I really like the ideas in this thread , especially those that chad proposed. I think having the game more realistic for building without taking away from the freedom , possibly adding to the scary side of minecraft , would be incredible.
-Personally id like to suggest an idea that came to me while building my town in single player. Id like a way to construct cranes (wooden / steel ranks) that help in building and mining. What they would do is let you store an amount of heavy goods (makes more sense if implemented with the ideas from chads post) on or in a storage basket like thing on the end of the crane. Than you can take these goods out from a box at the base of the crane or vice versa. With better animation it could be made to actually lift and lower goods but thats not immediately needed.
- A second idea links with this. I would like to be able to make water wheels to harness water. When water flows beneath the wheel it turns and if connected to a crane (or redstone generator) via redstone dust it creates a small amount of cheap power. I guess this could work with lava as well if you use stone or obsidian to make it. Lava would provide far more power.
This would give people a reason to create their town around a water source as water wheels could create cheap power but not force them to as cranes could be powered by generators albeit be harder to make.
As has been mentioned by several previous posters, the main issue is the simplicity with which the most difficult-to-acquire items are actually acquired. Any player can have cactii, crops, diamond tools, etc. within just a couple hours of playing, and this really discourages cooperation. People build together, but as has also already been stated, even in multiplayer, buildings serve little purpose besides storage and aesthetic appeal.
I very much liked Hamma117's example of how to add more tiers to the existing system, which is largely tiered. Forcing players to pool huge amounts of increasingly rare resources and to find new resources rarer than diamonds, combined with making finding these resources slightly more difficult to gather, and enhancing the trading and communication systems will encourage much more interaction. The most difficult to create items will require cooperation, or many times more solo to reach the highest tier. This would add another major wrinkle to the game.
Not necessarily "electricity", but a power source. Obviously a power generator would naturally be of redstone origin.
And as far as Notch not wanting anything "techy", I'm assuming he means resembling modern technology, and that he'd rather it be slightly fantasy-oriented (which redstone basically is). But if he means "techy" in the sense of technical, techy, geeky, etc., I don't know how much techier you can get than redstone circuits. It's probably the techiest thing I've ever seen in a video game. Mother****ers build computers with that ****.
This is a cool thread, but the futility in just building utility is, to what ends will utility resolve?
There has to be another motivating goal to utility or we will find ourselves bored again. Blizzard had a good idea, which was to grant the use of extra content after a massive collaborative effort.
I say after acquiring all necessary utility buildings and defenses, a city matures into new content and is able to withstand raids or to raid others. Or being able to unlock a whole new dungeon and bosses. This would also require a tiered armor system with other magic abilities or weapons. To what extent Notch will make MC like a conventional MMORPG, I don't know. This game is unique and I think that is because this isn't a conventional RPG. To stay that way, unconventional ideas must be implemented.
The last game that made me excited like MC was Ultima Online. It was simple adventure in its rawest form with a community so indept, I could logon at 5pm after school every wednesday to have my custom armor crafted by a GM armorer. I would be sad when a lich king 1hit me and all the other players raided my stuff or when I was a ghost in a dungeon searching for someone with GM healing to rez me. The community would be so into the economy that instead of grinding all the time, massive amounts of time would be put into just mining or going on a treasure hunt with a rare map drop. Eve is the progeny of UO in terms of community and economy.
sorry for the rant on a non-MMORPG forum.
I think Notch has a good idea here, just building from the ground up on what people already like.
I hope he hires some good brainstormers for this subject because the foundations of a successful community/economy in a virtual game need to be solid.
I'm apologizing in advance, this whole post is really muddled. I've put a summery at the bottom for those who don't want to suffer through it.
Quote from onfia »
I think, first of all, what we need is a sort of mechanism for defining rooms such as in Dwarf Fortress. We should be able to select an area as a living quarter or a trade depot, or a barracks for instance. At that point, the barracks should allow the hiring of npc fighters that ...
I would be all for this, be it by defining rooms or by simply crafting NPC's. Using the NPC's in either single or Multiplayer to do your (or the town's, or the group's, or the clan's, whatever) bidding. Especially when considering issues of balance in Multiplayer, where one person can potentially log onto even an one-hundred+ person server and destroy everything. Give the players the option to construct persistant NPC's and define their own alliances and settings (auto-ally with everyone, auto-enemy with everyone, friends with these people, etc), and the NPC's will defend the town reasonably well.
Another option, though I'm sure everyone currently playing would hate it, would be to rework the mining speeds such that in a Multiplayer [let's call it "Team," to differentiate from "Survival"] server, you can't dig anything with your hands. You might be able to dig a few things with a wooden tool, but you'd really need to get iron before you got to any reasonable mining speed, and even then, your usefulness (especially) against craftedblocks would be limited. The reasoning there is that natural blocks should be relatively easy to get, but in Team Multiplayer, your goal is to prevent people from destroying your town, so taking longer is a good thing. You would need to add several crafted tiers of just raw materials, each stronger or better than the last. The idea works kinda like this:
Natural stone: ~never to mine by hand, ~2 min with wooden tool, ~1 min with stone tool, and ~15 sec. with iron tools. (Communities pop up around mining if it takes longer)
Natural stone, when mined, turns into Cobble/stacked stone: ~never by hand, ~never by wood tools, ~5 min with stone, ~ 3 min with iron, etc.
Which, when put into a furnace, turns into Stone Blocks, which when crafted in a 4x4 block take even longer to mine, and so on.
Iron ore burns to iron, which can be crafted on an anvil (new block) to steel, which can be crafted in the forge with sand, gravel, or diamond to make "mythril" or some such thing that is neigh-invulnerable.
Gold could be usless on its own, but, as several people have suggested, enchanted (on the Alchemy table) to be much stronger using a similar staging of magical abilities.
In order to make that not too much of a pain, it might be feasible to ask that an improperly placed block be easily removable shortly after it's placed (~1-5 mins) for free.
