As I said back in the early days of this post, we should not establish a currency right away. Let the people decide what they want to do in terms of currency. That's the whole point of the simulation, to see what solutions people will come up with when facing one of the toughest issues in Minecraft, currency. I said it some time ago and did put it in better context, but that's the summary of it.
I could pick a piece of gum off the ground and call it currency, but it would be worthless. So in effect, currency would not develop right away, but once a faction(s) formed that agreed on a currency and it's value.
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Here is my signature. If you like it, I am amazed.
Powerful/clearly wealthy factions would elect to simply give people 'money' to claim items at a later date rather than expend them themselves. The key is to figure out some way to incentivize this. Maybe lower ore generation rate?
Also, please consider installing NoCheatPlus if you haven't already on the server when it goes live. There are a ton of unscrupulous fellows out there who wouldn't hesitate to ruin this experiment for the sake of their own amusement.
Yes. I am a current player there. Actually, I've come to view CivCraft as basically exactly what we wanted in a simulation. The only differences are our goal of having a whitelist of very active players (to prevent things like the recent apocalyptic invasion on there) and having short playing periods daily. Basically, our goal is to limit the amount of sociopaths going into our server to counteract the higher-than-usual number of sociopaths present on Minecraft and the internet in general. While a hands-off approach would be nice, we don't want our simulation to end up as another chaos server because of an uneven distribution of personalities on Minecraft.
I'm surprised nobody has thought of this yet, or if someone did it slipped right past me:
Think about how trading was in ancient times. They traded, say, a horse for two pigs, or a bag of flour for a bag of seed. Thing was, not everyone had horses, or flour. So people realized that if they used currency, they could trade money for a pig, and THEN the other guy would use it to pay for a horse. Everyone wins.
Most civilizations used metals to make coinage, though others used pebbles and shells. The reason why specific currencies were chosen was because they were rare.
I think there should be no forced currency. The factions will inevitably develop their own currencies. Let's say faction A chooses diamonds, faction B redstone, and faction C lapis.
Diamond is only slightly rarer than lapis, but you get about four per ore mined, so the exchange rate would be 4 lapis per diamond. Redstone is much more common, let's say a dozen times as common as diamond, so the exchange rate would be twelve redstone for one diamond, and three redstone for one lapis. This isn't set in stone though, so in theory a person could buy diamonds cheap and sell them for a huge profit.
I realize in this map ores are rarer, but the proportions will still be the same. No set currency and prices allows for merchants, because they can buy things from people who sell stuff cheap, and sell it elsewhere for a profit.
Consequently, the markets will be competitive, since people will lower their price as much as possible so their stuff gets bought more.
So if we let factions choose their own currency:
1. We'll have a "stock market".
2. We'll have merchants.
3. We'll have a good economy.
This also makes me think that if we have problems with, say, taxes, we could look at real-world examples of how society did it, and emulate it.
I could pick a piece of gum off the ground and call it currency, but it would be worthless. So in effect, currency would not develop right away, but once a faction(s) formed that agreed on a currency and it's value.
Reason why your gum right now is worthless because we already have an established currency. However, a problem among the players will be what is valuable to what. They MIGHT go with a currency system, they might go with a barter system, we'll just watch the simulation and see, that's the point of it.
Reason why your gum right now is worthless because we already have an established currency. However, a problem among the players will be what is valuable to what. They MIGHT go with a currency system, they might go with a barter system, we'll just watch the simulation and see, that's the point of it.
Exactly. The gum might be worth 1,000,000$ if, say there were only 5 pieces of gum in existence and there were no materials or facilities available to make more.
Anyway, it looks like the topic and server have progressed a lot since I last checked! I will continue keeping an eye on the topic.
Exactly. The gum might be worth 1,000,000$ if, say there were only 5 pieces of gum in existence and there were no materials or facilities available to make more.
Anyway, it looks like the topic and server have progressed a lot since I last checked! I will continue keeping an eye on the topic.
But there would also have to be a demand for gum. Gum chewed by Albert Einstein will be worth much more than gum chewed by you or me, because he's famous. The only reason gold is valuable is because there's a demand.
The only reason gold is valuable is because there's a demand.
Much like diamonds IRL. They're only valuable because the company with a monopoly on them tricked people into thinking they're rare.
You know, another interesting idea for a simulation would be to implement some sort of religion system, where groups of players could gain some sort of benefit from actions such as sacrificing items at altars, going to war with groups of different religions, or building ornate temples. This would act as a bit of a resource sink, as well as give some reason for going to war beyond mere plunder. As to what that actually would be would be decided by the players, but real world religions should probably be avoided so people aren't offended.
