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Introduction

Hello everyone! /u/Sharpcastle33 and I have had a long week of planning out the tech trees for First Light and the next iteration, but we aren’t quite ready to show it off to you all just yet. Of course we couldn’t just leave you without a dev post wednesday, so--seeing as we’ve gained quite a lot of attention in these last couple weeks--I decided to compile everything that we’ve worked on, are working on, and plan to work in into one ginormous post to get you all up to speed.

I would like to make a quick note, some of you have apparently got the idea that us saying that First Light is estimated to release in April means it will be out the Sunday after next. Let me be very clear, we estimated a full month’s worth of time because we absolutely cannot pin down a date at the current level of development. We aim for April if there are no delays, but that is not a guarantee--if it were we would simply have already announced the date! However we assure you that we are indeed very close, and would not have announced First Light if we were not sure if we could deliver. In the meantime I hope you guys enjoy the weekly posts, comment your thoughts and ideas, and hop on the discord to talk with us directly.

On another note, the previous dev post wednesday’s discussion was incredibly fruitful, and we are patching together a draft of the rewards for First Light. The official list will be present in the post announcing the launch date for the beta, but that could still be a little ways off. Feel free to continue discussion there if you have any new ideas.

And on that note, time to get you all...

Up to Speed

Why 3.0 Failed

“People were very angry with the 3.0 staff, due to the long wait for 3.0, it's resource issues, and the failure of the staff to maintain the server as a desirable place to play.” That was really the quote that started this project, the next iteration of CivEx. We’ve kept these criticisms at heart, and while we know it has been a long wait again--and it will still be a while yet--we’re doing our best to keep in touch and engage with the community. We’ve paid close attention to the issues of the past and hope to give you guys a well thought-out experience from the get-go, even in First Light.

Engaging the Community

The administrative team of 3.0 during development was, for lack of a better word, uncommunicative. Unfortunately, that failure continued well into the release of that iteration and was a significant contributing factor to its downfall. From the beginning our team has strived to fix that. However, we pledged to go further. We aimed to truly engage the community with development and to get your guys ideas as to the future of CivEx. The amazing thing was, for a while the community stepped up. The Focus Groups were made, people discussed all sorts of interesting ideas for how to improve upon the gameplay if the classic Civ Genre.

Although much of that initial hype has faded, we would like to revive this enthusiasm has we head toward First Light, and even during it. Thus, we will be opening the #suggestion_channel in the discord to the public. It will not be a place for everyone to suggest new features, instead we will be focusing it on very specific topics, changing them as development progresses. For example, we might ask for suggestions for tech trees. We’ll provide some basic details as to the situation and you guys can throw in your ten cents. We hope this can speed up the planning process so that we can focus on implementation. However, it is not to be a place where you will ask questions about development. You certainly can do that, but we would prefer to answer them in the comments below our dev posts, much like this one.

Custom Mobs

The original plan for custom mobs in the next iteration was to have them completely replace the vanilla set. These mobs would range from simple spawns to outright bosses on the level of the Ender Dragon. However, the mobs of First Light and the next iteration will be different from this original intention, and there are several reasons for the changes.

Firstly, we don’t have anyone specifically dedicated to making them as was the plan at the beginning. Thus, we have been unable to pump out enough of these custom mobs to really justify a complete replacement of the vanilla ones--at least for First Light. If anyone is familiar with the way MythicMobs configurations are made and is interested in helping with development, you can either develop the configs on your own and submit them to us, or apply for a position on the development team via modmail. We would very much appreciate aid here.

Secondly, we intend to have a handful of special “encounters” in which a cohesive group of mobs with greater rewards can appear. The eventual goal is to have these generate as intricate dynamic events which can be tailored based on lore events that are occuring in the world. This will help make the world feel alive rather than empty and littered with fragments of the past.