Hamma117 already explained the existing tier structure, what I'd call for is that at least in Team Multiplayer would be that the crafting structure were made way more complex, and in that mode (only multiplayer mode) lengthen the amount of time it takes to mine everything to prevent griefing in the off-peak hours.
Quote from Hamma117 »
also responding to the sawmill... you cant move trees.. so basicaiily you would have to chop the logs.. move them.. an then procfess.. :S. would be quicker to just spam left click IMO
This would be addressed if, for example, a sawmill was implemented by making it so that you either can't get planks without running them through a sawmill (powered by a furnace/waterwheel/redstone generator), or that the planks you get are better/greater in quantity (maybe you only get 1 plank per log when mining with your hands, but 4 out of the sawmill). All that would be addressed in the modified (properly balanced) tier structure.
Quote from Orcrist100 »
I have to say I quite like the idea, however i feel it would have to be a separate game type (like adventure and creative) as it would be impossible in single player and i like how single player is now.
I don't fully agree for ideas like NPC's and advanced crafting, which I think could work really nicely in single player and multiplayer, however creating a second game type for my idea of longer mine times is fully appropriate. Except that this is (already) in the Multiplayer discussion, not Single player.
Quote from Orcrist100 »
[Snip, because I more or less agree]
Finally as for the advanced building crafting idea, I both like it and fear it... because i do currently want to have an extra reason for building a massive fortress or city ect. as I'm not a massively creative person by heart but it should be similar to the crafting bench as you create that out of wood and then made a furnace... (such as a drill as strip mining would be fun :smile.gif: )
I don't see how making more advanced crafting tiers would require you to make a huge fortress or city, but it could make it so you need some more room to fit your stuff into. Now, making it larger and making mining take longer might, and that is why I think that massive balancing needs to take place in multiplayer regarding the mining times, object size (if possible), and tool effects.
Quote from Orcrist100 »
But ultimately humans biggest threat both in the real world and on Minecraft is each other and if PvP is introduced as with large server numbers (say 100's to a server) people would band together for mere survival against the ultimate threat to humanity that humanity itself is.
Well put.
TO LONG; DIDN'T READ [TL;DR]
What I'm suggesting/backing:
1) Add NPC's who do your (or your teammate's) bidding [you'd need to be able to define teammates for that to work].
2) Make things take longer to mine and nearly impossible to mine without tools IN MULTIPLAYER. Fix balance issues with different tools.
3) Make the crafting system more advanced, and offer more options - tied in with making crafted blocks take longer to mine vs. natural blocks and more advanced types of crafted blocks. Ideally, adding energy-providing things (like redstone generators, windmills, waterwheels) and things that hook up to those (advanced furnaces, mining equipment, lights, logging equipment, ships, minecart systems...)
NPCs are a good idea if implemented well. Mass NPCs in combat could take down players for sure. I think PVE should be fleshed out more before PVP is however. Making stuff take longer to mine is a no go. The problem is it is just too ****ing boring and slow. Minecraft needs new gameplay not current gameplay made harder and more time consuming. I enjoy mining somewhat but mining obsidian is about as boring as Minecraft can get currently; to make all blocks that bad or worse would totally kill any interest I have.
One great thing about parts of the Dwarf Fortress room system is it serves a purpose to give rooms function and encourages more "aesthetic" building too. Larger more innate rooms often have higher value enabling them to give bigger benefits. I like the current Minecraft crafting system but I feel like block building needs way more functionality and something within Minecraft which would give some kind of value to how you build. Just a random example for rooms what if bed rooms are added someday? Going there would refill your health once a day. If you built a small dirt bed room it would refill 2 hearts, if you used cobble 3 hearts. If it was a large room with various materials and maybe some stone trim it'd refill 5 hearts.
I think Minecraft's potential is near unlimited and I'd love to see mods become a major part of the gameplay so each server would end up being unique with different gameplay and ideas to be tried out. There are so many directions Minecraft could go but right now I just think it needs just a lot more of everything. The main things I want are gameplay which encourage cooperation and add more purpose to the game so it's not just pure sandbox building.
Minecraft has the potential to model the development of societies on a grand level, better than any RTS, because is has real people.
In Real Life the number one thing that encourages cooperation between humans is the comparative advantage of labor. In the real world individuals and groups are more productive at some things than others. And even people who are better at everything have some skills they do better that others, so even people superior than others in producing everything can gain from cooperation by specialization. When Ideas Have sex is an short 15 minute talk explaining things like comparative advantage:
Currently in Minecraft resources are fairly easy to get. I like this for the single player mode, but once you have resources everyone can produce things at a similar rate. so there is no need for specialization. Individuals are just as productive working alone as cooperating. So there is no benefit and the cost of communicating makes cooperation less productive.
Cooperation should not be forced by artificial game mechanisms, but allowed to emerge by making the game similar to real life (without boring players with the tedious parts of real life).
Also an artificial monetary system should not be forced on the game. Money will emerge when needed. Different communities may choose different commodities for exchange and this is good.
Here are some ideas to encourage cooperation: Unevenly distribute resources:
Resources could be placed in the word in clumps so not all resources are found in one location to encourage trucking and trading (biome specific resources could create this). One area may have lots of iron and no coal while another lots coal and no iron or something like that. Make crafting learned skills:
Maybe crafting could be made into a skill that the character learns and gets better at ,so some people could produce specific tools that others can’t or at faster rate that others. Skilled people might be able to train others allowing others to advance faster and encouraging cooperation, maybe guilds will emerge. Skills could build on each other to encourage specialization. Maybe tools have to be invented independently at some cost and random chance of successful invention. Maybe crafting may be learned from others at some rate of time (Apprenticeship). Specialised equipment for production:
Another option is to limit the craft bench to wood and stone tools and limit the oven similarly and have equipment that are expensive to make and can make only and few types of tools. This would encourage specialisation.
