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Bioxx

Kingdoms Brainstorming

899 posts in this topic

Maybe you could have a chance of destroying the base gem when trying to cut it into a currency. Maybe the chance for sucess not the ratio would increase with better quality. Simular to this: Chipped 10%, Flawed 25%, Normal 50%, Flawless 75%, Exquisite 90%. In this you would have a way to use those gems finally and still not flood the servers ridiculously fast. Also your civilization could chose wether they accept: agate, amethyst, beryl, diamond, emerald, garnet, jade, jasper, opal, ruby, sapphire, topaz, or tourmaline. If they accept all then cool if they want their money to mean more and are more restrictive then also cool. This would add a new element to government as they would have to approve of a currency that would be already in place. Also it might mean more jobs as gypsies and money changers would start being needed for cross civilization trading.

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Anything that prevents people from freely altering blocks destroys all hope of PvP in SMP. It makes it impossibly boring. Make destruction something harder and more dangerous to do, and fighting cities is more than just stabbing at their inhabitants (which is very, very boring).

Players should be building defenses (militias, arms and armor, etc) on their own.

The most boring thing in any game is absolute safety and security.

What he said. What I would suggest is a system where a mayor could set up sheriffs, and then blocks inside the town limits could be created or destroyed as long as a sheriff or mayor was online. That way you can't have vandalism or invasions when there's no one there to do anything about it (which would be completely unfair and unfun), but when they do have the potential to stop you you can do anything you want (provided you are capable).

For protecting your stuff, I think that being able to craft locks out of an ingot would be a simple solution. The lock's "quality" would be based upon its material and how well you made it (similar to durability ratings for all metal tools), with a lock being produced rated as: Shoddy, Simple, Normal and Complicated. Or something along those lines. Combining a lock with a door or chest in a crafting table produces a [Quality] [Metal] Locked Door that designates to the person who places it, not makes it (so that these items can be sold). Crafting a Key item will allow you to interact with a GUI on a door or chest to change it to being permanently locked or unlocked or assigning "spare keys" (not a physical item players have to carry, maybe make it a consumable to add new players to the list though. 1 ingot = 10 keys?) to other players so that they may access a locked item. Locked chest would only be single chest, but you would be able to place them side by side to compensate, this will allow would be thieves to be able to figure out which chests to go after.

For thieves, I would suggest a set of lock pick tools. Lock pick tools would have durability like all other tools and would have to be made of a material equal to or greater than the strength of the materials used to make the lock. Picking a lock would be similar to how the anvil works with an array of buttons that moves two lines near each other. The thief would have to obey certain instructions of various complications (as dictated by the quality of the lock) with the final instruction being the one that also aligns the two lines. So far very similar to the anvil process, however, as you input instructions trying to get the lock picked, you are adding tension to your tools and the lock, this is represented by a meter that fills at a rate proportional to the lock you are picking (and how much better quality your tools are). If this meter fills all the way, the lock jams and NO ONE is able to pick it again until the owner of the chest opens it again. This meter resets if you exit the lock picking screen, however you have to wait 5-10 min before anyone is able to attempt again.

This gives players a pretty reasonable amount of protections from thieves and also makes being a thief an actual skill one has to develop with practice, same as being able to effectively make high quality tools. :)

If that isn't enough protection, you could make it so that at certain points as the tension meter builds local players will get a percentage chance of receiving a whispered message of hearing metal click with a guarantee message to everyone in the area if the lock jams. You could also make it an option in the config menu to disable lock picking all together.

I like that. But I also think that there should be some more user input involved in locksmithing so that a clever person could make an "unbreakable" lock. not unbreakable as in actually unbreakable. I'm thinking making it like a puzzle. where someone clever could make an "impossibly" difficult puzzle.

EDIT: or not. that's actually a bad idea. leave the cleverness in the trapmaking. Bioxx! We need better traps and mechanisms.

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You guys should probably read the suggestions page we have gone over currency and RPG already. Currency was decided to be metal types and would display the makers name next to the type of coin. So for instance we could have all coins made by Jed become our currency. Nobody could counterfeit them, nice and easy. RPG like ideas are being constantly shot down. MC or TFC are not rpgs the object of Tfc is to get people as into the game as possible so they learn, they research, they do all the thinking and level up-ing this means Steve can't think or learn and therefore can't level up.

What if land was only protected when the player left the game? Greifing would rarely happen if people sat there watching and could easily report what happened.

A tnt sensor like better wolves mod would be nice also. Just would check their inventory for explosives (or hotbar) if it found anything it would tell you.

A problem with whitelist servers is that they rely complete on what the person says which will usually be untrue. A suggest that we suggest to mojang that some kind of log is kept of playtime number of bans number of jailings and so forth.

Also politically it would be nice to be able to declare someone dead. The homestone would record all members and their log-on times. If someone hadn't been on for at least a month they could be declared dead. All possessions and property would be lost but it wouldn't tarnish their record like banning or jailing would.

And eternal every player can only access there own things through an ender chest and it is extremely difficult to break so if its not the same its similar.

