.
• Originally, the server reboots were done manually by the developers.