I like the idea of arranging blocks in configurations (just like crafting on the work bench but in 3D) to create equipment or buildings that have special uses. Similar to putting 2 chests together makes 1 big chest.
The equipment could be large and complicated needing special blocks, making it hard to acquire all the pieces needed. They should be logical, for example gears and mechanical blocks for factories. Maybe a waterwheel placed over flowing water is needed to power a mill. And spinning shafts connect the wheel to looms or other machines that can make things. Rare materials like diamond blocks and red stone dust could be needed.
I don’t want to have to do work in the game like real life, but I don’t like the idea of human NPCs to do players bidding. Humans are not robots and should not be enslaved. The players should be the humans. I like the idea of automaton Golems or something or not human that can operate and defend things while people are offline.
Also the equipment does not have to be buildings. It would be boring if all stores looked the same in the whole world. Maybe functionality is at the room level and the rooms can be stacked together and build upon to make them look different. Also some equipment may pollute and smoke up enclosed places so they can’t be placed inside mines without ventilation. If weather damaged equipment it would encourage buildings to protect them.
Players would want to build equipment close together that work together. Like smelter, smithy, and store to produce and sell metal tools. Villages and maybe cities will emerge.
------------- Ideas for equipment: (some have already been mention on this thread)
Smelter: Makes ingots
Forge: Makes metal tools, swords, Armor
Workshop: Makes Planks sticks, ladder
Sewing machine: Make Clothes
Loom: Make Cloth
Vault: Securely stores things
Bank: automates resources loans at interest
Factory: Makes one type of tool in mass production
Merchant/Store: automate exchange of a goods at specified rates (like vending machine)
Auction: automates exchange of goods with between may people (similar to the old M.U.L.E. actions, but no need to be present to make a trade) * I got this idea from a friend
Ranch: Produces livestock
Kitchen/Smoker: cooks food fast
Fort: Has durable walls that can’t be easily mined away
Kiln: Makes bricks
Machine Shop: Minecart Tracks, Lever, Pressure Plates, Stone Button, Doors, gears, shafts,
I feel like I just wrote and unreadable painful text. Sorry if it's unclear, weird or boring.
My view on these changes as if it was 2 different games.
Minecraft: You wake up on a world, alone and you have to survive. You battle, mine and build, then you check your watch and you tell yourself: this game is killing my time and i just managed to build a single tower. Next day, you build a second tower or something else. You nearly forgot about mobs.
Minecraft Online: You wake up on a world, with peoples that you don't know. The world is dangerous (strong mobs, weather?) so you chose to stick with them to survive even if you don't know them. More peoples join. You are as strong as the world (mobs) and build a town, but other players did the same. The new threat now is: the others. Every city is using resources to run but these resources aren't unlimited, you have to look further. Another other city has them or the resources are between the 2 cities. Wars are beginning. You discover more cities. The situation is bad and you ally with them because wars are damaging your economy and the enemy may have been too strong. So here we are, 2 organizations battling to survive. The resources of the territory can't satisfy 2 large populations, soon or later, the 2 organizations will have to explore and then.... the server explodes because of the overwhelming amounts of data processed. ( :/ this issue just popped in my face when i was writing this, but notch will be super rich at this stage and the server will be insanely fast)
Result: Adding the stuff you were talking about would make the game sooooooo much funnier! :biggrin.gif:
The situations, the needs, the problems, the solutions and the goals change. The game is dynamic.
The players would have more long term goals.
Building a rainbow pyramid : "Okay, nice.., i did it!... Now what..." (the pyramid does not change)
Building a town: "Okay, nice, who's the leader now?" (politics) "OH SH-" (war) "o hai!" (alliances) "The land we were fighting for is now useless..." (exploration)(or you win then later you explore or you keep winning and become an empire)
1 problem: the players will generate endless amounts of data on the servers because they have to explore to get more resources. Maybe there should be something that respawn resources. (earthquake + volcano)
omg, this idea became a 10 million $ game. (volcanoes... maybe I went too far... xD)
Check this vid:
One on many ideas that may work in a town/city :tongue.gif:
So basically for this to work at it's best and purest we'll need some kind of random matching. Maybe a master server or something could fix this. If we have a normal server it would more likely turn into all the friends band together and get comfortable because the server regulars have all the things they need forever. If it was random you'd be forced to rely on those you don't know and fight for what you need.
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I hope Minecraft gets some cooler stuff in the future like vehicles. Yeah I really don't have anything to put here.
So basically for this to work at it's best and purest we'll need some kind of random matching. Maybe a master server or something could fix this. If we have a normal server it would more likely turn into all the friends band together and get comfortable because the server regulars have all the things they need forever. If it was random you'd be forced to rely on those you don't know and fight for what you need.
Maybe a admin command or mod that has the option to automatically assign players to groups when they join the server or the first time they join. It would than be up to you to contact a admin / mod if you wanted your team changed i suppose.
So basically for this to work at it's best and purest we'll need some kind of random matching. Maybe a master server or something could fix this. If we have a normal server it would more likely turn into all the friends band together and get comfortable because the server regulars have all the things they need forever. If it was random you'd be forced to rely on those you don't know and fight for what you need.
Maybe a admin command or mod that has the option to automatically assign players to groups when they join the server or the first time they join. It would than be up to you to contact a admin / mod if you wanted your team changed i suppose.
You see I have an inherent problem with too much structure. I'm one of those tabletop game players who gets made at fallout for not letting me make the EXACT choice I was planning to make earlier including the daring saving of my enemy from the enemy's base to execute him later but NOO fallout makes it so I can't kill him after despite that being the whole point..... what was I talking about again? Oh yeah.
I think it would work better say there was a central spawn point. And maybe everyone spawned lets give it a random number say 1000 blocks away from it. That way it would give a greater feel of you know no one since you start all alone until you meet up with someone. Also no name seeing...pretty self explanatory.