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I honestly believe the best solution here is to provide very basic tools to allow protection/imprisonment, and allow all civilizations to arise organically from that, without arbitrarily claiming an 128 block radius as "Your City". Allow fortification of blocks that deters attackers, but doesn't stop them. Don't provide players a hardwired mechanic to arbitrarily claim land - if they want to claim it, they have to be able to protect it. Provide tools for player arbitration, like imprisonment.

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As Gekkey and bsb have mentioned, it was actually something I was thinking about while sleeping, activating the protections only while the player is offline, would be acceptable.

PVP could still happen, but it would limit griefing. I'm perfectly happy defending my property while I'm there to defend it, It's the time I'm offline that I'm more concerned about.

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Got busy in here quick. I should make a big point that I won't be doing any of this until Beta 2 is done i.e. not any time soon.

If that's the case then I take back my last comment about it being too soon.

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Look out, everyone! I'm gonna suggest some shit from townie!

I think that the home stone should reserve exactly 1 chunk. I think you should use the home stone to power up home fragments that can then be used to reserve adjacent chunks. The cost (like, money cost, from the economy?) of new chunks should scale exponentially, but the curve should be flattened by having more players in the town. Reserved blocks should be full-protected. You should have 64 blocks of "influence" spreading out from your town. These blocks aren't protected but are extra super hard to destroy blocks in and have stiffer material requirements to destroy them. We should have extra expensive/hard building materials like metal doors and walls, concrete, etc. that require high-tier tools to destroy in "influence" areas.

You cannot expand your town in a direction if your influence is already touching another town's influence in that area.

You successfully attack a town by dropping a flag, open to the sky, in one of their reserved chunks that's adjacent to an influenced chunk (somewhere at the edge of their town). You defend the flag for a bit, and then their claim to that chunk disappears. Because of it's position it's still influenced, but their influence also pulls back as a result of the claim. So two towns that are preventing each other from expanding could attack each other and immediately claim a new chunk as soon as the attack is successful. If they have tools that are high enough quality, they could also bust down doors, walls, bust open chests looking for loot in the newly-attacked area. The attackers don't actually get the area they attacked, though. I guess the goal of a particularly angry war would be to get to the center of your opponents' town and raze their home stone.

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Maybe you could have a chance of destroying the base gem when trying to cut it into a currency. Maybe the chance for sucess not the ratio would increase with better quality. Simular to this: Chipped 10%, Flawed 25%, Normal 50%, Flawless 75%, Exquisite 90%. In this you would have a way to use those gems finally and still not flood the servers ridiculously fast. Also your civilization could chose wether they accept: agate, amethyst, beryl, diamond, emerald, garnet, jade, jasper, opal, ruby, sapphire, topaz, or tourmaline. If they accept all then cool if they want their money to mean more and are more restrictive then also cool. This would add a new element to government as they would have to approve of a currency that would be already in place. Also it might mean more jobs as gypsies and money changers would start being needed for cross civilization trading.

Please either do this or find SOME use for all those gems. They pile up in chests doing nothing for the moment. This seems like a good balanced solution. It would also factor into those who want raiding.

Speaking of which, I have another opinion on PvP than has been stated so far. I HATE PvP on a world-wide basis, which is the only kind MC honestly supports. I personally like the idea of towns being able to mutually declare war on each other, thus opening up a PvP option to those who want it. But I also like the thought of a third town, a "neutral" nation that buys and sells to both without involvement.

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Have you ever sat there holding a mouse button for 5 minutes solid? Staring at the same unchanging screen? It's like a million years pass in your head. You've wondered if it's done yet 5 times in the last second alone.

You'd be surprised at the persistence of dedicated griefers/stealers

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I honestly believe the best solution here is to provide very basic tools to allow protection/imprisonment, and allow all civilizations to arise organically from that, without arbitrarily claiming an 128 block radius as "Your City". Allow fortification of blocks that deters attackers, but doesn't stop them. Don't provide players a hardwired mechanic to arbitrarily claim land - if they want to claim it, they have to be able to protect it. Provide tools for player arbitration, like imprisonment.

All that's required for imprisonment in TFC is a way to take items off a player and to be able to move him forcefully. You already can't break stone with your bare hands so so long as you can take the tools off of the criminal you can imprison him. There should also be a way to move offline players, but probably not kill them so that if someone gets stuck in a trap in your house and logs off, you can still put him in jail when you log back on.

Edit:

I do quite like the idea. The only problem is players being offline, which is why multiplayer has to have some unrealistic protection measures, at least when players are offline.

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Lets talk Home Stone for a moment.

First off, while I do kind of like the name, I think Cornerstone would be better suited. Just personal opinion.

