Edit: Apparently this thread attracted enough interest in the server to change everything. People have been pearled, societies have formed, things are starting to heat up.

THE SUBREDDIT IS NOW UP http://www.reddit.com/r/civice

Here are some pictures: http://imgur.com/a/UjzLm

And the original reddit thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/Civcraft/comments/1cuabi/civice_citadel_on_a_incredibly_hard_bukkit_server/

Hi all,

I've been experimenting with Civcraft's plugin suite (Citadel, PrisonPearl, BottleO) on a completely crazy map gen with a small world. The server is called CivIce if you remember seeing the post.

The world has been fully created and players have been exploring it in the first few days. Almost everything is vastly thick layers of ice and snow, no vegetation is to be found anywhere, and there are lots and lots of challenging monsters with randomly boosted stats and sometimes nice deadly equipment. The first thing you need is of course logs. There are no trees in sight (a player just found the first natural tree on the game last night in a deep "garden" cave near bedrock). However, exploring the various cave entrances and holes in the ice should eventually yield a few frozen logs. You may also notice that randomly-spawned research stations full of goodies like saplings and seeds are not that uncommon. You will also probably stumble across a big biodome (or three) full of glowstone. Generally, the research stations are the best options and you can even find some animal spawning eggs. Without finding seeds in a research station, you will have to survive off zombie meat and dig around under several dozen layers of frozen ocean in hopes of finding a rare garden cave.

That's how it begins, and it only diverges further from civcraft's playstyle. The ore distribution is completely different, and I am still having trouble finding any reasonable amount of coal to build much larger than the "shack" level and keep it reinforced. The fact that ice only melts deep underground and you need to hide your trees means that underground infrastructure is generally highly expansive, with farms and the works.

Then, you notice that after an hour of mining you still have yet to find any lava or any obsidian. I finally found a small pool of lava on the third day which I can use in a small obsidian generator. This means smoothstone and obsidian - staples of civcraft - are relatively scarce. Working your way up the tech tree takes A LOT longer. Also, the loss of your vulnerable tree farms, animal pens, and food farms can be potentially devastating.

Other things: the PVE is pretty damn hard. Lots and lots of monsters, zombies constantly breaking down the doors in the basement because they are spawning like crazy in the mines. The random loot system is really cool and makes some mobs incredibly dangerous, but rewarding to kill. I managed to kill a zombie for a Prot IV diamond chestplate, but it is so badly damaged it will take something like 48 levels to repair it. The mobs are always a threat and I have to design my settlement around keeping them out.

The settlement I have been constructing has been a struggle to even erect a couple of buildings due to the huge amount of mobs and the lack of smoothstone. Any reinforced structure on the surface is somewhat of a minor feat - representing a pretty significant ascension through the tech tree. I once ran out of inventory space and was amused as I threw out a stack of redstone in order to hang on to 20 blocks of dirt. Coal, which can be seen sticking out the sides of the buried mountain peaks, is easier to acquire from those visible sources than randomly mining underground. Perhaps this is a tiny incentive for mining outposts.

Of course, a major part of Civcraft is the social aspect, so what about that? Unfortunately it hasn't been long enough, nor enough people to fully fledge out that dynamic. However, due to the harshness of the map, most of my encounters with other players have been highly cooperative. Caiden06 found somebody's base (full of sheep and trees -- nice!) and we hung out there making improvements to it until forming a settlement, where we were joined by a number of other folks. Another player is halfway across the map in a mountain-side base and traded us seeds we didn't have for seeds she didn't have. Now that we have obsidian and diamond equipment I am a lot less concerned about one person essentially extinguishing all life on the server in the early days.