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I hope Minecraft gets some cooler stuff in the future like vehicles. Yeah I really don't have anything to put here.
I definitely support some of these ideas.
Crafting specialized blocks would be very helpful.
For example, say you wanted to make a bed to heal some health faster.
Craft 6 bed blocks and put them on the floor in a bed shape. As long as the blocks don't stack they will be difficult to move and so will not make food obsolete for mobile healing. On that subject, food should really stack to 4 or so, something small but at least more efficient than trying to bring bedding with you.
I have a slight problem with the redstone generators though. Perhaps power should be different from redstone power.
Otherwise how will generator power interact with regular power? Will red torches do the same as a generator? Will it provide a different amount of power? How will you measure that power? Redstone is normally just on or off; it's just been used for signaling more than power supply so far. I know Notch doesn't want electricity, but the generator power will need to be differentiated from the torch power somehow.
As for craftable NPC's/autoturrets, what keeps a town from just covering their walls with these things and being impenetrable above ground? Could the NPC's or autoturrets be killed or burned down?
Then there's the issue that tunneling would be the best way to break into a city. Any sort of sensor tower should probably detect anything within 6-10 blocks horizontal and 64 blocks vertical, to ensure that if the enemy tunnels you at least get some warning before they pop up and murder everyone.
The automatic trading post is an excellent idea, I think that alone would cause people to want to stay in an area.
Mostly with this post I'm just trying to address a few concerns that some people mentioned about consequences of a few of the items, and bring up a whole lot more concerns that should probably be addressed before anyone considers adding them to the game.
I have a slight problem with the redstone generators though. Perhaps power should be different from redstone power. Otherwise how will generator power interact with regular power? Will red torches do the same as a generator? Will it provide a different amount of power? How will you measure that power? Redstone is normally just on or off; it's just been used for signaling more than power supply so far. I know Notch doesn't want electricity, but the generator power will need to be differentiated from the torch power somehow.
The way I'd been thinking about "redstone generators," was to use it in similar ways to how redstone is already used. However, we'd add mechanical (Read: Wind, water) 'power' sources as well that could replace the redstone/be used to supply power that the redstone would traditionally supply. I was thinking that it'd be a balancing act- this is still Alpha, I'd expect that in the finished version of the game, one redstone torch could not supply an entire town with power. Still, the main use of redstone generators would be to power larger things - bigger furnaces, forges, autohammers (monks invented them to work iron way faster than by hand - originally powered by a waterwheel and a cog), mills... the list could go on, but the idea is to add complexity to the game and make it so you can build more advanced and exciting things that produce either new resources, or vastly improve efficiency in mining, or preform some task we can do now that we wouldn't be able to do then so that the game is more balanced.
Quote from download13 »
As for craftable NPC's/autoturrets, what keeps a town from just covering their walls with these things and being impenetrable above ground? Could the NPC's or autoturrets be killed or burned down?
Yes, they would not be invincible, and they would need to be balanced properly so that constructing them is not something that you can do in insane amounts, but that you can do sufficiently to prevent the town from being destroyed when few (if any) people are online. As for tunneling, I think that in MP, the resources (all of them) need to be more difficult to mine (especially initially, with no tools, though later they might be easier with the aforementioned redstone-generator powered devices), thus preventing people from just mining under a city. Notch even mentioned requiring Obsidian to allow floating land, perhaps along a similar line of reasoning having most resources randomly cave-in if not supported by something man-made would discourage random mining. That would have the added benefit of making resources more valuable, which encourages societies rather than individual entities, which I've suggested earlier in the topic. And keep in mind, it wouldn't be nessecarily that you can't mine as fast as you can now, it might just require some mythril tools to do it and getting that requires a foundry which uses the resources of an entire town to create (the object "foundry" - and it's supporting objects, not the building, that can be whatever).
I was going to do this anyways on the server I was setting up. Me and my buddy would go in separate directions after setting up a main spawn camp for new players, then once we were far enough away from each other we would make homes and tools and such and survive alone. Then we would grief each other!
In Real Life the number one thing that encourages cooperation between humans is the comparative advantage of labor. In the real world individuals and groups are more productive at some things than others. And even people who are better at everything have some skills they do better that others, so even people superior than others in producing everything can gain from cooperation by specialization.
Also an artificial monetary system should not be forced on the game. Money will emerge when needed. Different communities may choose different commodities for exchange and this is good.
Here are some ideas to encourage cooperation:
Unevenly distribute resources
Make crafting learned skills
Specialised equipment for production
I wanted to emphasize this post because it get to the heart of what would make MC into an actual evolving economy. I take issue with only a few things:
Banks should not be automated. Players are completely capable of making loans and upholding them. I don't see how an automated bank could have an effective enforcement mechanism.
I'm not sure I like the idea of Golems. I think people should do the resource extraction work, but perhaps transformative processes should simply take time. IE, a small furnace can only turn one iron ore into an iron bar per 30 seconds or something, a larger furnace would be more effective. Walk up to a furnace, start a batch of iron smelting, walk away and it completes over time. That way players aren't consumed by menial labor, only the dangerous exploring kind!
I would also like to point out that if at any point an artificial money system is enforced no economy in MC will ever make any sense. Prices would be arbitrary and meaningless. A payday system would be even worse.
Minecraft actually has almost no incentive to ever develop a currency system at all. Nothing in your inventory ever deteriorates. A player can carry ridiculous amounts of trade goods and raw materials with 0 effort. All things are easily divisible, and all blocks and items are homogeneous. There is basically no reason for a currency to ever develop, aside from people being used to transacting in currencies. There is just no point to develop currencies, barter is just as effective in the MC universe. Perhaps if there were a weight limit imposed on what a player could carry there would be an incentive for currency development, but that would probably cause a lot of other gameplay problems.