For a property system to work in SMP you are going to have to give some configuration to server Admins:

  • Turning the whole system on or off.
  • Whitelist option on who could place a Home Stone. Have the config file options be for Whitelist only or free placement. Whitelist should be editable from in game (/addmayorrights [name], /removemayorrights [name]). As a server moderator I have seen what happens when people are not unified and everyone goes off to make their own town. Their is little group focus in any one area and no town get fully developed, you end up with a bunch of ghost towns. A whitelist would allow towns to be only started up if the server admin feels that the guy starting a town has a good idea and has enough people backing him to get the job done, this prevents people gaming the Home Stone for personal protection and such.
  • Ability to disable towns mob protections out right as well as while in game as an admin (/removetownprot [Town Name], /removealltownprot, /enabletownprot [Town Name], and /enablealltownprot). This allows admins to have "PvE" events, such as the "enemy" growing in strength and overcoming the towns protections, etc. It would also allow Admins to mark towns as "on the fringe of civilization", basically towns that are on the border of the wilderness and thus would be more open to attacks from the unknown.
  • Ability to disable players from upgrading towns, making it an Admin only right.
  • Ability to enable or disable towns needing to have a maxed population in order to upgrade.
While a lot of these are very much "control freak" settings, they would allow such a system to be added to most any server without butting up against how an Admin might run his world.

Next lets talk about the actually construction of the Home Stone. I like the idea that it is made from gems and metal. I think the basic Home Stone you start off with should be made from Bismuth, Tin and Zinc. These are the basic metals that everyone starts off with, by having these three metals you have shown that you have begun making progress in life. With these three metals I would also suggest three Chipped Gems of any type. You may want to add something else to this, like make the 3 metals shaped items and not just ingots and the chipped gems cut and slotted into them. Either way, this would produce the most basic Home Stone, the founding stone.

The founding stone would give you a very small radius of property with a max citizen limit of 5, including the mayor. In this most basic town, mob spawn rates are dropped by 5%.

The next upgrade would require copper, brass and bronze and would require 3 Flawed gems. This would create a sort of upgrade kit that can be used on the original founding stone by the mayor. This increases the citizen population to 10 players and increase the size of land owned by a town, mob spawn rates would be 15% less likely to occur. I would also maybe suggest that the town must have max population in order to upgrade at any point, this would help prevent the creation of large empty towns and everything would grow at a nice slow rate. Also at tier two, I suggest that the mayor would be able to assign at least two players as Town Guards. Town Guards would get a passive protection enchantment while within the town's property (you could use vanilla potion effects to pull this off).

Tier Three of a town would require rose gold, black bronze, bismuth bronze and 3 Normal gems. This kit would increase citizen population to 15 players, town size, and mobs would be 25% less likely to spawn. At this tier the town can have five designated guards.

Tier Four of a town would require wrought iron, steel, black steel and 3 Flawless gems. This kit would remove the cap on citizen population, town size would increase, mobs would be 25% less likely to spawn, designated guards increased to 10.

The final tier of a town would require Blue and Red steel as well as 3 Perfect gems. Though Tier four removed population cap, you must have at least 25 citizens in a town to upgrade to this tier. This would increase town property to the maximum limit, mobs would be 50% less likely to spawn and town guards are increased to a cap of 20.

While this is the basic requirements and perks of a town, there should be more added I think, maybe with certain perks not appearing until you reach certain levels of a town.

Also, I want to note on the placement of Home Stones, you should limit where you can place them. I would think that once a stone is placed, another stone cannot be placed within 1.5x distance of the maximum border of a town (maybe further). This prevents people from, again, using home stones to grief players as well as prevent arguments between two towns of different aesthetics complaining about being right up against each other. And of course this prevents towns from overlapping.

As a side note, town owned property should of course be done in squares and be measured in chunks with the Home Stone being "centered", regardless of placement, within whatever chunk it was placed in. Selling property could then be done in chunks and the mayor should be able to decide how the property is shaped (maybe by placing some kind of marker on each chunk to be sold.. I would also suggest some kind of button you can hit that would give some kind of overlay effect to show citizens the boundaries of town as well as their property, even if it is something like the grid line overlay that chunk loaders use).

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Please either do this or find SOME use for all those gems. They pile up in chests doing nothing for the moment.

Only if you're stubborn. Mine despawn where I drop them.

For protecting your stuff, I think that being able to craft locks out of an ingot would be a simple solution. The lock's "quality" would be based upon its material and how well you made it (similar to durability ratings for all metal tools), with a lock being produced rated as: Shoddy, Simple, Normal and Complicated. Or something along those lines. Combining a lock with a door or chest in a crafting table produces a [Quality] [Metal] Locked Door that designates to the person who places it, not makes it (so that these items can be sold). Crafting a Key item will allow you to interact with a GUI on a door or chest to change it to being permanently locked or unlocked or assigning "spare keys" (not a physical item players have to carry, maybe make it a consumable to add new players to the list though. 1 ingot = 10 keys?) to other players so that they may access a locked item. Locked chest would only be single chest, but you would be able to place them side by side to compensate, this will allow would be thieves to be able to figure out which chests to go after.

For thieves, I would suggest a set of lock pick tools. Lock pick tools would have durability like all other tools and would have to be made of a material equal to or greater than the strength of the materials used to make the lock. Picking a lock would be similar to how the anvil works with an array of buttons that moves two lines near each other. The thief would have to obey certain instructions of various complications (as dictated by the quality of the lock) with the final instruction being the one that also aligns the two lines. So far very similar to the anvil process, however, as you input instructions trying to get the lock picked, you are adding tension to your tools and the lock, this is represented by a meter that fills at a rate proportional to the lock you are picking (and how much better quality your tools are). If this meter fills all the way, the lock jams and NO ONE is able to pick it again until the owner of the chest opens it again. This meter resets if you exit the lock picking screen, however you have to wait 5-10 min before anyone is able to attempt again.