Thirdly, in making these bosses we realized we’ve more or less just made tougher mobs. Making a good boss mob is not that simple and serious work needs to go in to challenging encounters that we can reasonably have drop great rewards. Simply giving a mob more health or damage is not what makes a boss challenging. A challenging boss must require multiple, coordinated players with good gear to take down, which means it needs mechanics that encourage that kind of fight. It needs to be able to harass multiple players, prevent itself from being cheesed, and have the ability to shift the tide of the battle if things begin to sour. A good boss needs interesting mechanics, like phases of some sort, that tie these parts all together and make it more than a giant walking health pool with loot. Thus we are re-evaluating bosses and they likely will not be present at the launch of First Light.

The Map and Fractures

Essentially, and as most of you should know, the next iteration is based upon there being a single main world and several other smaller ones all with a unique, customized setting. There will be no nether or end. Instead all resources in the game are redistributed across the worlds in various forms, and people will have to really explore to understand where they all are. In First Light we have put a great deal of effort into ensuring that the worlds are of high quality. Despite it being a Beta, the map and fractures will greatly contribute to quality play. First Light will also give us a good chance to really see how players interact with these alternate worlds, and if they decide to set up inside them.

Crops

We originally planned on having custom crops, but we’ve discovered that it would take a considerable amount of dev time to get it working and thus have decided to avoid it for the time being. That does not mean that there will be no changes from vanilla gameplay however. Alongside the standard RealisticBiomes and CropControl for the CivEx experience, we will be implementing a plugin called Arability which will be able to prevent you from being able to grow certain crops in the same biome of another world. It’s a rather rough patch, perhaps, but it will allow us to get First Light out to you guys earlier. We will likely look at this again during First Light.

Resources and Distribution

There are two completely custom ores that will be present in First Light -- Adamantine and Delirium. They have unique item textures that are present in a resource pack that will be available to download at launch. We are also adding a few existing items as ores, those being glowstone and quartz as of now.

Each region has its own ore tables, but they are loosely tiered around 3 rarities of resources. Rare resources, like gold, emeralds, adamantine, and delirium, typically are the primary resource of a region. Few regions have them, and they rarely contain more than one rare resource. Uncommon resources are glowstone, diamonds, and quartz. Some regions have them, and they usually aren’t the primary resource of a region. Common resources are coal, iron, redstone, and lapis. Many regions have them, and they are never the primary resource of a region. Regions don’t always have the same amount of each resource, but there are usually 2-3 standard rates so it isn’t very difficult to tell whether one region has more of a resource than another once you really start writing down the drops you guys get.

Overall, ores feel quite common compared to other servers which makes for a far superior mining experience.

Citadel/Bastions

As of right now, this post is mostly up to date with the current state of our plans and implementation, however there are a few complications that have arisen due to issues with renamed items working as reinforcement materials. We’re sure we will get it to work, but it may differ slightly from the original plan. Furthermore, we would love for you guys to bring up your ideas about exile and prison pearls, and how they might be handled, as the last discussion didn’t go as far as we’d hoped and it hasn’t been a focus for us these past few weeks.

Potion Brewing

We’re discussing a total revamp of the potion brewing system, potentially including new factorymod-based (or factorymod-like) machines. We will go into detail about this in the future once we’ve fully fleshed out the idea, but essentially it will be based around an item aspect system, drawing power from certain items properties with the effects being based on the purity of the properties in question in the item, and the combination of them amongst other things. We hope to make it a very interesting experience and leave the potential for recipe discovery.

Enchantment

The custom enchanting plugin is essentially complete, however we have had very little time to test the enchantments themselves. We would like to have at least some assurance that every enchantment works before we launch First Light, but it is not a priority at the moment. You can learn more about the enchanting in CivEx in this post and this post.

Combat

The original plan was to have multiple custom armor sets and that is still a goal for us, however all we have thus far is a proof of concept that shows it is possible to do. It is probable that we will see this become a focus after the launch of First Light, with a live implementation for you all to test out. Indeed, this kind of thing is exactly what we hope to do during the beta--while you guys are playing in a legitimate civ experience we’ll be pumping out new mobs, changing recipes, testing out new features, and modifying configs.

Teaser

And, seeing as you’ve made it to the end of this monstrously long dissertation of a dev post wednesday, here’s your weekly teaser...