I would also add that either a hunger system or a HARD difficulty level of monsters spawning would massively increase the incentives to form a tribe and band together. Hunger, implemented in a balanced fashion, would lead to benefits for a society with a few farmers working to make food for the farmers and the workers, who would be free to mine/build/defend. Lots of monsters most simply create a strength in numbers scenario. Massively disincentivizes individual exploration without being properly equipped, and it will take a society to provide arms and armor in a dangerous world.
To add some depth to waste-management, may I suggest that instead of dropped items disappearing if not picked up, they change the block they are on top of into a "poison-waste" block? This would encourage the use of incinerators and/or a sewer-system. Poison blocks would cause damage to anyone that treads on them, which could be used as both a defense mechanism and a way to "decay" a civilized area. If adequate measures aren't taken to clean up your town/city, it will degrade to a Dark Ages-esque environment. Swampy biomes could also naturally spawn these blocks for a more "poisonous bog" effect. If a dropped item despawns in water, it should become "stagnant", which would cause damage while swimming in it.
Large machinery and constructed factories could also affect the environment (ie- increased smog levels and polluted water). Naturally some players would prefer the aesthetics of an untainted land to the efficiencies that machinery provide.
Minecraft Green Peace, I can see it now... :biggrin.gif:
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The only thing I'm not terrible at is being terrible.
I have an idea for a "spawn block" which I think could be used to meet several goals of a "cooperative multiplayer".
I think players should start out carrying a "spawn block". The purpose of such a block would be to set your own spawn point. You could set it anywhere you like, and pick it back up to move it if you like.
When set, the spawn block would allow you to respawn after death at a particular point, rather than your random respawn point, allowing you to set your spawn near teammates.
However, to make this interesting is that anyone else could destroy your spawn block (much like you can destroy an enemy spawner in single player), and in doing so, erases your set spawn point (putting it back in your inventory), forcing you to respawn way back at your original point unless you deploy it again.
This could be the a objective in combat - rather than just randomly destroying structures, you would have to invade the enemy town and destroy their spawn blocks in order to legitimately capture it.
This could also be a feature in building "special buildings" - some type of requirement where, say, a hospital can only be built if it is near 10 spawn blocks (or whatever). So if you want to build a hospital, you have to have enough people to cooperate for it. You can't just build your own by yourself. This would be another objective of combat - to neutralize a certain clan/group's facilities, rather than actually destroy the facility you have to destroy the spawn blocks.
I would even go so far as to put in a feature where the more spawn blocks you have in a certain area, the harder it is to destroy the man-made blocks in that area. In this case, it would be much more advantageous to "live" and cooperate with others rather than go it alone, especially if you don't like your buildings being destroyed.
There are many things that could be done with this, and I think it would add a much deeper aspect of multiplayer.
Just posting to say I like these ideas and hope we see a them developed by someone!
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A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned - this is the sum of good government.- Thomas Jefferson
-Personally id like to suggest an idea that came to me while building my town in single player. Id like a way to construct cranes (wooden / steel ranks) that help in building and mining. What they would do is let you store an amount of heavy goods (makes more sense if implemented with the ideas from chads post) on or in a storage basket like thing on the end of the crane. Than you can take these goods out from a box at the base of the crane or vice versa. With better animation it could be made to actually lift and lower goods but thats not immediately needed.
- A second idea links with this. I would like to be able to make water wheels to harness water. When water flows beneath the wheel it turns and if connected to a crane (or redstone generator) via redstone dust it creates a small amount of cheap power. I guess this could work with lava as well if you use stone or obsidian to make it. Lava would provide far more power.
This would give people a reason to create their town around a water source as water wheels could create cheap power but not force them to as cranes could be powered by generators albeit be harder to make.
[]
[] [] (Crane?)
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[] [] (Waterwheel? )
http://www.thedarktide.net
I very much liked Hamma117's example of how to add more tiers to the existing system, which is largely tiered. Forcing players to pool huge amounts of increasingly rare resources and to find new resources rarer than diamonds, combined with making finding these resources slightly more difficult to gather, and enhancing the trading and communication systems will encourage much more interaction. The most difficult to create items will require cooperation, or many times more solo to reach the highest tier. This would add another major wrinkle to the game.
And as far as Notch not wanting anything "techy", I'm assuming he means resembling modern technology, and that he'd rather it be slightly fantasy-oriented (which redstone basically is). But if he means "techy" in the sense of technical, techy, geeky, etc., I don't know how much techier you can get than redstone circuits. It's probably the techiest thing I've ever seen in a video game. Mother****ers build computers with that ****.
There has to be another motivating goal to utility or we will find ourselves bored again. Blizzard had a good idea, which was to grant the use of extra content after a massive collaborative effort.
I say after acquiring all necessary utility buildings and defenses, a city matures into new content and is able to withstand raids or to raid others. Or being able to unlock a whole new dungeon and bosses. This would also require a tiered armor system with other magic abilities or weapons. To what extent Notch will make MC like a conventional MMORPG, I don't know. This game is unique and I think that is because this isn't a conventional RPG. To stay that way, unconventional ideas must be implemented.
The last game that made me excited like MC was Ultima Online. It was simple adventure in its rawest form with a community so indept, I could logon at 5pm after school every wednesday to have my custom armor crafted by a GM armorer. I would be sad when a lich king 1hit me and all the other players raided my stuff or when I was a ghost in a dungeon searching for someone with GM healing to rez me. The community would be so into the economy that instead of grinding all the time, massive amounts of time would be put into just mining or going on a treasure hunt with a rare map drop. Eve is the progeny of UO in terms of community and economy.
sorry for the rant on a non-MMORPG forum.
I think Notch has a good idea here, just building from the ground up on what people already like.
I hope he hires some good brainstormers for this subject because the foundations of a successful community/economy in a virtual game need to be solid.