Much like diamonds IRL. They're only valuable because the company with a monopoly on them tricked people into thinking they're rare.
You know, another interesting idea for a simulation would be to implement some sort of religion system, where groups of players could gain some sort of benefit from actions such as sacrificing items at altars, going to war with groups of different religions, or building ornate temples. This would act as a bit of a resource sink, as well as give some reason for going to war beyond mere plunder. As to what that actually would be would be decided by the players, but real world religions should probably be avoided so people aren't offended.
Currency is not and never was intended to be implemented through modifications. If the need for currency arises, players will implement currency. This thinking will apply to any other element of society, from roads to religions. Modifications are needed to create the society in itself, but this should be the extent of its role.
Adding religions with bonuses in certain areas would be interesting, I agree. I really like the idea of specialization in video games but, in this instance, we will let players develop their bonuses and weaknesses through the way they play the game.
I have been following this thread for a few months, but have just created my account to be able to post today. I would definitely like to be invited if this server ever comes to fruition. Does anyone have a status update, projected launch date, etc?
Also - if there is anything I may be able to help with (from a plugin perspective), I may be interested in helping. It looks like the mapmaking duties have been fairly well delegated and taken care of, but I haven't seen any real posts about who is taking on the coding of the necessary changes to the game to accomplish all of the things that have been mentioned.
Just wanted to say - great ideas and if there is anything I can do to help, please let me know who to contact.
This is just terrible. You are taking away from what minecraft is made from, like other servers out there. If realism and politics is what you want, play Real Life.
Yeah, but this progresses a lot faster than real life, and as there are fewer people you get more of a say and have more of an effect on the game.
But there would also have to be a demand for gum. Gum chewed by Albert Einstein will be worth much more than gum chewed by you or me, because he's famous. The only reason gold is valuable is because there's a demand.
Er... That's the only reason anything is valuable. If everyone stopped eating food, food would be worthless too. It's just that their will always be a demand for it because no one wants to starve.
It seems a little too complicated for some people. It isn't really my cup of coffee either but at the same time this seems cool. Good luck to you, if you're still pursuing this!
I got to thinking about this topic again recently, and began wondering if some tech mods might be helpful in simulating increasing industrialization and automation as time progresses. I came up with a few criteria with regards to what we would want out of such mods in order to see really interesting emergent behavior:
1.) No easy "set and forget" free energy sources. If these exist, the game becomes a contest of who can spam the most solar panels or what have you. Free energy is probably okay to have if it's either very time and resource intensive to set up (and, optimally, less efficient than non-renewable resources), or is limited in some way to very few "niche" uses.
2.) Simple enough for most players to use fairly effectively. Not everyone is an engineer, after all.
3.) Absolutely no currency. Enough has been said about this on the thread, I think I shouldn't need to explain it.
4.) Resource teleportation should be kept at a minimum. I realize that Ender Chests exist, but in general I'd rather see players invest resources in physical transportation and trade networks (i.e. minecart railways) than be able to transfer their goods across the map instantaneously..
5.) Diversity of resources. By this I mean there should be a decent variety of commodities that could be produced and traded, allowing for specialization in one particular resource. As an added point of interest, these commodities could be distributed differently according to biome (i.e. X requires a cold biome for optimal production, but Y can only be found beneath ocean biomes).
I think a good combination of mods to try would be Buildcraft, Railcraft, and Forestry. Here's how they stack against the criteria:
1.) They all have machines that work off of Buildcraft's energy system, which is based on internal combustion - this means in order to produce enough energy for most tasks, fuel of some sort has to be consumed. Buildcraft's redstone engine and Forestry's clockwork engine are exceptions to this, but the former produces very little energy and can't be hooked up to conductive pipes (severely limiting the number of them you can use to power one machine), and the latter has to be wound manually. Automatic, infinite fuel loops are theoretically possible, but very resource intensive and difficult to balance properly.
2.) Buildcraft is about as simple as you can get for a tech mod. Its gates may give some pause, but they're later game items only really used for automation of some tasks, and fairly simplistic once you become comfortable with the concept. Railcraft's routing and signaling systems may be a tad difficult to wrap your head around initially, but, as these would be used mainly for public transportation systems, most need not be an expert in their inner workings. Forestry takes a little time to get to know properly, but it's nothing a trip to a wiki couldn't fix (most of the time).
3.) No currency to speak of. Forestry has stamps, but see the next point on that.
4.) Forestry does have a mail system. However, I'm fairly certain that there's a way to disable the crafting recipes for stamps (which are required to send mail) in the config files, essentially turning off the whole system. Might I point out that Railcraft is almost entirely focused around railways?
