Hello all,

A thought struck me while reading clone's post about the Tofu factory (which is quite a good idea, go read it if you haven't) which if you have read the title you can probably guess it.

Having been around for a while I've realized that one of the game elements the dev team has been trying to encourage is region based conflict, where land and territory actually matter.

In real life this was mostly accomplished by resource scarcity and availability. For a large portion of human history, people were nomadic, roaming the land and more or less following animals as they migrated across the continents. It was only when agriculture was discovered and food became available year round that people settled down (more or less, pls don't kill me anthro majors).

Anyway, this doesn't work in Minecraft at all. First, the world isn't nearly big enough. Animals, even if they weren't culled, don't migrate. Food is also a non issue after playing the game for about 5 minutes. This means that if we want regional conflict, we'll have to find a different way about it rather than resource scarcity on its own.

We tried Realistic Biomes, which while being very cool and definitely adding to the immersion, did fail to make regional conflicts (to an extent, there are some edge cases which have happened). Trading, while a thing, has mostly been defeated by player created co-ops which band together to distribute the load among a handful of people. Or bots.

So resource collection seems to be right out. Now enough of the preamble,

FACTORY MOD

What it does:

Extends and improves the minecraft tech tree using only server side mods.

What it could do and has already started to do:

Create regional scarcity by limiting the number of factories of a certain type within certain radius.

We've already seen this with Nether Factories and I think its been successful. I would argue that the extreme cost discouraged most smaller towns that couldn't afford it from even trying to compete with the larger towns, but imagine if the ore smelter had a radius as well. Or the XP Cauldrons. If the radius increases as you increase the power of the factory, you start to build more conflict with neighbors as you advance up the tech tree.

Perhaps, for example, the radius of the wood cauldron is 500 blocks. Most cities could have one and no one would say a peep. Perhaps Iron becomes 1000 blocks. Now the 1000 Block radius starts to cause problems between very close cities. A state would most likely be able to only house one of these unless they have a lot of territory. A diamond Cauldron may have a radius of 2000 Blocks. Now an entire region would only have access to a single factory, with its owners having control of it.

If I could change everything, I would give all factories a radius at which the game will not let you build a factory. I would even perhaps go as far as to have the game tell you the location of the factory if you are not allowed to build there (or as in the case of the nether factory, make the build cost exponentially).

Most people will say that this makes the rich and older members over powered and I would agree with that sentiment. This means another mechanic may need to be tweaked.

Prison Pearl

It may have been discussed at some point, however to compensate for having such power given to older established members, there has to be an increased risk.

Prison pearl could be changed so that if an owner of a group is pearled, the holder of the pearl becomes a moderator of that group.

This would give more meaning for assassinations, leaders of towns would become targets. PvP would become even riskier and more meaningful. Grab a high ranking member of the other side and all of a sudden you have access to their base, their infrastructure, etc. You would have to hold the pearl on you, which, as all pvp people know, is risky business. Having your location revealed makes the game hard.

To address alt accounts, we would unfortunately most likely need some sort of auto group associater. If one of your alts gets pearled, the pearl should still transfer the group permissions. This could be a bit of an admin headache however. It would mean being a lot stricter on VPNs, or if people need to VPN to get around certain regional bans/firewalls cough china cough, require a modmail to confirm your associated accounts.

Anyway, this is a discussion post. Post your thoughts. Please argue for or against it reasonably and be nice to each other.

Cheers,

Muli

EDIT: I wouldn't advocate changing anything until there are no major conflicts occurring. Something like this would need to be pretty bug free before going live, which means testing and what not. Something to mull over a bit!