cevkiv

And that's why they will have the whole server on their ass. I won't steal objects, I'm gonna steal a house. I will dig a hole in the floor and hide there.

Unless you have a system in place to where I can examine my chest and it will tell me who took what from it, then how will we know whose ass to get on?

I don't know about you, but I'm not talking about "griefing". I'm talking about thievery and raiding, which I believe should be a fun and interesting mechanic for both the owner of items and the thief/raider.

I personally want to avoid having NPCs, but NPC guards that patrol the streets and confront strangers is, in my opinion, a FAR better option than protecting land.

Perhaps there could be citizenship cards, and those who don't have them should try to avoid guard confrontations, which could lead to their death or imprisonment.

I don't think you understand. Some people do not find having their shit stolen to be fun and interesting. They view it as hours of their work being taken away from them.

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.

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.

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.

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 joined this server cause it was TFC i'd be pretty let down if it wasn't anymore. D:

Ditto.

Lol - I haven't been here long, but I've hoovered up as much info as I can.. Part of my effort to convert more friends to TFC prior to upping and making semi-public a server. Dwarf Fortress themed server anyone?

I would love a DF themed server. One server I played on I made a mountain fortress and struck the earth

I guess he's busy moving.

Alright. Assuming you have dug a shaft straight down into the ground, dig a tunnel in each of the cardinal directions, using the propick as you go. These tunnels will need to be 25 blocks long each.

Eventually, you will notice that the ore seems to be concentrated more in one direction than another.

Proceed to the end of the tunnel where the concentration is highest, or to the spot in the tunnel where the concentration is highest if it tapers off before the end of the tunnel, and dig another group of tunnels to each cardinal direction. Repeat this process until you hit ore.

If you find that you seem to be where the vein should be, dig up and down.

I know, right?

You know, everyone is talking about cast metal being weak, but that's not really always true. Some cast metals are more prone to fracture (cast iron being the big example) because of the larger crystal structure that forms as they cool, but they can still be quite strong under compression. Even high quality cannons were commonly made out of cast iron up into the late 18th century.

I think that's less because they wanted to make them that way, and more because they didn't really have a better way of making them.

The Bessemer process didn't come into existence until around the time of the American Civil War, and it was the first cheap way to make steel.

Seriously, though. I can't remember the source, but I remember reading about a mass grave that had been found that was linked to a medieval battle. Almost all the swords that were in the grave were cast iron.

The rank and file, if they had swords, had cheap, mass produced swords. The important people had the stuff that took time and skill to make.

I've got a giant green beanbag for a head, and I endorse this post.

Nice thought, but cast tools are quite poor quality. This is because the metal cools as-is, whereas in proper blacksmithing, the metal is treated, hammered and shaped in the proper manner so that applied stress is properly distributed. The cast metal tools would have a very poor strength as opposed to true smithed tools. If we DID do this, you would be sacrificing tool strength and longevity for ease of production.

Which is what they used to do for swords.

If they're smaller than regular chunks of ore, so that they give one quarter the amount of metal, they should heat four times as fast, since the volume being heated is smaller.

Green wood isn't that readily flammable. Red hot metal would certainly burn it, but as you are just trying to rush out basic stuff, I can't see it making a huge difference.

If we were being super pedantic, you would wait a year before burning the logs you cut down. How bad would that be ? :L :L

I'll have to dig my book on blacksmithing out, but if I recall correctly green hickory actually burns hotter than dry hickory.

bioxx says this is a no-go.

Would that happen to be because it would add a crap ton of items and there's not enough IDs?

Nevermind, I figured it out. It's just incredibly finicky about what direction you have to be facing to place the sluice

Alright, this is ungodly frustrating. Whether or not the sluice will place seems to be entirely up to random chance. I had one placed earlier, and then moved it because I couldn't find any gravel. I now have dug a second set up for a sluice that is the same as the first and now it won't place.

That was actually false

The tube was SUPPOSED to contain ebola, but someone in the lab fucked up and it wasn't actually in there. The dudes got away with their lives intact, if not their reputation

I was told it contained Ebola Reston, which is harmless to humans.

Will someone please explain how to get the sluice to work, exactly? It would be nice if these update notes included instructions. I can place the sluice, I can even get the little water drop to turn blue, but I can't get it to actually do anything.

What is the recipe for the gold pan?

I'm reminded of two army researchers who once did the thing where you fan air from the top of a test tube towards your nose to see if there's a smell without straight up snorting the stuff.

The test tube contained ebolavirus.

If the new version does come out in the next few hours, I might record a Let's Play, or whatever it's called.