5.) Forestry has tree and bee breeding mechanics, which are somewhat picky about which biome you're in. These can produce a variety of things that can fill a particular niche. Breeders might even start exchanging specimens with good genes for a particular purpose. Railcraft has some biome specific decorative blocks which can be found in forests and oceans, as well as ores that appear only in deserts and extreme hills (however, these ores are only really useful for making gunpowder...). Buildcraft has oil, a very useful fuel resource that is more common in deserts, though appears in springs that are scattered across the map. The fuel made from refining it is bound to be a valuable commodity, though I suspect its availability will balloon early on, then decline as local sources are exhausted. This will push players to either explore out further for more of it, or work on developing the less efficient, but renewable, ethanol.
The problem with mods like that is that advances come far to quickly to be reasonable. Within a week, we would have confederations of Diamond-Drill using spacemen. In addition, those mods are to far removed from Miecraft to give an accurate simulation for our purposes.
And I know this is a bump, but I'm in love with the concept.
No, I do not. Please explain.
I could pick a piece of gum off the ground and call it currency, but it would be worthless. So in effect, currency would not develop right away, but once a faction(s) formed that agreed on a currency and it's value.
Powerful/clearly wealthy factions would elect to simply give people 'money' to claim items at a later date rather than expend them themselves. The key is to figure out some way to incentivize this. Maybe lower ore generation rate?
Also, please consider installing NoCheatPlus if you haven't already on the server when it goes live. There are a ton of unscrupulous fellows out there who wouldn't hesitate to ruin this experiment for the sake of their own amusement.
Yes. I am a current player there. Actually, I've come to view CivCraft as basically exactly what we wanted in a simulation. The only differences are our goal of having a whitelist of very active players (to prevent things like the recent apocalyptic invasion on there) and having short playing periods daily. Basically, our goal is to limit the amount of sociopaths going into our server to counteract the higher-than-usual number of sociopaths present on Minecraft and the internet in general. While a hands-off approach would be nice, we don't want our simulation to end up as another chaos server because of an uneven distribution of personalities on Minecraft.
http://www.reddit.com/r/Civcraft/comments/193ng6/is_it_just_me_or_has_the_server_population/
Not sure who that is referring to, but I figured it might have been my post…
http://www.reddit.com/r/Civcraft/
^ Official subreddit, virtually everything you need to know is there…
@Jr8
I understand, that would mean that if you didn't miss a playing period, you wouldn't have things happening while you were gone.
Think about how trading was in ancient times. They traded, say, a horse for two pigs, or a bag of flour for a bag of seed. Thing was, not everyone had horses, or flour. So people realized that if they used currency, they could trade money for a pig, and THEN the other guy would use it to pay for a horse. Everyone wins.
Most civilizations used metals to make coinage, though others used pebbles and shells. The reason why specific currencies were chosen was because they were rare.
I think there should be no forced currency. The factions will inevitably develop their own currencies. Let's say faction A chooses diamonds, faction B redstone, and faction C lapis.
Diamond is only slightly rarer than lapis, but you get about four per ore mined, so the exchange rate would be 4 lapis per diamond. Redstone is much more common, let's say a dozen times as common as diamond, so the exchange rate would be twelve redstone for one diamond, and three redstone for one lapis. This isn't set in stone though, so in theory a person could buy diamonds cheap and sell them for a huge profit.
I realize in this map ores are rarer, but the proportions will still be the same. No set currency and prices allows for merchants, because they can buy things from people who sell stuff cheap, and sell it elsewhere for a profit.
Consequently, the markets will be competitive, since people will lower their price as much as possible so their stuff gets bought more.
So if we let factions choose their own currency:
1. We'll have a "stock market".
2. We'll have merchants.
3. We'll have a good economy.
This also makes me think that if we have problems with, say, taxes, we could look at real-world examples of how society did it, and emulate it.
Come visit Mocha's Sandbox!
Reason why your gum right now is worthless because we already have an established currency. However, a problem among the players will be what is valuable to what. They MIGHT go with a currency system, they might go with a barter system, we'll just watch the simulation and see, that's the point of it.
Exactly. The gum might be worth 1,000,000$ if, say there were only 5 pieces of gum in existence and there were no materials or facilities available to make more.
Anyway, it looks like the topic and server have progressed a lot since I last checked! I will continue keeping an eye on the topic.
Check out my bad CTM map reviews here.
But there would also have to be a demand for gum. Gum chewed by Albert Einstein will be worth much more than gum chewed by you or me, because he's famous. The only reason gold is valuable is because there's a demand.
