One of the goals seemingly stated by 3.0 is to prolong the server's longevity by placing speedbumps before the endgame.

This has meant removing hoppers, hopper minecarts, banning botting and alts, reducing ore rates, nerfing crop growth, removing the usability of the enchantment table, replacing endgame crafting with factories, and I'm assuming a reason behind banning withers.... but is it worth it?

People have complained, that they have been stuck in the stone and iron age for a month with little hope in sight, and this is contrasted sharply with other servers where you can generally log in, and be in diamond with a small farm by the end of the night.

The fact is, this server requires specialized knowledge in order to play.

1. you must be aware of and have knowledge of all the plugins from the beginning in order to proceed.

2. you must be aware of the biome settings for crop growth, animal breeding, and ore distribution.

What this boils down to, is that this server is a huge expectation shock for new players. Unless they are willing to pour over the help files, read the various biome spreadsheets and comb the sub for mining advice ... they will fail to flourish.

I equate it to trying to pick up a game of D&D 3.0 without ever having read a Player's Handbook, and even if they have read it in an academic sense ... playing is a whole other beast.

A lot of the things created for Civcraft like: Citadel reinforcement, Namelayer Groups, Factories (and tech trees), Humbug tweaks, ect ... make for a highly specialized experience of Minecraft akin to a modpack. One that, increasingly, has a high and steep learning curve and serves as a barrier to entry for new players.

One saving grace is the development of the plugin GUIs, but this in itself will not save new players.

If we want to retain players, I suggest we look for ways to make the server tech trees more in line with Vanilla progression (to ease the steepness of the learning curve) and make it easier for a player to pick up this server within the first 5 minutes.

A player who has only played singleplayer or vanilla servers should be able to pick up the basics of this server, without having to reference the subreddit if we want player retention.

We must also look to allow small groups, AND one-man nations, to benefit from things like end-tier factories.

It was never the means of production that encouraged player groups to form, as a single power player could always provide for themselves.

Often it was boredom, and a sense of protection that encouraged grouping. The current system only incentivizes groups to act like factions, in order to be able to produce protection armor, to further entrench their stranglehold.

The means to protect oneself in civcraft 3.0, is restricted to large groups, this is a VERY hard barrier for newfriends to cross. Most larger established groups are closed, and production is limited to only people they have played with in previous servers, this is very disheartening for people looking to start out.

You can reasonably be assured in other anarchy servers that when you log in and see people in P4 Dia armor, you will be able to achieve that and be able to match strength at some point ... on this server that is not a given, unless an entrenched group (one that has staked out pylons in the shard) accepts you.

To end this rant, I will offer a few suggestions:

1. Allow EVERY crop to be grown in ANY biome, but require any crop currently listed at ungrowable to be set to 3 weeks unclayed. This will allow players to farm whatever they wish, allow for greenhouses, but still encourage shard specific crops to have competitive advantage.

1a. Allow when right clicking a farm block or left clicking the ground with a crop, the display of how many out of how many (displayed as */4) clay blocks are under the farm. This will promote newfriends looking into adding clay or atleast asking about it when planting.

1b. Show light level % when right clicking with stick on crop or animal, to demonstrate to a player why something may not be working. This will help newfriends trying to breed cows in a cave to understand why they aren't reproducing (as it currently is un-intuitive)

1c. Show if greenhouse mode is enabled y/n ... or perhaps use a debug mode that can be disabled/enabled to show all of this information in RB.

2. Have a small percentage of all ore available in every biome, it does not have to be large, but you should be able to find atleast 1 diamond in any shard (even Sheol) if you dig out a chunk.

3. Re-implement the enchantment table, and give players a vanilla way to acquire xp but make it more cost-effective to use emeralds instead (but keep the option to vanilla enchant/repair)

3a. Allow condensing of vanilla xp into emeralds, use a formula that ensures a loss of efficiency but allows for xp to be stored.

4. Enable mob grouping, find a way to group mobs into one entity rather than killing them when the entity count gets too high. I have seen servers do this by adding tags to specific entities that have been bred, so that when they die they drop the equivalent # of drops for the number of mobs combined.

5. Look into developing a GUI for item recipes, most modpacks utilize NEI or JEI integration to allow players to know at-a-glance what they need to do to create the items they need. Recipe manager currently has a command to do this, but a searchable GUI would make the process a lot more user friendly. Perhaps a dedicated fork for Civcraft to handle recipes would be appropriate.

6. Re-enable hoppers, and do so by either increasing the cost, using a weight system like pylons use, or by making them a rare drop. I'd rather they be craftable ... but the fact that they currently aren't is a big pet peeve.

I'll probably add more, but these are some things I think might help.