Another Civ Guide

Disclaimer: This is not the only newfriend guide out there - others have come before this. To see others check them out on the civwiki page here: https://civwiki.org/wiki/Getting_Started_Guide . There is a lot of good content there. What i've tried to do in this post is provide the minimum a new player should know to get off the ground with as little pain as possible, I can't claim this is the best guide, it probably isn't, but it should help.

Civmc is like other civ servers - it has many of its core mechanics changed by a set of plugins you can read about here on the wiki. These changes make the server very unique compared to other minecraft experiences, its not for everyone, but it encourages the evolution of a very different type of minecraft experience.

Block Protection

To protect blocks there are 2 plugins/mechanics: Citadel/Namelayer and Bastion

Citadel & Namelayer go hand in hand and let you protect individual blocks with reinforcements, consuming 1 reinforcement block/item per block reinforced.

• Stone - 50 breaks
• Iron - 300 breaks
• Diamond - 2000 breaks

(In the nether these are replaced with Netherbrick block, gold ingots, and ancient debris respectably)

So if you made a house that was built out of say 2,000 blocks, you'd use an additional 2,000 stone to reinforce the entire house. You usually use iron and diamond to reinforce things like chests and other objects. You can cut corners, you could not reinforce anything, but it makes griefing very hard.

Reinforcements are on groups. You start with a default group named after your user name. You can make your own new groups, or use the public ones you're invited&added to depending on what you're doing. You can create & join many namelayer groups.

The other protection comes from Bastions

There are 2 types of bastions Vault Bastions and City Bastions.

Vault Bastions are more powerful, more expensive, but protect a smaller area.

City bastions provide basic protection across a 100x100 square up to sky limit that require you to be on the group to place reinforced blocks (so baddies can't come into that area and place reinforced blocks to grief)

Catching Greifers and Raiders

To log what goes on when you're not online there is plugin called jukealert that modifies reinforced jukeboxes and noteblocks into 'snitches' that monitor a 23x23x23 cube around the block (11 radius away from the block in every direction).

The jukeboxes will record events for you to see when you log back on, the logs will show you if someone breaks something, kills an animal, opens a chest, places stuff, enters/leaves. If it happened within 11 blocks of the jukebox. image of a snitch log

Noteblocks don't record events, they just notify you in chat when someone enters/leaves their area, if you're online.... there is also a bot that relays those notifications to discords with the bot set up (most civs do). The in-chat notifications come with a proximity distance telling you the general direction and distance to the snitch hit.

This helps everyone know who are the baddies and what they did in the event there is griefing or other weird activity.

[Example of a snitch log]() so i can go to this juke i'm at now. and see nothing's happened, just people entering leaving the area.

Individuals and groups will commonly maintain hundreds or thousands of snitches throughout their territory and beyond.

Punishing Griefers?

There is a plugin claled exile pearl.

In short: If you are killed by another player, and that player has an ender pearl in their hotbar, they will pearl you. This confines you to the nether until you are freed.

If it happens to you, do not fret, its not the end of the world, usually. If you are innocent you will be freed. Hostile groups will use this to grief players but you shouldn't need to worrya bout that - as long as you are reaosnable and don't raid/grief, you should not be pearled. (or at the very least not pearled for long). The pearl is turned into an item that exists in the overworld, the location of the pearl can be accessed from the /ep showall command. If the holders will not free the pearl, others can try to get to the pearl and free the pearl themselves. Pearlings can lead to greater conflicts.

As far as it impacts a new player: Because of the afformentioned "snitches" - if (or more like when) someone catches you raiding, they will usually try to come pearl you. so don't raid, its seldom worth it, and you will be caught, it is virtually impossible to insure there are no jukes catching your activities when up to no-good.

The Nether

The nether is a 1:1 nether that exists parallel to the overworld. Nether portals are not vanilla, however. The map is filled with ~20 Pre-placed portals that were created on world-creation before the start-of-the-world. It is through these portals you can access the nether and return to the overworld. Some of these portals are "public" and some of them are private, or very private.

While the S.P.Q.R. does not control a portal directly, we're fortunate to have negotiated access through an ally - if you need nether access you can be added.

Production is Different

One other big plugin that makes things different is Factorymod.

Which adds a bunch of "factories" to the game.

