Dear all,
The recent issue (see the previous post) regarding automated farming has raised a couple of questions for me:
- Are some items simply too cheap to buy in the economy due to automated farming? It seems to me that the opportunity to build mega-farms in all dimensions (End, Nether, Normal worlds) have deteriorated values of formerly valuable things to near zero. Just by voting one day people can afford to buy things to last them for weeks. We might as well switch the economy off and just start sharing things freely since the money is there in abundance for almost anything you want.
- Is space in the kingdom too cheap so that we have a bunch of half-finished mega builds? There are the outlines/foundations of lot-sized or even multi-lot sized structure on the surface that have not change since months, even years. Some users have several of those structures on the map.
- Is the kingdom too much used for mining sand & other items instead of building things? The kingdom was meant for people to build stuff. I have seen several lots on the 2D map where the surface was simply stripped and left as is. It’s taking the space away from people who want to build something and turning the Kingdom into an ugly wasteland. With the point above, it gets even worse.
I wanted everyone’s input on this. Obviously I think that these issues are a problem and I would like to tackle them.
I know some will not like this but maybe ban the auto farming. 1. It causes lag. 2. It destroys the economy by flooding the market. 3. Do we really need the mega auto farms? 4. Put a limit on how much of an item someone can have up for sale? Is it possible that some people are using the shop as an extra deposit box?
It is getting too easy for people to get King lots. Some people are using the King lots as their personal gather place instead of going to the darklands. Could there be a rule that must be read and checked on before buying a King lot that it is to be used for building and not just for mining? Maybe if it is found that they bought the land for mining only then the lot is taken away, no refund? Limit how many King lots one can have per rank?
I have heard some talk of the darklands getting to hard. Could we make it maybe once a week, or even once every other week to have it where it is normal with night and day, no frying sun? This might get more people out into the darklands and less buying king lots to strip.
Sorry brainstorming on this. I am sorry if some of these suggestions are silly or a heck no one. Just trying my best to help.
And Unc, we all miss having you play with us. Can you please come out and play… when possible? Hugs.
It is possible that some people use the shop as a deposit box. We can limit (or sell?) sales slots as a solution.
The sun only fries on Friday by the way. I have an idea already how to limit Kingdom lots. Will think about it more and then update you all.
I will come more often online in the future and play. I actually restarted to play recently but oddly enough on single player. I was traveling so much during the beginning of the year that I needed something to do off-line as well. Since I now don’t travel so much anymore I can move my playtime online again, specially with 1.13 coming.
Dear Unc,
Personally, I am not a fan of redstone. I’m no good at it and probably never will be. That said, I feel automated farms are a good thing. Sure they make things extremely, super, dirt cheap, but then that saves me time from manually farming so that I can either plan, build, or gather harder to get/expensive resources. Also, while crops are cheap, harder to get items are exponentially more expensive. So, I feel they sort of cancel each other out. However, like Vixen said above, perhaps we should limit the number of items one can have of the item? Like a 1k max? I’ve seen upwards of 10k items offered at one time…
As one who has not been able to purchase another home and much less a kingdom lot, they are certainly not too cheap *for me*. However, for others, I know kingdom lots are like candy. Again, I agree with Vixen; the lots should be limited according to rank, like in the empire. I don’t really have much to say about this one, mainly because life happens to me often and I can understand forgetting to come on or losing an idea or muse….and then being too lazy to take it down.
I’ve heard that there are base plot blocks that are being replaced by other block types. What I mean is: one of Luke’s plots was changed from one biome type to another by the help of Vixen. I know this project was done in a short amount of time, but if it were me, I know I’d take a while to accomplish such a ginormous task. I may stop that project to work on something else, or play a game, or forget to come back for a while because of life. As for trying to stop the use of kingdom lots as tools for resources, people have been talking about the darklands being too hard. Vixen’s suggestion about allowing for a day of grace, or even a week, sounds like it could be worth a try. That way, the people who want to use the dl to test their skills and those who only want to gather resources can both get what they want. Another thing to consider could be allowing torches again (I think they were allowed previously)? Just as a quick fix.
Speaking with Penguin, he brought up a good point for the dl. There could be some sort of incentive to bring people there instead of kingdom, such as receiving double items when mining. For example, 1 stone = 2 stone (silk touch) or 2 cobble. The only problem with this is that users could find something of value, such as a diamond ore block, mine with silk touch, re-place, and mine for a total of four. A way to get around this could be that this rule is only true IFF the blocks were from natural world generation instead of player placement.
I hope this was helpful…and Unc, we’d love to see you play, relax, and joke with us. ^~^ We all miss you!
Another thing, perhaps you could choose a secret group of players to check out the lots/listen around for rule breaking to report back to you for the final decision?
People do that anyhow when things go out of hand.