I would be all for this, be it by defining rooms or by simply crafting NPC's. Using the NPC's in either single or Multiplayer to do your (or the town's, or the group's, or the clan's, whatever) bidding. Especially when considering issues of balance in Multiplayer, where one person can potentially log onto even an one-hundred+ person server and destroy everything. Give the players the option to construct persistant NPC's and define their own alliances and settings (auto-ally with everyone, auto-enemy with everyone, friends with these people, etc), and the NPC's will defend the town reasonably well.
Another option, though I'm sure everyone currently playing would hate it, would be to rework the mining speeds such that in a Multiplayer [let's call it "Team," to differentiate from "Survival"] server, you can't dig anything with your hands. You might be able to dig a few things with a wooden tool, but you'd really need to get iron before you got to any reasonable mining speed, and even then, your usefulness (especially) against craftedblocks would be limited. The reasoning there is that natural blocks should be relatively easy to get, but in Team Multiplayer, your goal is to prevent people from destroying your town, so taking longer is a good thing. You would need to add several crafted tiers of just raw materials, each stronger or better than the last. The idea works kinda like this:
Natural stone: ~never to mine by hand, ~2 min with wooden tool, ~1 min with stone tool, and ~15 sec. with iron tools. (Communities pop up around mining if it takes longer)
Natural stone, when mined, turns into Cobble/stacked stone: ~never by hand, ~never by wood tools, ~5 min with stone, ~ 3 min with iron, etc.
Which, when put into a furnace, turns into Stone Blocks, which when crafted in a 4x4 block take even longer to mine, and so on.
Iron ore burns to iron, which can be crafted on an anvil (new block) to steel, which can be crafted in the forge with sand, gravel, or diamond to make "mythril" or some such thing that is neigh-invulnerable.
Gold could be usless on its own, but, as several people have suggested, enchanted (on the Alchemy table) to be much stronger using a similar staging of magical abilities.
In order to make that not too much of a pain, it might be feasible to ask that an improperly placed block be easily removable shortly after it's placed (~1-5 mins) for free.
Hamma117 already explained the existing tier structure, what I'd call for is that at least in Team Multiplayer would be that the crafting structure were made way more complex, and in that mode (only multiplayer mode) lengthen the amount of time it takes to mine everything to prevent griefing in the off-peak hours.
This would be addressed if, for example, a sawmill was implemented by making it so that you either can't get planks without running them through a sawmill (powered by a furnace/waterwheel/redstone generator), or that the planks you get are better/greater in quantity (maybe you only get 1 plank per log when mining with your hands, but 4 out of the sawmill). All that would be addressed in the modified (properly balanced) tier structure.
I don't fully agree for ideas like NPC's and advanced crafting, which I think could work really nicely in single player and multiplayer, however creating a second game type for my idea of longer mine times is fully appropriate. Except that this is (already) in the Multiplayer discussion, not Single player.
I don't see how making more advanced crafting tiers would require you to make a huge fortress or city, but it could make it so you need some more room to fit your stuff into. Now, making it larger and making mining take longer might, and that is why I think that massive balancing needs to take place in multiplayer regarding the mining times, object size (if possible), and tool effects.
Well put.
TO LONG; DIDN'T READ [TL;DR]
What I'm suggesting/backing:
1) Add NPC's who do your (or your teammate's) bidding [you'd need to be able to define teammates for that to work].
2) Make things take longer to mine and nearly impossible to mine without tools IN MULTIPLAYER. Fix balance issues with different tools.
3) Make the crafting system more advanced, and offer more options - tied in with making crafted blocks take longer to mine vs. natural blocks and more advanced types of crafted blocks. Ideally, adding energy-providing things (like redstone generators, windmills, waterwheels) and things that hook up to those (advanced furnaces, mining equipment, lights, logging equipment, ships, minecart systems...)
See the post for a Texture pack tutorial!
One great thing about parts of the Dwarf Fortress room system is it serves a purpose to give rooms function and encourages more "aesthetic" building too. Larger more innate rooms often have higher value enabling them to give bigger benefits. I like the current Minecraft crafting system but I feel like block building needs way more functionality and something within Minecraft which would give some kind of value to how you build. Just a random example for rooms what if bed rooms are added someday? Going there would refill your health once a day. If you built a small dirt bed room it would refill 2 hearts, if you used cobble 3 hearts. If it was a large room with various materials and maybe some stone trim it'd refill 5 hearts.
I think Minecraft's potential is near unlimited and I'd love to see mods become a major part of the gameplay so each server would end up being unique with different gameplay and ideas to be tried out. There are so many directions Minecraft could go but right now I just think it needs just a lot more of everything. The main things I want are gameplay which encourage cooperation and add more purpose to the game so it's not just pure sandbox building.
In Real Life the number one thing that encourages cooperation between humans is the comparative advantage of labor. In the real world individuals and groups are more productive at some things than others. And even people who are better at everything have some skills they do better that others, so even people superior than others in producing everything can gain from cooperation by specialization.
When Ideas Have sex is an short 15 minute talk explaining things like comparative advantage:
Currently in Minecraft resources are fairly easy to get. I like this for the single player mode, but once you have resources everyone can produce things at a similar rate. so there is no need for specialization. Individuals are just as productive working alone as cooperating. So there is no benefit and the cost of communicating makes cooperation less productive.
Cooperation should not be forced by artificial game mechanisms, but allowed to emerge by making the game similar to real life (without boring players with the tedious parts of real life).
Also an artificial monetary system should not be forced on the game. Money will emerge when needed. Different communities may choose different commodities for exchange and this is good.
Here are some ideas to encourage cooperation:
Unevenly distribute resources:
Resources could be placed in the word in clumps so not all resources are found in one location to encourage trucking and trading (biome specific resources could create this). One area may have lots of iron and no coal while another lots coal and no iron or something like that.
