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Oh my gosh, what happened to @therother 's volcano



Should we be worried ?!?

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@Ishmael, which nether fortress did you hang out in to gather your skulls? I spent a while in the one on the road to my place but saw almost no spawns at all, and zero wither skeletons. I'm hoping there's one that's got a better spawn rate.

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I don't know what a "good" spawn rate is but they seem fairly common in my neck of the Nether. And that's not just a ploy to get people to trade in my villages.

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I believe it was the one at (51, 127), although it's a little tricky determining it from the map. To get there I took the path south from the central portal until the junction with a crafting table, at which point I took the path with stone railings. Once that was about to enter a tunnel I headed off the path directly to my left, and dropped down into the fortress via an exposed section there.

After wandering around for a while I found a room with a lava 'well' (lava enclosed by nether brick), and I found patrolling that floor was the most efficient. I'd say I had an average of around one wither skeleton a minute, although that would be skewed somewhat by them often spawning 2+ at a time (and that's not to mention the ridiculous number of blazes...).

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I could've been hallucinating, but I remember seeing Wither Skeletons in the fortress near my place. It's where the blaze spawner was, if that helps, which is near the intersection to Vlad's place.

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That's the place. I took the blaze spawner in a brilliant act of tunneling but the skeletons still spawn there.

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Yeah, I've killed a few around there as well. Never got any drops though, would a fortune enchantment help with that?

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Fortune is for ores. The enchantment you want is Looting.

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I would like some feedback on some changes I'm thinking about making. therother and I have discovered that EnderHome is poorly coded and causes issues for server Ops (us). I've been looking for a way to re-code the plugin to fix the problem, but I've concluded that I don't understand java and Bukkit well enough to do that. At the same time, I've been slightly annoyed with EnderHome for a while now. When I added it to the server Ender Pearls were one of the rarest items around and thus using them was a non-insignificant cost. Due to the Ender Farm, that has not been the case for a long time. Ender Pearls are now basically worthless, and EnderHome might as well just be free. That's not the fault of the Ender Farm (which is one of the best constructions on the server), it's a problem with EnderHome. At the same time, I don't want to simply remove EnderHome because I know you all love it.

It occurred to me this morning that perhaps the solution to this is to add an economy system to the server. Economy plugins are very common on Bukkit servers but I've held off on them up to now because we've always been a very cooperative server. There are many economy plugins, but they all basically work the same way. In short, you sell items/blocks for virtual money which the server keeps track of. You can then spend that money in multiple ways, such as buying different items/blocks, paying for access to console commands (such as /home), or trading money with other players. Things can get a lot more complex from there, including having player-created shops where you can sell your own items to other players at whatever price you think is fair.

As I said, there are many economy plugins. The one I'm currently looking at is Gringotts, which essentially just uses emeralds as the currency rather than some random imaginary money without any in-game representation. Moving to a system like this would allow me a lot more flexibility on command access. For example, I could set up a system where the game charges you 10 emeralds to use /home. However, I could also allow many other commands at different prices, including teleporting to another player, or even teleporting back to the location of your death for fast item retrieval. At the same time, once I add an economy plugin it's going to be very difficult to ever give it up. I'm concerned that it might cause a bit more competition on the server than we want and degrade cooperation. At the same time, it opens up a lot of possibilities for balanced game management and might make it easier for some people to get rarer blocks by sacrificing/selling larger quantities of more common blocks. I would like to hear some opinions on this.

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My main concern is for people (like me) who play sporadically. I use EnderHome to get me out of the Nether when I go mining for quartz and glowstone because I get so lost down there. Or if I go exploring, etc. It's saved me a lot of frustration from being lost. Since I'm not on the server as much as others, I'm concerned that the economy will be such that it would be prohibitively expensive for me to trade for enough emeralds to afford to teleport. I don't have a lot of rare resources, certainly not enough to trade, I'd be trading basic blocks. So, I'd like to see a breakdown of what it would look like. How much cobblestone can I trade for an emerald? Gravel? Dirt? etc.

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I look at EnderHome as more or less essential. Just look where I placed my bed . The enderfarm is a result of needing ender pearls to travel and capturing mobs.
I didn't know that it caused problems on the server.. I might have restricted the use (I would move from the back of the chest vault to the front just to save a few seconds).

Economy... how does that work if we look past the commands cost emeralds (not a bad idea). Setting up shops to get emeralds - how do we ensure that transactions are correct. Price vs. goods movement.
Which reminds me of the city layout. I started playing with the map and came up with this preliminary design:



Legacy would be:
Yellow = new roads
Red numbers = plots to be claimed
Main plaza should be beautified
The plaza should be surrounded by shops type buildings.
The Harbour has a better location on the suggested layout.

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I'm opposed to it, personally, largely working off the principle of 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it.' Building projects on the server seems to work quite well for everybody, with a decent balance between difficulty in collecting resources and the ability to make impressive structures (earlier difficulties in acquiring sand aside). Having the ability to trade between resources opens up the possibility of exploitation of the system through grinders, farms, block generators and the like, which would in turn cheapen the value of rarer blocks. Sure, you could probably fine-tune the system to prevent this, but it seems like that would be a never-ending process.