Factories are just 1 furnace placed next to 1 crafting table placed next to 1 or 2 chests. like pictured here - although they can be arranged differently. You can see all the different factories there are in the 2nd image. we have about half of them available for public, some of them are not useful, others are expensive we're working towards.

you can see all the factories using the /fm command which brings up this GUI you can use to navigate around and see costs and recipes of all factories.

Pictured is also example of the startup cost for a "basic smelter". Once you have the chests, table, and furnace arranged, you put in 8 stacks of stone and 1 charcoal, then you use a stick item in your hand to left click on the factory to create the factory.

You control which recipe is used by left clicking on the crafting table part of the factory.

The Factories consume charcoal every time a recipe is used; you put the charcoal it consumes into the furnace. You put the materials into the chest - the factory replaces the input with output materials in the chest. Also pictured is the basic stone recipe - it takes 64 cobblestone and turns it into 96 stone. (What is not pictured is the charcoal cost) But the factories use much less charcoal than if you tried to smelt it in the furnace the vanilla way.

So factories basically just do things you can already do - just more efficiently.

The one caveat to this is Enchanting.

The biggest change from vanilla to this server is probably enchanting - You don't gain XP normally - you make enchanting bottles through the cauldron factories using ingredients. So it is more expensive and more work to get enchants - The going rate for XP is roughly 5 diamonds per Emerald Block (81 bottles of enchanting).

Mining is very Different

You should be aware of the plugin called Hidden Ore - This changes the way ores are distributed from vanilla.... In short: mining sucks.

All ores (except diamond) have a chance to spawn in any block you mine - within the regions/heights they normally spawn in. All ores (except copper?) spawn in veins. These are "large concentrations" of ores within a space, they vary in size and shape, and they are the only way to obtain diamonds - pictured is an excavated diamond vein to give you an idea of what they look like in full. You will know when you are in an ore when you get the message in-game-chat: you sense an ore nearby... and will tell you the type.

All that said: the best way to mine remains to be lucky and find untouched caves, which had ores spawned on the cave walls in a different way at the start of the server and will yield much much wealth for time. Of course there are tradeoffs: its much more dangerous, lava is a hazard, mobs can surprise you, it is easy to get lost, ect. I believe lava spawns on Y=-54, so if you want to find caves one of the least bad and generally safer methods is to mine at that level until you hit lava - then proceed to explore the cave - it should be obvious if the cave is untouched (the biggest tell is if any of the lava has turned on obsidian) - If you go caving its good to take a bucket of water to safely cross lava, some scaffolding to reach ceilings, a crafting table to combine your raw iron/gold/copper into blocks... maybe more to add.

I should also mention the Ore Smelter* - There are advanced and basic ore smelters - the ore smelters take diamond ore, redstone ore, lapis ore, coal ore, raw gold, raw iron, raw copper - and turn them into more than if you had used a fortune pick or smelted them normally. (e.g. The basic smelter turns every diamond ore into 3 diamonds) So its a must-do thing - as a civ we keep a public silk touch and public fortune 3 pick in our ore smelter to be borrowed as needed.

In the discord there is a more in-depth explanation on "mining" that can give you some more help.

Farming is also different

There is a plugin called realistic biomes that affects the growth rates of crops in various biomes or preventing their growth altogether.

In short, Nothing grows everywhere, some crops are fairly exclusive to remote regions and rarer for it, and every crop has an optimal biome they grow fastest in, and usually a short list of alternative biomes they grow suboptimally in... You can use clay blocks under soil to increase growth rates, and other blocks in some other areas (soul sand in nether for nether wart). The impact of this change is an increased emphasis on trade and cooperation.

It's worth pointing out because here in S.P.Q.R. most of our nearer biomes are forests and meadows where you, for example, can't grow sugar cane, and a number of other crops.... We have Taiga bioms nearby that help with a lot of crops but for many more items we need to travel or trade for things that are more exclusive to areas like jungle, swamp, desert, ect.

Other Plugins?

The above outlines the most core plugins, but additionally there are many others... to name a few:

• Item Exchange
• Brewery
• Castlegate
• Railswitch

The full list

These all add additional features to the server that are worth exploring at some point, but are either optional or minimally impactful to the daily experience....

Closing?

This post is not comprehensive and quite probably contains some errors that need correction, but it is a good starting point.