Sting_Auer

The leader of the town could, for example, make it to where only designated builders are allowed to build, or people can only build within a certain area (i.e. their property). People who build without permission would be attacked by the guards. A jail system could also be put in place, with guards binding you with rope or something and forcing you into a "jail area" designated by a "Jail Obelisk". The system would obviously need to be tweaked and fine tuned after gameplay testing is done. My idea is mostly for larger towns and whatnot and how to defend them, not small-scale defenses. However, the creator of a Town Obelisk could easily set it to where people can't open chests that they don't own. I don't know how the coding would be done. Theoretically, the most complex part of the worker system would be pathing. The resource gathering would be a simple equation involving the specific job, resource density, tool tier, and how long the worker was gone.

Well, you could take my idea and add in a requirement to "pay" the soldier NPC's every time some are spawned to respond to a threat. That would further balance it by not only needing to keep their tool racks equipped with weapons and armor and also clean up the mess that the atackers made, but also needing to pay the soldier NPC's. This would encourage people to pay taxes and would encourage mayors to levy taxes and keep the barracks in good repair. I think my system is one of the most "sandbox-y" systems. It allows the leader to set tax rates, groups in their town, permissions for those groups, and creates defenses for the towns while still leaving them vulnerable. With the diminishing returns of the Town Obelisk, you will need to make more towns at a certain point, or expand outside of the protected zone. My Obelisks system could be expanded to include worker NPC's for different professions (Miner Obelisk, Blacksmith Obelisk, etc.). Obviously they would be taxed by the nearest Town Obelisk and would need to be payed by their owner/employer (creator of the Worker Obelisk), and would need to be supplied with tools, food, and housing. Miner NPC's could have "work flags" that could be numbered. The Miner would walk to the first detected "#1" Miner Flag first, and would follow the instructions put on it; Walk to flag #whatever, walk that direction, mine that direction until you find ores, only mine whatever ores, etc. (Think Lemmings). Obviously this brings the problem of chunks being loaded. Simple enough to fix; Just don't have NPC's load chunks. First, make chunks be saved with a value that says if they have ores, trees, or other resources, and what type of resource they have. Then, when a Worker NPC exits the loaded area, it does a quick check for the "Resource" value. The NPC disappears, and shows back up again after a certain amount of time with an inventory full of whatever resource they were going to go gather. When an NPC goes to a chunk that has been exploited previously, it checks how many times it has been exploited and how many of whatever resource there was when it was first checked. If it has been exploited too many times, the NPC doesn't exit and returns to its home bed. Of course, if there aren't any of the target resources to begin with, the NPC doesn't return with any. Something that could be done is for NPC's to leave notes in their Worker Obelisk for the original builder to check. These notes could contain information about how many resources are left in the areas being worked, if they need more food/pay/whatever, etc. None of the values would be exact, apart from pay, and would be estimations ("There's still a large amount of Cassiterite in our mine", or "The Iron mine is almost stripped clean".)

You can also get swords, ingots, and helmets.

I personally think that the random drops from zombies is fine. They're really rare, they are unique items only attainable through that, and they give people more of an incentive to fight monsters (This last one I don't completely agree with, but meh)

How about a Town Obelisk (A constructed object, think Nether Portal) that, when constructed out of things like obsidian or gem blocks, would create an area around it that makes people not on the team take longer to place or break things and need to hold right click on a chest for a certain amount of time to open it. The builders of the obelisk could create groups that people would fall under, and these groups would have permissions (i.e. Workers wouldn't be able to build or break easily in the city, leaders could do whatever they wanted to, etc.). The Obelisk could be infinitely scaled, but it gives diminishing returns on its range every time you make it bigger. The creator of the obelisk could make it to where their obelisk becomes a potential spawn point for people who just entered the server., and would be put into an assigned group that the Obelisk Maker designates (New arrivals could automatically become "Peasants" for example.) As for defending a city while its inhabitants are offline: Nothing too complex it needed. Have a "barracks obelisk" be added as a constructible object just like the regular obelisk, only cheaper, that would check for nearby beds and equipped weapon/armor racks to supply spawned soldiers. It would spawn a soldier NPC for each bed that would defend the city against hostiles. What is recognized as "Hostile" can be set by the person who built the nearest Town Obelisk (People breaking blocks without permission, people entering a certain area without permission, etc.). Soldier NPC's can open iron doors (They are only defensive, so the explanation is that they have all the keys), and in order to destroy the Town Obelisk, you must first destroy all of the Barracks Obelisk's. Soldier NPC's could be recruited to follow a person of sufficient rank if they ask, making large-scale warfare possible without having a server with hundreds of people playing on it. The balancing thing about the barracks system is that, while powerful, it still requires maintenence by a human, and the barracks can't automatically repair damage.

I personally love the color of bismuth. I plan on having everyone in my team when I launch my server use bismuth helmets to identify each other.

I typically design my structures with efficiency and utility in mind, not so much aesthetics. I'm working on that though, because whenever I lead a team in a minecraft server people get mad at me because I accidentally put it across that THEY can't decorate either ;_;

It would be nice if some primitive electrical stuff were added. There could be early mechanical things (water wheels, windmills, etc.), then later, you could replace these with primitive electrical things, like lights, electrical industry things, etc.

I do what I want jk, I hope we can ride them into war.

Sorry about that I looked on the first page and 2 pages back and didn't find anything.

woah woah woah, there's bears? What? Is there an update that I missed or something?