Not to mention, as you say, that the sense of community on this server reduces the need for such a system to a large extent. If I need lots of a block for a project I'm building people are usually willing to share some of their surplus, and in turn I'll help them out later if they need anything. I can see the need for a formal trading system on large servers, where most people don't know each other, but that's not really the case for us.

With regards to EnderHome, I don't really have any strong opinions. If people think it's a bit too 'cheap' then I can live without it - I tend to get my active bed mixed up anyway, and end up halfway across the world from where I wanted to go . Of course, it is a very handy feature to have. I don't suppose it's possible to change the item requirement from ender pearls to something else?

EDIT: By the way, I like the idea of that city layout Sigurd. I like the idea of a 'townhouse' like Nigel is building, but I'd feel a bit conspicuous if it were just me building in that area.

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It's possible to change the item used by EnderHome within the plugin, and I've considered changing it to a Ghast Tear. That said, the plugin itself is still problematic regardless of the item used. If necessary, we can live with it, but I'd prefer to find another option if possible.

The general block economy stuff pointed out by Ishmael is what I'm most concerned about. There are tons of servers out there that run these things so presumably there are systems that are balanced, and I believe there are supply/demand systems that adjust prices dynamically. That said, it's an issue.

We could avoid that by simply using the economy for access to console commands and nothing more. If real in-game currency wasn't desirable, we could simply use virtual currency that accumulates for each player. I could probably figure out a way to simply set it up so that each player gets X credits per Y period of time, and those credits can then be spent on a variety of commands, including home. A system like that would essentially boil down to a frequency use limits on special console commands like /home. If you spend all your credits on commands, just wait longer to get more and use your feet to get around until then.

Again, I want to emphasize that moving to this kind of system also increases options for all of you because it allows me to give you access to other commands that you don't have right now. These could include:

/back - returns you to the place of your death or the last place you teleported from, whichever is more recent

/sethome - allows you to mark your 'home' location at someplace other than your bed.

/tp - teleport directly to a specific player

/setwarp - create a 'warp' which is a pre-defined teleport location for the entire server

/warp - teleport to an existing warp

I might even be able to allow you to purchase /fly for limited periods of time, say 60 seconds per use.

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If it's possible, I definitely like the sound of this. It neatly solves the issue of EnderHome being rather devalued, but doesn't drastically change anything.

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I was opposed to the initial currency idea. But I'm impartial to the pay-for-console-commands plugin. The only issue I have is with the setwarp thing. Wouldn't it make portal's redundant?

I have no problem with EnderHome being disabled, but the pearls will become useless. That's my only concern, which isn't really a problem. Having to dispose of the pearls is not hard, just an annoyance.

To be honest, the only thing I care about is server stability. If it's stable (which it is), I'm happy. However, I'm opposed to any plugins that make Minecraft "broken", in the sense that it drastically changes gameplay.

This looks excellent. But the terraforming part is the biggest obstacle.

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Anything that allowed players to teleport out to a specific spot is very powerful and has this risk. /home only teleports you one direction and to a pre-defined location that you can't easily change. However, adding in /tp, /sethome, /warp, etc gives people ways to erase both trips, not just the trip home. As such, it would have to be much more expensive to keep it balanced. The idea being that these are things that would be used rarely and that you'd need to save up for, rather than just using them whenever you wanted.

A MC in-game day is 20 minutes. I was thinking that maybe it could be setup so that we earned 1 credit per full 20 minutes on the server. /home is cheap and would cost 1 or 2 credits. /back and /tp are powerful and would cost maybe 10. Probably 10 for /sethome as well, since you can use it to place your spawn somewhere other than your bed. /setwarp would have to be very expensive because it works for the entire server, not just each individual player. That would have be something like 100 credits, with /warp itself costing 20 or something similar. Balance would be the key on all these things. As it is, I think /home is used too much and I'd like to slow it down some. All of the others should be orders of magnitude rarer still.

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Here my two cents on EnderHome:

I love the feature although I hardly use it.

To me a good exploring adventure consists of going out - finding stuff - and getting it back home safely. EnderHome seems to be too cheap an option for the back home safely part of it, so I tend to walk home after my explorations.

I do however, always keep some Ender pearls in my pocked. It adds so much comfort to my mind, that I could teleport home if I got myself absolutely stuck and unwilling to commit seppuco just to get back home. Also, I can see it in situations, where the getting home bit is no longer part of an adventure but just a tedious chore which takes away fun rather than giving it.

So keeping the /home feature, wether tied to Ender Pearls or something else, would be good.

I have some thoughts on the economy too, but will need some more time to put them into proper writing....

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Forgot to mention the above. I like this design a great deal. I agree that terraforming will take a lot of work, but everything decent takes a lot of work. I've reached a stopping point in my own home improvements and will start work on the terraforming and road network to fit the above map.

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Economy: Fine the way it is. Villager trading is already an effective economy.

Enderhome: I'm one of the worst offenders. I love using it but have no problem restricting it if it's causing problems.

City Layout: I would prefer more than just a simple grid, at least around the town hall. The proposed design doesn't look very nice. Hopefully existing terrain can be incorporated into the design and it will be more organic.