This gives players a pretty reasonable amount of protections from thieves and also makes being a thief an actual skill one has to develop with practice, same as being able to effectively make high quality tools. :)

If that isn't enough protection, you could make it so that at certain points as the tension meter builds local players will get a percentage chance of receiving a whispered message of hearing metal click with a guarantee message to everyone in the area if the lock jams. You could also make it an option in the config menu to disable lock picking all together.

I vote THAT!
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All that's required for imprisonment in TFC is a way to take items off a player and to be able to move him forcefully. You already can't break stone with your bare hands so so long as you can take the tools off of the criminal you can imprison him.

Actually you can, it just takes like 30 sec.
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Only if you're stubborn. Mine despawn where I drop them.

You shouldn't have to despawn mod items. They should have a use.

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Bioxx, in regards to your Stone idea, have you ever heard of the game Haven and Hearth?

It's sort of like a 2D Isometric Minecraft. Players can create an item, some sort of totem pole, I can't remember the name of it, which is extremely resource intensive to create, which, when placed, claims an area of land for a player. The size of the area of land can be increased by the player later through the expenditure of experience.

How about something similar for TFC? A player can create a Standard, let's call it. Make it expensive, so you can't make one by yourself without intense effort on your part. Cloth will be added as part of the Agriculture update, right? Make the Standard a flag, with, say, a steel pole and some sort of cloth for the flag (if there are tiers of cloth -- flax < cotton < silk, for instance -- make it not the low tier cloth).

The pole and the banner/flag themselves would probably be separate recipes.

Anyway, once you have the banner ready, you pick a spot and plop it down. It claims a 65x65 area, centered on the pole, and assigns its ownership to the player who planted the banner.

The banner, when activated, brings up a GUI. The GUI has two parts. The first part is a list where the owner of the banner may add other players who "belong" to the faction of the banner's placer. The second part of the GUI allows for the expansion of the area claimed by the banner. What is spent to increase this, I'm not exactly sure. I seem to recall there are coin graphics in the resources file. Maybe coinage is required to increase the size of the banner? Assuming you get 9 coins for 1 ingot, be it copper, silver, or gold, increasing the area claimed could be based on the new amount of area that would be added. For example, to go from the default claim area of 65x65 to 67x67 would be an increase in area of 264 blocks. So make it cost 264 units of currency (2 gold, 6 silver, 4 copper?) to increase the size. And then going from 67x67 to 69x69 would cost 272 units of currency, 69x69 to 71x71 would be 280, etc, etc.

People who have been added to the list of "residents" by the banner's owner would be able to place and break blocks within the protected area. People who are not on the list of residents would not be able to place blocks within, say, 5 meters of the protected area (since walls aren't really useful if someone can just build up a column of dirt and jump over them).

People who are not residents would be able to break blocks within the protected area, but it would take a far longer amount of time. Tunneling through walls can (in real life) take days. Fortifications must be worth making them in the first place. Increase the time required to break a block exponentially. If a block normally can be broken in 10 seconds, it now takes 100 seconds to break it. Then, provide reinforced versions of blocks that can be used to make fortifications.

This is not to make it impossible to break into a walled city. Assuming a wall that is five blocks thick (solid), that is 10 blocks that need to be broken to get through the wall and inside. If each special, reinforced block which would be used in a really nice wall of a well defended city takes 2 minutes to break, then it would take 20 minutes for someone to tunnel through the wall. Some might call this "tedious", but the wall does not serve as a determent if it's not annoying and time consuming to go through. It really should take more time to go through a wall. This would dissuade casual people who steal simply because they're too lazy to get things for themselves (because if they're too lazy to gather their own resources they'll be far too lazy to break through a wall), but won't stop people who are dead set on getting through that wall.

Anyway, to get back on topic, people who are not residents of the town (hereinafter referred to as "invaders") would be able to break blocks within the city limits. Skilled and/or organized invaders would have special tools (siege equipment for breaking walls, lockpicks for opening metal doors and locked chests, etc) to help mitigate the time it takes to gain entry to a town.

Once inside the town, the invaders would want to steal things, of course. One of the requirements for a SMP server is a method of chest protection. I suggest a lockbox which would be crafted out of metal sheets instead of wood plank, but in the top middle slot, instead of an 8th metal sheet, would have a special "lock mechanism" on the top, which would probably be resource intensive to make (special tools to make it, etc).

This lockbox would function exactly as a chest, except that when you attempt to open it a GUI appears that requires you to enter a numeric code. Simple lockboxes could have only three digits to choose from, while a higher end one could have five digits or even six or seven. When first placed, the combination is set to 000(0..0), and a little marker on the GUI indicates that the combination is not set. The person placing it would enter a combination and then hit "enter", which would set the combination, and then they could hit "open" to open the lockbox. Subsequently, when someone tries to open the box, they must turn the dials to the right combination of digits and hit enter, at which point if they choose the correct combination, they will have the option to either change the combination or open the box.