Come visit Mocha's Sandbox!
Much like diamonds IRL. They're only valuable because the company with a monopoly on them tricked people into thinking they're rare.
You know, another interesting idea for a simulation would be to implement some sort of religion system, where groups of players could gain some sort of benefit from actions such as sacrificing items at altars, going to war with groups of different religions, or building ornate temples. This would act as a bit of a resource sink, as well as give some reason for going to war beyond mere plunder. As to what that actually would be would be decided by the players, but real world religions should probably be avoided so people aren't offended.
Like in Civilization 5?
Come visit Mocha's Sandbox!
Adding religions with bonuses in certain areas would be interesting, I agree. I really like the idea of specialization in video games but, in this instance, we will let players develop their bonuses and weaknesses through the way they play the game.
Also - if there is anything I may be able to help with (from a plugin perspective), I may be interested in helping. It looks like the mapmaking duties have been fairly well delegated and taken care of, but I haven't seen any real posts about who is taking on the coding of the necessary changes to the game to accomplish all of the things that have been mentioned.
Just wanted to say - great ideas and if there is anything I can do to help, please let me know who to contact.
Yeah, but this progresses a lot faster than real life, and as there are fewer people you get more of a say and have more of an effect on the game.
Er... That's the only reason anything is valuable. If everyone stopped eating food, food would be worthless too. It's just that their will always be a demand for it because no one wants to starve.
http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/1794116-what-do-you-think-is-the-most-useless-thing-in-minecraft/page__st__340#entry22643550
... and you seem to be solving this. My only question: does a client of your server need to install the mod before using your server?
BUMP!
1.) No easy "set and forget" free energy sources. If these exist, the game becomes a contest of who can spam the most solar panels or what have you. Free energy is probably okay to have if it's either very time and resource intensive to set up (and, optimally, less efficient than non-renewable resources), or is limited in some way to very few "niche" uses.
2.) Simple enough for most players to use fairly effectively. Not everyone is an engineer, after all.
3.) Absolutely no currency. Enough has been said about this on the thread, I think I shouldn't need to explain it.
4.) Resource teleportation should be kept at a minimum. I realize that Ender Chests exist, but in general I'd rather see players invest resources in physical transportation and trade networks (i.e. minecart railways) than be able to transfer their goods across the map instantaneously..
5.) Diversity of resources. By this I mean there should be a decent variety of commodities that could be produced and traded, allowing for specialization in one particular resource. As an added point of interest, these commodities could be distributed differently according to biome (i.e. X requires a cold biome for optimal production, but Y can only be found beneath ocean biomes).
1.) They all have machines that work off of Buildcraft's energy system, which is based on internal combustion - this means in order to produce enough energy for most tasks, fuel of some sort has to be consumed. Buildcraft's redstone engine and Forestry's clockwork engine are exceptions to this, but the former produces very little energy and can't be hooked up to conductive pipes (severely limiting the number of them you can use to power one machine), and the latter has to be wound manually. Automatic, infinite fuel loops are theoretically possible, but very resource intensive and difficult to balance properly.
2.) Buildcraft is about as simple as you can get for a tech mod. Its gates may give some pause, but they're later game items only really used for automation of some tasks, and fairly simplistic once you become comfortable with the concept. Railcraft's routing and signaling systems may be a tad difficult to wrap your head around initially, but, as these would be used mainly for public transportation systems, most need not be an expert in their inner workings. Forestry takes a little time to get to know properly, but it's nothing a trip to a wiki couldn't fix (most of the time).
3.) No currency to speak of. Forestry has stamps, but see the next point on that.
4.) Forestry does have a mail system. However, I'm fairly certain that there's a way to disable the crafting recipes for stamps (which are required to send mail) in the config files, essentially turning off the whole system. Might I point out that Railcraft is almost entirely focused around railways?
5.) Forestry has tree and bee breeding mechanics, which are somewhat picky about which biome you're in. These can produce a variety of things that can fill a particular niche. Breeders might even start exchanging specimens with good genes for a particular purpose. Railcraft has some biome specific decorative blocks which can be found in forests and oceans, as well as ores that appear only in deserts and extreme hills (however, these ores are only really useful for making gunpowder...). Buildcraft has oil, a very useful fuel resource that is more common in deserts, though appears in springs that are scattered across the map. The fuel made from refining it is bound to be a valuable commodity, though I suspect its availability will balloon early on, then decline as local sources are exhausted. This will push players to either explore out further for more of it, or work on developing the less efficient, but renewable, ethanol.
And I know this is a bump, but I'm in love with the concept.