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Another way could be a top-down design. As if the roads are creating some sort of pattern upon the ground. Though I am unsure what design would look best.

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I think this would be just fine for our little server. I don't think we need an actual way to buy certain items, since we'll usually trade it someone needs anything. I'm not sure, but could we use experience to purchase these commands? Or would that be too cheap?

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FYI, for those who are using my smelter, you need to start bringing your own fuel. My coal stock has dropped by a full double chest and I'd prefer for it not to go much lower.

I think so, but you can get 30 levels in about a minute or two in the ender farm, so xp isn't too valuable either.

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I think the terraforming should be done to the bare minimum. Having a completely flat city is bland. As long as the hills are not too steep.



The buildings in the background have a pleasing uneven look to it.

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That's me, I've been taking from the bottom chest but just noticed the top one is cleared out. I'll start bringing my own. I hoped the quartz shipments would at least partially offset the cost since you made a comment earlier about having a lot of coal. Maybe I'll try using lava buckets.

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The City layout is just a suggestion. If you don't agree I would challenge you to come up with alternatives.

It seems you guys are more into medieval type cities with no structured streets, which is fine.
Success in street planning is the american squared grid system (think New York). This structure is for the main roads and you can add more, smaller and not so straight roads within the grid squares.
And yes... these roads can go uphill or down - that would just make it more interesting. But some terraforming might be in order where land is missing or large ravines interrupts.

Maybe to protect the capitol building more, there could be extra wide streets along the sides of it.
I would also advice that any city building plot should incorporate gardens (grass + trees / leaves placed on the ground for small hedges).

Here are some ideas I would like to implement into the city:
The city shops should be multifloor buildings with the shop at ground level:


Green areas can easily be beautified with a little imagination:

(Yeah, I have plans for my front lawn)

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I do think laying out streets before construction is a good idea. However, I do agree that a bit more randomness in design would be more attractive, and would also make for more interesting building designs in oddly shaped plots. Maybe we could do street layouts now, but not plan them out too precisely on the map and add in curves and angles in whichever way suits the builder.

That said, we should standardize the road design. I would like to suggest that we create two road sizes, large and small. Large would tend to be for main avenues and should be straight. Small would be for local roads and can take whatever irregular designs we want. I would suggest that the large roads be the same size as the existing road between the Arena and the Town Hall, which I think has a width of 9. Small roads could then be something like 4. I would also like to suggest that any roads that are put down leave a buffer of at least two squares between the edge of the road and any existing building. We should standardize the building materials as well. I would suggest stone brick for all roads as that's what's already down there and it's also cheap to produce for everyone in large quantities. Lighting should probably be done by torches simply due to the expense of glowstone and the fact that jack-o-lanterns look a bit odd when placed everywhere. We might want to design standard street lights though, at least for the large roads, such as a block of something on top of two nether brick fences, with torches on each side of the block.

Another area for city construction can be around the Arena. I specifically built the ring road around that thing to link in future city roads to it. With the presence of the Ender Farm and my turbo XP farm, I don't think there's any need to keep the old skeleton xp farm around anymore so I'd propose knocking that down to make room for more attractive buildings. We can also erase the Arena light sensor as it can now be replaced with the single-block light sensor that's been added to the game. Removing both of those would restore a lot of valuable central real estate. We can also completely rework the existing roads/bridges around the starting area to make them fit better into a more organic layout. A more attractive main spawn point might help as well. We could either rebuild the spawn island, or simply remove it and place the starting spawn location anywhere we want, such as in the noob hotel or perhaps in a newly built custom location.

If a large number of us are going to start working on this, it might also be smart to establish a central workshop for mass storage of materials and crafting/smelting. While we could build a new one, we could also use the workshop I used for the Town Hall, which still exists. It's actually a really old early construction from the server that got buried when I built the place. It's located under the Town Hall and is accessed through a ladder (labeled Boiler Room) in the bottom floor of the Town Hall. I think there are still some resources down there and we could expand it further if needed.

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I say build the small roads out of gravel or cobblestone. The plebs wouldn't be able to afford fancy stone bricks.

I'll start stockpiling stone bricks and dump them in the Town Hall.

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Stone brick for the main, cobblestone for the secondary sounds nice. Hopefully the new light sensors are small enough that it can be centered over the top of the arena or closer in so the lighting is more reliable.

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I already swapped my home sensor out for the new block. It's very small, just a single square. To rewire the Arena, I'd place a block on top of the scoreboard or somewhere similar, and then add a second one on the statue and remove the link connecting the two.

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I like the way this is taking: away from a strictly rectangular to a more organically grown street system (I guess I am just an old European). Keeping some main roads as straight axis (boulevards) and then allowing for some more irregular backstreets or roads following the layout of the rivers or mountains (hmmm... London, Paris, Rome, ....)

About the area around the Arena, I never understood how the old light sensor worked anyway.
But dont take the skeleton farm down just yet. It is so far my only way to recover my xp - I have yet to try out and get the hang of arena fighting. But yes, I am sure we can do something really nice with that area eventually.

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