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weylin

Renewal of long abandoned areas

9 posts in this topic

When a chunk is stripped of loose stone and naturally generated plants, this leaves it a bit of a wasteland for new players trying to start on multiplayer servers.

 

What I suggest is that every chunk has a tracking entity which keeps tabs on how long it has been since a player last loaded it.

The longer the time period, the more rocks and plants that will be generated on that chunk when it is loaded in the future.

If the chunk already has enough rocks and plants, it wont generate anything.

Chunks that see a lot of activity wont regenerate, so players needn't worry about their town getting overrun by random clutter.

 

This could also have a role in eroding player-placed player-made blocks that haven't been visited for several months or years (in game)

This would allow nomads to eventually come full circle to find their old land replinished with naturally occuring resources.

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Plants such as flowers, tall grass and saplings already regenerate on their own when the climate is habitable and a player is in the area.

 

Rocks would take hundreds if not thousands of years to come back, so it doesn't make much sense for them to regenerate.

 

All of the resources being gone around spawn is a pretty common theme on any popular Minecraft server. The smart servers acknowledge this problem and create ways for players to get out into new areas that haven't been completely stripped dry such as portals or through the use of plugins or command blocks.

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Plants such as flowers, tall grass and saplings already regenerate on their own when the climate is habitable and a player is in the area.

It would be nice if these things regenerated on their own when the chunks are unloaded, sort of like how wild crops appear even if you aren't in the area (I think? Is that right?)

 

Rocks would take hundreds if not thousands of years to come back, so it doesn't make much sense for them to regenerate.

 

Also, rocks do come back quite quickly. It wouldn't be super super fast, but not thousands of years.

 

All of the resources being gone around spawn is a pretty common theme on any popular Minecraft server. The smart servers acknowledge this problem and create ways for players to get out into new areas that haven't been completely stripped dry such as portals or through the use of plugins or command blocks.

 

Just because it's a common theme, doesn't mean that it's a good thing. The very fact that servers must accommodate for this and create workarounds shows that the stripping of resources is not a desirable thing.I'm all for most of weylin's ideas, except the erosion of player-placed blocks (this, I think, would become annoying fast.) unless it took place over hundreds of years for less durable materials like wood, and thousands of years for more durable like stone or bricks. Maybe thatch would break down within 10-20 years, this could be a limiting factor for the lowest tier building block.

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It would be nice if these things regenerated on their own when the chunks are unloaded, sort of like how wild crops appear even if you aren't in the area (I think? Is that right?)

 
Also, rocks do come back quite quickly. It wouldn't be super super fast, but not thousands of years.

 

Just because it's a common theme, doesn't mean that it's a good thing. The very fact that servers must accommodate for this and create workarounds shows that the stripping of resources is not a desirable thing.

 

It's not right. Wild crops regenerate when you load the chunk. They do not appear until you actually come back.

 

Nowhere in that link is a reference to time. It states about how farmers have to deal with rocks each year, but that is in tilled soil, which obviously is a more fluid-like material than soil that has been undisturbed. I also stated "hundreds if not thousands of years."

 

To put this into perspective, let's say it takes 100 in game years for rocks to appear on the surface again. How exactly do we do this calculation? On year 1100 do all of the rocks suddenly regenerate? Do they regenerate slowly over time? There are 96 days in the default TFC year, so 960 days for the rocks to regenerate. At 20 minutes per day, this comes out to 13 days, 8 hours real life time of a server constantly running. If we assume there are around 10 rocks in each chunk (16x16 block area) that would round out to be around 1 rock appearing every single real life day. This could also quickly result in areas that are completely covered in rocks, if no players are picking them up in the area, but they do wander through and keep loading the chunk.

 

Another thing that needs to be kept in mind is that the small ore pieces and sticks you find on the ground are the exact same block as the rocks on the ground, called "Debris." When a piece of debris generates, it scans the surrounding area for ore veins, trees or a river/beach biome. If it finds an ore vein, the debris usually becomes a small ore piece. If it finds trees, or a river/beach biome, the debris usually becomes a stick. If it doesn't find anything, the debris becomes a rock. If debris regenerates over time, it essentially becomes an infinite source of ore in areas where there is a vein nearby.

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Servers need to solve this problems by carrying out programs to help new comers - just like any society.

 

1.  Hostels - Large buildings with beds (hand-me-down straw beds if you want) where new players can reset their spawn points within the towns, villages, cities so death is not so scary.

2.  Community Chest - Free stuff (used weapons, tools, so on) for new players.  I saw this in the one TFC server I played in.

3.  Community Kitchens - As cities and villages should have a more stable foundation, and surplus, when it comes to food they can help support the hungry new players till they can get on their feet.

4.  Give them a mule and saddle, some gear, point West (or East or North) and says, "Go forth!"  No matter how many players play on a server the world of TFC is going to be huge.

 

The problem you are talking about also effects the village people* as they need resources also - new players become the miners, farmers and frontier people who can supply the old civilized centers with the raw material they need in return for finished goods.  Don't look for the 'fix' with the mod.  Look for ways to solve it within the server's social network.  

 

*"YMCA....hehe"

 

Once again, I believe that TFC is best played on a server (if you can find one that has no griefers or tosses such people to the bears).

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I imagine that this suggestion could be implemented as a server tweakable option.

 

The server could set values or enable/disable certain bits of it.

If you dont want cheaply made abandoned buildings to decay over long periods of no contact, that can be disabled.

If you want only certain things to regenerate while you're away, such as only organics, that could be configured.

 

This isn't entirely based on realism, but believabilty and even more importantly, preventing the stagnation of long running servers.

After having a map on for several real months, every easily acquired little tidbit in a 10 mile radius around spawn gets collected, and new players have to walk for an hour to come across new untouched frontier, rather than repurposing a long abandoned area.

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Greater variety in spawning locations could help this.  By this I mean that players spawn in different areas when they log into the server for the first time or die.  This could be done individually by server owners using commands. I think it would also be interesting to see varied spawns in single-player, so that you don't spawn in the same relative Z each time you start a world, although the world spawn changing over time would be less desirable.

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One way I've seen this dealt with on vanilla servers is a random spawn feature, where you press a button and get randomly teleported to a location within a certain radius (3000m?) of true spawn.

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Honestly i don't see the problem with regenerating rocks, Especially if it was done as OP suggest which would stop rocks from appearing in populated areas. And  honestly what's the problem with infinite access to materials? It's not like someone who has come somewhere and gotten metal tools will be using nuggets for anything other then prospecting.

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