Now, if a low end lockbox had a 3 digit combination, that's 1000 possible combinations. Assuming you can enter 1 combination every 6 seconds, that would take 100 minutes to open a low end lockbox via random guessing. That would deter random lazy people who got in because there are no walls, but what about the person who was determined and either had enough time or the resources to overcome walls? They should also have the ability to make devices with will "guess" the combination for them.

For example, imagine three tiers of lockpicks. The lowest tier of lockpick, when used on a lockbox, will tell the user what the first digit of the combination to the lockbox is. So a low end lockpick used on a low end lockbox would reduce the time to open it from 100 minutes (1000 possible combinations at 1 attempt/6 seconds) to 10 minutes (100 possible combinations at 1 attempt/6 seconds). Mid tier lockpicks would tell the user the first two digits of the combination of the lockbox (and mid tier lockboxes should have an increase in number of digits in the code so that using an equivalent tier lockpick on an equivalent tier lockbox should always result in the same amount of time required to crack it), and a high tier lockpick would give the first three digits of the code.

So that way, someone with high tier lockpicks (large time invested in acquiring the tool for opening locks quickly) who effortlessly be able to open the lowest tier of lockbox, but would still need 10 minutes to open a high tier lockbox (5 total digits in the combination, with the first three being revealed by the high tier lockpick).

Invaders would also need to pick the locks of doors to get inside houses if they don't want to spend time breaking through the side of the house (which will take longer than normal, since they're trying to break a protected block). The simple wooden door would not have a lock, but higher tier doors, made out of copper or iron or steel, would have increasingly complex locks. Skeleton keys could be produced, in various tiers (various material bases) to pick the locks of doors. A given skeleton key would have, say, a 25% chance of opening a door of its tier, a 50% chance of opening the tier below it, and a 100% chance of opening the lock of a door two tiers below it, while it would have, say, a 5% chance of opening a lock a tier above it, and a 1% (or 0%) chance of opening a lock two tiers above it.

This would, once again, deter the extremely lazy from getting inside, but would not stop someone who devotes the effort to getting good lockpicks, or just getting a very large number of them.

Basically, for every defense, and every level of it (bad, good, better, best), there needs to be a countermeasure (bad, good, better, best) that mitigates the time required to bypass it.

Example:

I have a city with steel-reinforced stone walls (best wall material) five blocks thick. It will take someone with a pickaxe (bad tool) 1 hour to tunnel a 2x1x5 path through the wall.

Someone with a catapult (good tool) could break through that wall in, say, 30 minutes.

Someone with a siege ballista (better tool) could break through that wall in 20 minutes.

Someone with a trebuchet (best tool) could break through it in 10 minutes.

If that wall was a simple wooden pallisade (bad wall material), someone with an axe (bad tool) could go through it in 10 minutes.

Someone with a trebuchet could go through it in 1 minute 40 seconds.

tl;dr: Have a means of claiming an area, designating who belongs to it and has build privileges. People without privileges cannot build in the claimed area, but can freely move around it, but it takes significantly longer for them to break blocks in the area. Introduce different kind of wall materials (wood palisade, reinforced wall, steel-reinforced wall, etc) that require greatly increase amounts of time to break through, and also introduce different kind of siege weapons or tools that mitigate the amount of time required to break in while still requiring an effort on the part of the vandal. Implement different kinds of doors with different qualities of locks, and implement different kinds of skeleton keys which are used to open locked doors. Implement lockboxes of various qualities that have combination locks (3 to 5 digit, e.g.) that take time to pick, and then introduce lockpicks which tell the user what the combination to a lock is (1 digit for lowest tier lockpicks, up to 3 for the highest tier) to mitigate the time spent guessing combinations.

tl;dr of the tl;dr: Implement a means of claiming an area for a person or group. Implement defensive measures (walls, door locks, lockboxes) that significantly increase the amount of time required to get inside a settlement and taking its resources. Implement various countermeasures (siege weaponry, skeleton keys, lockpicks) that mitigate the increase in time while still making it non-trivial.

It should be an arms race between the civilized nations of a server and the barbarian horde (griefers) -- the city builds a pallisade to keep the griefers out? They build a catapult to take the pallisade down. The griefers built a catapult? The city upgrades to reinforced walls. The barbarians got in and walked right in my house and stole my precious, precious damaged gems? I'll build a locking door to keep them out. The citizens have locks on their doors? The resourceful thief will make skeleton keys to get inside. The thieves got in through my locked door and stole my things? I'll make a lockbox to keep my things safe. A thief notices a lockbox? Good thing he brought a long a set of lockpicks to help him find the combination, and so on, and so on.

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Id really like to see a useage of gems, since thats our current currency at the server i play on.

When money is added it will become chaos in the village as people have all these gems but no money, until we of course, obtain some money.

though miniting and such sounds cool, being able to make money is a way to destabilize the economy.

also i was wondering if there will ever be a way to put gems and such on the ground? like displaying them?

or maybe mayke a glass box with a key for them so you could display them safely in a town museum or such.

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Bioxx, in regards to your Stone idea, have you ever heard of the game Haven and Hearth?

It's sort of like a 2D Isometric Minecraft. Players can create an item, some sort of totem pole, I can't remember the name of it, which is extremely resource intensive to create, which, when placed, claims an area of land for a player. The size of the area of land can be increased by the player later through the expenditure of experience.