Make crafting learned skills:
Maybe crafting could be made into a skill that the character learns and gets better at ,so some people could produce specific tools that others can’t or at faster rate that others. Skilled people might be able to train others allowing others to advance faster and encouraging cooperation, maybe guilds will emerge. Skills could build on each other to encourage specialization. Maybe tools have to be invented independently at some cost and random chance of successful invention. Maybe crafting may be learned from others at some rate of time (Apprenticeship).
Specialised equipment for production:
Another option is to limit the craft bench to wood and stone tools and limit the oven similarly and have equipment that are expensive to make and can make only and few types of tools. This would encourage specialisation.
I like the idea of arranging blocks in configurations (just like crafting on the work bench but in 3D) to create equipment or buildings that have special uses. Similar to putting 2 chests together makes 1 big chest.
The equipment could be large and complicated needing special blocks, making it hard to acquire all the pieces needed. They should be logical, for example gears and mechanical blocks for factories. Maybe a waterwheel placed over flowing water is needed to power a mill. And spinning shafts connect the wheel to looms or other machines that can make things. Rare materials like diamond blocks and red stone dust could be needed.
I don’t want to have to do work in the game like real life, but I don’t like the idea of human NPCs to do players bidding. Humans are not robots and should not be enslaved. The players should be the humans. I like the idea of automaton Golems or something or not human that can operate and defend things while people are offline.
Also the equipment does not have to be buildings. It would be boring if all stores looked the same in the whole world. Maybe functionality is at the room level and the rooms can be stacked together and build upon to make them look different. Also some equipment may pollute and smoke up enclosed places so they can’t be placed inside mines without ventilation. If weather damaged equipment it would encourage buildings to protect them.
Players would want to build equipment close together that work together. Like smelter, smithy, and store to produce and sell metal tools. Villages and maybe cities will emerge.
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Ideas for equipment: (some have already been mention on this thread)
Smelter: Makes ingots
Forge: Makes metal tools, swords, Armor
Workshop: Makes Planks sticks, ladder
Sewing machine: Make Clothes
Loom: Make Cloth
Vault: Securely stores things
Bank: automates resources loans at interest
Factory: Makes one type of tool in mass production
Merchant/Store: automate exchange of a goods at specified rates (like vending machine)
Auction: automates exchange of goods with between may people (similar to the old M.U.L.E. actions, but no need to be present to make a trade) * I got this idea from a friend
Ranch: Produces livestock
Kitchen/Smoker: cooks food fast
Fort: Has durable walls that can’t be easily mined away
Kiln: Makes bricks
Machine Shop: Minecart Tracks, Lever, Pressure Plates, Stone Button, Doors, gears, shafts,
I feel like I just wrote and unreadable painful text. Sorry if it's unclear, weird or boring.
My view on these changes as if it was 2 different games.
Minecraft: You wake up on a world, alone and you have to survive. You battle, mine and build, then you check your watch and you tell yourself: this game is killing my time and i just managed to build a single tower. Next day, you build a second tower or something else. You nearly forgot about mobs.
Minecraft Online: You wake up on a world, with peoples that you don't know. The world is dangerous (strong mobs, weather?) so you chose to stick with them to survive even if you don't know them. More peoples join. You are as strong as the world (mobs) and build a town, but other players did the same. The new threat now is: the others. Every city is using resources to run but these resources aren't unlimited, you have to look further. Another other city has them or the resources are between the 2 cities. Wars are beginning. You discover more cities. The situation is bad and you ally with them because wars are damaging your economy and the enemy may have been too strong. So here we are, 2 organizations battling to survive. The resources of the territory can't satisfy 2 large populations, soon or later, the 2 organizations will have to explore and then.... the server explodes because of the overwhelming amounts of data processed. ( :/ this issue just popped in my face when i was writing this, but notch will be super rich at this stage and the server will be insanely fast)
Result: Adding the stuff you were talking about would make the game sooooooo much funnier! :biggrin.gif:
The situations, the needs, the problems, the solutions and the goals change. The game is dynamic.
The players would have more long term goals.
Building a rainbow pyramid : "Okay, nice.., i did it!... Now what..." (the pyramid does not change)
Building a town: "Okay, nice, who's the leader now?" (politics) "OH SH-" (war) "o hai!" (alliances) "The land we were fighting for is now useless..." (exploration)(or you win then later you explore or you keep winning and become an empire)
1 problem: the players will generate endless amounts of data on the servers because they have to explore to get more resources. Maybe there should be something that respawn resources. (earthquake + volcano)
omg, this idea became a 10 million $ game. (volcanoes... maybe I went too far... xD)
Check this vid:
One on many ideas that may work in a town/city :tongue.gif:
Maybe a admin command or mod that has the option to automatically assign players to groups when they join the server or the first time they join. It would than be up to you to contact a admin / mod if you wanted your team changed i suppose.
http://www.thedarktide.net
You see I have an inherent problem with too much structure. I'm one of those tabletop game players who gets made at fallout for not letting me make the EXACT choice I was planning to make earlier including the daring saving of my enemy from the enemy's base to execute him later but NOO fallout makes it so I can't kill him after despite that being the whole point..... what was I talking about again? Oh yeah.
I think it would work better say there was a central spawn point. And maybe everyone spawned lets give it a random number say 1000 blocks away from it. That way it would give a greater feel of you know no one since you start all alone until you meet up with someone. Also no name seeing...pretty self explanatory.
Crafting specialized blocks would be very helpful.
For example, say you wanted to make a bed to heal some health faster.
Craft 6 bed blocks and put them on the floor in a bed shape. As long as the blocks don't stack they will be difficult to move and so will not make food obsolete for mobile healing. On that subject, food should really stack to 4 or so, something small but at least more efficient than trying to bring bedding with you.
I have a slight problem with the redstone generators though. Perhaps power should be different from redstone power.