How about something similar for TFC? A player can create a Standard, let's call it. Make it expensive, so you can't make one by yourself without intense effort on your part. Cloth will be added as part of the Agriculture update, right? Make the Standard a flag, with, say, a steel pole and some sort of cloth for the flag (if there are tiers of cloth -- flax < cotton < silk, for instance -- make it not the low tier cloth).

The pole and the banner/flag themselves would probably be separate recipes.

Anyway, once you have the banner ready, you pick a spot and plop it down. It claims a 65x65 area, centered on the pole, and assigns its ownership to the player who planted the banner.

The banner, when activated, brings up a GUI. The GUI has two parts. The first part is a list where the owner of the banner may add other players who "belong" to the faction of the banner's placer. The second part of the GUI allows for the expansion of the area claimed by the banner. What is spent to increase this, I'm not exactly sure. I seem to recall there are coin graphics in the resources file. Maybe coinage is required to increase the size of the banner? Assuming you get 9 coins for 1 ingot, be it copper, silver, or gold, increasing the area claimed could be based on the new amount of area that would be added. For example, to go from the default claim area of 65x65 to 67x67 would be an increase in area of 264 blocks. So make it cost 264 units of currency (2 gold, 6 silver, 4 copper?) to increase the size. And then going from 67x67 to 69x69 would cost 272 units of currency, 69x69 to 71x71 would be 280, etc, etc.

People who have been added to the list of "residents" by the banner's owner would be able to place and break blocks within the protected area. People who are not on the list of residents would not be able to place blocks within, say, 5 meters of the protected area (since walls aren't really useful if someone can just build up a column of dirt and jump over them).

People who are not residents would be able to break blocks within the protected area, but it would take a far longer amount of time. Tunneling through walls can (in real life) take days. Fortifications must be worth making them in the first place. Increase the time required to break a block exponentially. If a block normally can be broken in 10 seconds, it now takes 100 seconds to break it. Then, provide reinforced versions of blocks that can be used to make fortifications.

This is not to make it impossible to break into a walled city. Assuming a wall that is five blocks thick (solid), that is 10 blocks that need to be broken to get through the wall and inside. If each special, reinforced block which would be used in a really nice wall of a well defended city takes 2 minutes to break, then it would take 20 minutes for someone to tunnel through the wall. Some might call this "tedious", but the wall does not serve as a determent if it's not annoying and time consuming to go through. It really should take more time to go through a wall. This would dissuade casual people who steal simply because they're too lazy to get things for themselves (because if they're too lazy to gather their own resources they'll be far too lazy to break through a wall), but won't stop people who are dead set on getting through that wall.

Anyway, to get back on topic, people who are not residents of the town (hereinafter referred to as "invaders") would be able to break blocks within the city limits. Skilled and/or organized invaders would have special tools (siege equipment for breaking walls, lockpicks for opening metal doors and locked chests, etc) to help mitigate the time it takes to gain entry to a town.

Once inside the town, the invaders would want to steal things, of course. One of the requirements for a SMP server is a method of chest protection. I suggest a lockbox which would be crafted out of metal sheets instead of wood plank, but in the top middle slot, instead of an 8th metal sheet, would have a special "lock mechanism" on the top, which would probably be resource intensive to make (special tools to make it, etc).

This lockbox would function exactly as a chest, except that when you attempt to open it a GUI appears that requires you to enter a numeric code. Simple lockboxes could have only three digits to choose from, while a higher end one could have five digits or even six or seven. When first placed, the combination is set to 000(0..0), and a little marker on the GUI indicates that the combination is not set. The person placing it would enter a combination and then hit "enter", which would set the combination, and then they could hit "open" to open the lockbox. Subsequently, when someone tries to open the box, they must turn the dials to the right combination of digits and hit enter, at which point if they choose the correct combination, they will have the option to either change the combination or open the box.

Now, if a low end lockbox had a 3 digit combination, that's 1000 possible combinations. Assuming you can enter 1 combination every 6 seconds, that would take 100 minutes to open a low end lockbox via random guessing. That would deter random lazy people who got in because there are no walls, but what about the person who was determined and either had enough time or the resources to overcome walls? They should also have the ability to make devices with will "guess" the combination for them.

For example, imagine three tiers of lockpicks. The lowest tier of lockpick, when used on a lockbox, will tell the user what the first digit of the combination to the lockbox is. So a low end lockpick used on a low end lockbox would reduce the time to open it from 100 minutes (1000 possible combinations at 1 attempt/6 seconds) to 10 minutes (100 possible combinations at 1 attempt/6 seconds). Mid tier lockpicks would tell the user the first two digits of the combination of the lockbox (and mid tier lockboxes should have an increase in number of digits in the code so that using an equivalent tier lockpick on an equivalent tier lockbox should always result in the same amount of time required to crack it), and a high tier lockpick would give the first three digits of the code.

So that way, someone with high tier lockpicks (large time invested in acquiring the tool for opening locks quickly) who effortlessly be able to open the lowest tier of lockbox, but would still need 10 minutes to open a high tier lockbox (5 total digits in the combination, with the first three being revealed by the high tier lockpick).

Invaders would also need to pick the locks of doors to get inside houses if they don't want to spend time breaking through the side of the house (which will take longer than normal, since they're trying to break a protected block). The simple wooden door would not have a lock, but higher tier doors, made out of copper or iron or steel, would have increasingly complex locks. Skeleton keys could be produced, in various tiers (various material bases) to pick the locks of doors. A given skeleton key would have, say, a 25% chance of opening a door of its tier, a 50% chance of opening the tier below it, and a 100% chance of opening the lock of a door two tiers below it, while it would have, say, a 5% chance of opening a lock a tier above it, and a 1% (or 0%) chance of opening a lock two tiers above it.

This would, once again, deter the extremely lazy from getting inside, but would not stop someone who devotes the effort to getting good lockpicks, or just getting a very large number of them.

Basically, for every defense, and every level of it (bad, good, better, best), there needs to be a countermeasure (bad, good, better, best) that mitigates the time required to bypass it.

Example:

I have a city with steel-reinforced stone walls (best wall material) five blocks thick. It will take someone with a pickaxe (bad tool) 1 hour to tunnel a 2x1x5 path through the wall.

Someone with a catapult (good tool) could break through that wall in, say, 30 minutes.

Someone with a siege ballista (better tool) could break through that wall in 20 minutes.

Someone with a trebuchet (best tool) could break through it in 10 minutes.

If that wall was a simple wooden pallisade (bad wall material), someone with an axe (bad tool) could go through it in 10 minutes.

Someone with a trebuchet could go through it in 1 minute 40 seconds.

tl;dr: Have a means of claiming an area, designating who belongs to it and has build privileges. People without privileges cannot build in the claimed area, but can freely move around it, but it takes significantly longer for them to break blocks in the area. Introduce different kind of wall materials (wood palisade, reinforced wall, steel-reinforced wall, etc) that require greatly increase amounts of time to break through, and also introduce different kind of siege weapons or tools that mitigate the amount of time required to break in while still requiring an effort on the part of the vandal. Implement different kinds of doors with different qualities of locks, and implement different kinds of skeleton keys which are used to open locked doors. Implement lockboxes of various qualities that have combination locks (3 to 5 digit, e.g.) that take time to pick, and then introduce lockpicks which tell the user what the combination to a lock is (1 digit for lowest tier lockpicks, up to 3 for the highest tier) to mitigate the time spent guessing combinations.

tl;dr of the tl;dr: Implement a means of claiming an area for a person or group. Implement defensive measures (walls, door locks, lockboxes) that significantly increase the amount of time required to get inside a settlement and taking its resources. Implement various countermeasures (siege weaponry, skeleton keys, lockpicks) that mitigate the increase in time while still making it non-trivial.

It should be an arms race between the civilized nations of a server and the barbarian horde (griefers) -- the city builds a pallisade to keep the griefers out? They build a catapult to take the pallisade down. The griefers built a catapult? The city upgrades to reinforced walls. The barbarians got in and walked right in my house and stole my precious, precious damaged gems? I'll build a locking door to keep them out. The citizens have locks on their doors? The resourceful thief will make skeleton keys to get inside. The thieves got in through my locked door and stole my things? I'll make a lockbox to keep my things safe. A thief notices a lockbox? Good thing he brought a long a set of lockpicks to help him find the combination, and so on, and so on.

I like the idea that protection just fortifies, instead of making it invulnerable. But how would you protect things when a player isn't there; when an invader has hours to just whack at it? Because there are going to be people hell-bent on breaking in just for the sake of breaking in.

also i was wondering if there will ever be a way to put gems and such on the ground? like displaying them?

or maybe mayke a glass box with a key for them so you could display them safely in a town museum or such.

there should be some container overhaul. like glass cupboards and pallets of planks or sticks. But that's a topic for another thread.

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I should also add that Haven and Hearth has a system for handling trespassers. I'm not exactly sure on all the specifics, but, basically, when you trespass on someone's claimed land, you leave a "trail" behind after you leave that can be followed, so that someone can track down the thief and get their things back.

Maybe when someone trespasses on claimed ground, they leave a scent behind them. An item could be created which would allow a person for find and follow this trail, provided not too much time had elapsed, so that it would be possible to track down the thief and get your stuff back.

Example:

I have just trespassed on claimed property, and am leaving the claimed property with goods from the claimed property. As a thief, I will leave a trail behind me.

Every block I pass over, once I leave the claimed property, that I have not already passed over, is invisibly marked as part of my trail that can be followed with the proper item (or a bloodhound, I guess). This trail will go for 1000 blocks, and will last for, say, 12 hours. So to avoid leading someone back to my own base, where I will be storing my ill-gotten gains, I need to run around over 1000 blocks, looping and curving and going this way and that, backtracking and making multiple false trails (just like someone in real life trying to avoid pursuit could do) to eat up those 1000 blocks that will get marked. A clever thief, knowing that his trail would be followed, would go in the exact opposite direction that their camp lies, leaving a trail pointing in the wrong direction, and then would loop back around and head home. A stupid thief could walk right back to their home and get away scot-free if no one hunts them down before their trail goes cold and disappears.