Otherwise how will generator power interact with regular power? Will red torches do the same as a generator? Will it provide a different amount of power? How will you measure that power? Redstone is normally just on or off; it's just been used for signaling more than power supply so far. I know Notch doesn't want electricity, but the generator power will need to be differentiated from the torch power somehow.
As for craftable NPC's/autoturrets, what keeps a town from just covering their walls with these things and being impenetrable above ground? Could the NPC's or autoturrets be killed or burned down?
Then there's the issue that tunneling would be the best way to break into a city. Any sort of sensor tower should probably detect anything within 6-10 blocks horizontal and 64 blocks vertical, to ensure that if the enemy tunnels you at least get some warning before they pop up and murder everyone.
The automatic trading post is an excellent idea, I think that alone would cause people to want to stay in an area.
Mostly with this post I'm just trying to address a few concerns that some people mentioned about consequences of a few of the items, and bring up a whole lot more concerns that should probably be addressed before anyone considers adding them to the game.
The way I'd been thinking about "redstone generators," was to use it in similar ways to how redstone is already used. However, we'd add mechanical (Read: Wind, water) 'power' sources as well that could replace the redstone/be used to supply power that the redstone would traditionally supply. I was thinking that it'd be a balancing act- this is still Alpha, I'd expect that in the finished version of the game, one redstone torch could not supply an entire town with power. Still, the main use of redstone generators would be to power larger things - bigger furnaces, forges, autohammers (monks invented them to work iron way faster than by hand - originally powered by a waterwheel and a cog), mills... the list could go on, but the idea is to add complexity to the game and make it so you can build more advanced and exciting things that produce either new resources, or vastly improve efficiency in mining, or preform some task we can do now that we wouldn't be able to do then so that the game is more balanced.
Yes, they would not be invincible, and they would need to be balanced properly so that constructing them is not something that you can do in insane amounts, but that you can do sufficiently to prevent the town from being destroyed when few (if any) people are online. As for tunneling, I think that in MP, the resources (all of them) need to be more difficult to mine (especially initially, with no tools, though later they might be easier with the aforementioned redstone-generator powered devices), thus preventing people from just mining under a city. Notch even mentioned requiring Obsidian to allow floating land, perhaps along a similar line of reasoning having most resources randomly cave-in if not supported by something man-made would discourage random mining. That would have the added benefit of making resources more valuable, which encourages societies rather than individual entities, which I've suggested earlier in the topic. And keep in mind, it wouldn't be nessecarily that you can't mine as fast as you can now, it might just require some mythril tools to do it and getting that requires a foundry which uses the resources of an entire town to create (the object "foundry" - and it's supporting objects, not the building, that can be whatever).
See the post for a Texture pack tutorial!
I wanted to emphasize this post because it get to the heart of what would make MC into an actual evolving economy. I take issue with only a few things:
Banks should not be automated. Players are completely capable of making loans and upholding them. I don't see how an automated bank could have an effective enforcement mechanism.
I'm not sure I like the idea of Golems. I think people should do the resource extraction work, but perhaps transformative processes should simply take time. IE, a small furnace can only turn one iron ore into an iron bar per 30 seconds or something, a larger furnace would be more effective. Walk up to a furnace, start a batch of iron smelting, walk away and it completes over time. That way players aren't consumed by menial labor, only the dangerous exploring kind!
I would also like to point out that if at any point an artificial money system is enforced no economy in MC will ever make any sense. Prices would be arbitrary and meaningless. A payday system would be even worse.
Minecraft actually has almost no incentive to ever develop a currency system at all. Nothing in your inventory ever deteriorates. A player can carry ridiculous amounts of trade goods and raw materials with 0 effort. All things are easily divisible, and all blocks and items are homogeneous. There is basically no reason for a currency to ever develop, aside from people being used to transacting in currencies. There is just no point to develop currencies, barter is just as effective in the MC universe. Perhaps if there were a weight limit imposed on what a player could carry there would be an incentive for currency development, but that would probably cause a lot of other gameplay problems.
I would also add that either a hunger system or a HARD difficulty level of monsters spawning would massively increase the incentives to form a tribe and band together. Hunger, implemented in a balanced fashion, would lead to benefits for a society with a few farmers working to make food for the farmers and the workers, who would be free to mine/build/defend. Lots of monsters most simply create a strength in numbers scenario. Massively disincentivizes individual exploration without being properly equipped, and it will take a society to provide arms and armor in a dangerous world.
Large machinery and constructed factories could also affect the environment (ie- increased smog levels and polluted water). Naturally some players would prefer the aesthetics of an untainted land to the efficiencies that machinery provide.
Minecraft Green Peace, I can see it now... :biggrin.gif:
I think players should start out carrying a "spawn block". The purpose of such a block would be to set your own spawn point. You could set it anywhere you like, and pick it back up to move it if you like.
When set, the spawn block would allow you to respawn after death at a particular point, rather than your random respawn point, allowing you to set your spawn near teammates.
However, to make this interesting is that anyone else could destroy your spawn block (much like you can destroy an enemy spawner in single player), and in doing so, erases your set spawn point (putting it back in your inventory), forcing you to respawn way back at your original point unless you deploy it again.
This could be the a objective in combat - rather than just randomly destroying structures, you would have to invade the enemy town and destroy their spawn blocks in order to legitimately capture it.
This could also be a feature in building "special buildings" - some type of requirement where, say, a hospital can only be built if it is near 10 spawn blocks (or whatever). So if you want to build a hospital, you have to have enough people to cooperate for it. You can't just build your own by yourself. This would be another objective of combat - to neutralize a certain clan/group's facilities, rather than actually destroy the facility you have to destroy the spawn blocks.
I would even go so far as to put in a feature where the more spawn blocks you have in a certain area, the harder it is to destroy the man-made blocks in that area. In this case, it would be much more advantageous to "live" and cooperate with others rather than go it alone, especially if you don't like your buildings being destroyed.
There are many things that could be done with this, and I think it would add a much deeper aspect of multiplayer.