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I like the idea that protection just fortifies, instead of making it invulnerable. But how would you protect things when a player isn't there; when an invader has hours to just whack at it? Because there are going to be people hell-bent on breaking in just for the sake of breaking in.

That's why you live in a city with other players. If you can prove yourself to be a realiable trade ally/good person, people will defend your property if they see someone trying to break in. If you're all alone in the wilderness, your primary form of protection comes from being hard to find.

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I like the idea that protection just fortifies, instead of making it invulnerable. But how would you protect things when a player isn't there; when an invader has hours to just whack at it? Because there are going to be people hell-bent on breaking in just for the sake of breaking in.

Thick walls. I really do think it should take at least an hour to get through a city wall. Even with the right equipment. An hour to go through a wooden palisade with an axe might not dissuade the random griefer who joins the server and wants to fuck shit up, but a steel-reinforced stone wall that would take literal hours to go through with a pickaxe might.

Of course, then someone would just go UNDER the wall, and we'd need some way of making sure people don't do that.

All these people who complain about making it "hard" or "tedious" to grief -- that's the whole damn point. I don't enjoy some random 12 year old asshat just waltzing in and within five minutes of being on the server having stolen all of the shit I worked for days or weeks to acquire. And I'm sorry if the only way you can have fun is by fucking over other people, but you should not be allowed to have fun at someone else's expense. A lot of griefing I see is done by puerile little pissants who wouldn't dare do anything remotely similar in real life because they know that there are real consequences to their actions. Since there can't be "real" consequences in a video game (aside from bans for cheating and excessive griefing), the only option you have is to make it so god damn tedious that no one but the most determined little shit with literal hours on his hands and nothing better to do can get in and steal your stuff.

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That's why you live in a city with other players. If you can prove yourself to be a realiable trade ally/good person, people will defend your property if they see someone trying to break in. If you're all alone in the wilderness, your primary form of protection comes from being hard to find.

See, people keep on saying shit like this, but the only reason this works in real life is because there is almost always someone around.

If I'm on a SMP server that has 20 users, maybe only 10 of us will be on at any one peak time. Maybe on average only 3 or 4 of us are on at once. And those people are usually split between several different settlements.

Just to take some examples from previous servers where I've played on, there have been multiple times where I have lived in a populated city (more than 10 residents) and griefing still happened because there isn't someone there 24/7/365 to stop no-life assholes from stealing and breaking shit.

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Create a NPC system of cities (including INN, Shops of weapons, tools, raw ores, Restaurants), and this cities can be bought by a player to own this city (only accept one buy), or include his as citizen.

This system create life in SSP and SMP (and can be choose into world creation options).

Some cities can be underground with a entrance in upper ground. This feature add underground forest and animal to ecosystem.

Into the cities, the citizen can register into NPC guild (SSP), or NPC/players guild(SMP). Into the guild, the player can level up skills and learn other guild only skills. Each guild has unique skills, then the player must travel around the world to learn new skills. For example: Only in the Fish City, you can learn Fisher skill to improve this ability. If the player do not learn this skill, only can fish a bottle or sticks. But each player can only learn a limited number of skills, if the player want to learn a new skill, he has to forget other skill.

If any player has a house in a city, he has to pay monthly the tax, but instead he receives goods. In NPC city the player can not change the list of goods but if the player buy a city, he can change these monthly goods.

This system can be used into SSP and SMP.

I think this system is too strict.

First of all, it depends on finding already established NPC cities, instead of allowing people to found their own. Secondly, it enforces taxes and offers no model of a city without it.

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All these people who complain about making it "hard" or "tedious" to grief -- that's the whole damn point. I don't enjoy some random 12 year old asshat just waltzing in and within five minutes of being on the server having stolen all of the shit I worked for days or weeks to acquire.

So just protect the blocks so they can't be broken. It's stupid to make a system that is designed to prevent griefing full stop, but intentionally designing it in a way that it won't prevent griefing full stop. If you're not comfortable with making griefing impossible then don't recommend something that does the same thing.

EDIT: To be clear, I don't think there's going to ever be any agreement between the "griefing yes" and "griefing no" camps, but these truth-is-in-the-middle answers aren't gonna make anyone happy.

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Maybe control greifers by putting a bounty system in place?

If a player enters your controlled area and takes something from you/ breaks blocks/ sets fires/ etc. he or she gets a certain bounty put on his/her head. The more grevious the offense, the higher the bounty.

The mayor/ sherriff could issue warrants for the offenders, and they would be hunted for their crimes by any player who felt they were up to it. They could kill the wanted person, and return to the sherriff for their reward, as well as loot the corpse without penalty. Any item that was stolen is able to be picked up without penalty as well.

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So just protect the blocks so they can't be broken. It's stupid to make a system that is designed to prevent griefing full stop, but intentionally designing it in a way that it won't prevent griefing full stop. If you're not comfortable with making griefing impossible then don't recommend something that does the same thing.

EDIT: To be clear, I don't think there's going to ever be any agreement between the "griefing yes" and "griefing no" camps, but these truth-is-in-the-middle answers aren't gonna make anyone happy.

Where does he suggest it to be made impossible to destroy? I only find suggestion making it very very hard and tedious to destroy, and I like that concept.

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