Been brainstorming with a few others. On the rule breaking. How about if you picked a group or 3 or so that you most trust. No one but you and they will know who they are. They will see and report to you on stuff and you check it out. Or they can be a secret council that if something is going on to decide what to do, such as strip a lot, demote, ban, a talking to to correct the problem or if no rules are being broken then no actions are taken. If they tell anyone who they are then they lose your trust. I know crazy suggestion.
Not really. I don’t want to create a secret server police. Anyhow, people tell me when things go out of hand. I just rather had it so this stuff does not even happen. Specially, when I see it, the people building theses things have already invested a lot of time into it.
Are some items simply too cheap to buy in the economy due to automated farming?
– I think maybe, but not totally. Some types of auto farming works well, and doesn’t make the economy junk. If I have to spend time farming for food, I won’t have time to build. Maybe a solution for this is to offer a free type of food, with a /kit? Then the excuse for auto farming wouldn’t be hunger. The auto farms that make the economy junk are things like iron farms, but we have that shut down already.
Is space in the kingdom too cheap so that we have a bunch of half-finished mega builds?
– I once bought a kingdom lot, with good building intentions, then built a small hut and never went back. My lots reset after that. It is a massive space, and like cocoa said, sometimes life needs our attention. Maybe the problem is not how much they cost, but instead the intentions of the buyer. I think, if the intention is to build, you should have people apply for kingdom lots (like how we vote for players). Maybe lots/builds proposed by a group have a higher probability of passing than proposals for an individual lot.
Is the kingdom too much used for mining sand & other items instead of building things?
– Vixen made a good point, about the DL being too scary for some players. On the other hand, I think the DL is supposed to be a challanging place, where it’s hard to survive. That being said, we do have a massive tunnel system and plenty of lighting. The parks we have built at each biome give players a safe place to prepare, and with the right equipment, travel is safe and fun. Maybe in the new DL, we can make it more inviting for people that may have thought it was too scary / hard to travel before.
— upon rereading that, I fell like it might look like I am saying “auto farms are fine”, I am not. There defiantly needs to be some scaling down of auto farms.
I think if it can feed you for the day, its ok. If you can’t use it all today, you should turn it off.
* ECONOMY & BIG FARMS
I firmly think that some items are too cheap to buy in regard of he 500+Uncs per day that you can freely grab by voting, and I’d be very much in favour of a fixed minimum price on items. For starter, no item should be worth less than 1 unc.. the market is necessary to help people who don’t have access to all ressources on their lot to be able to start farming any kind of stuff, but it doesn’t have to be the main source of material or anyone. Economy farming also means a competition in which the player with the biggest and most efficient farm will be able to put competitors out of business by offering a lower price.. with a fully open market it’s close to impossible to sell an item at a higher price than the lowest available.
I also don’t like the free storage that the shop provides, and I personnally have all my stuff in chests (I like my 5×14 cobblestone doublechests rack), but then chests mean wood chopping, which in turn often means falling leaves lag.
Mega-farming should be limited to one’s personnal use (to support mega-buildings) or fun.. but not to become a player in the economy. And of course they should be switchable.
* KINGDOM LOTS PRICE & UNFINISHED MEGA STRUCTURES
Kingdom lots are surely not expensive for daily voters, but then there’s always free space available.. Sleeping mega-structure foundations are not especially nice
to see, and personnally I think some are just too big, but then there are different cases: for example the one that lays in 4 ocean lots is hardly monopolising lots, as ocean lots
are not the first pick. My concern for this one would be that one could not be able to sail freely, but that doesn’t seem to be the case for the moment.
* KINGDOM STRIPPING
I’m a fan of preserving the existing landsape and integrating the constructions in it. Open air stripping is ugly and I wouldn’t mind if something was done to
limit/prevent it in the Kingdom. DL is definitely not too hard to mine in my opinion, there are many options to do it, from the collective efforts around spawn to the more intimate individual nether portals, leading to your own private DL.
Hey man, I’m not paying 1 unc per dirt or cobble. I think limiting to the quarter (.25) is more reasonable. I use the shop frequently, and I think it works well.
Kingdom lots are so cheap, leading as the root cause of Kingdom abuse. As for large group builds, we just don’t have the leadership or consistency anymore. There needs to be some incentive to get these done (I remember pinebenj would pay more than a Kingdom lot just for a small house).
Is there a way to reward users for builds? I mean, besides promotions… which isn’t how it happens anymore.
If we take the incentives out of building then all people are left with is promoting their friends and making auto farms
I think that if the economy wasn’t working to some extent, that people wouldn’t be able to afford kingdom lots. I know I bought a lot of kingdom lots where I haven’t begun to build yet, but were near my original kingdom lot build because there were unfinished eyesores where I didn’t want the barebones extending to closer lots. While some of the easier to obtain items sell low, in comparison to our active members, we have a rather good economy for higher priced items ie: shulker boxes, enchants, diamonds, and emeralds. I think if we turn off autofarms, we risk the chance of losing members who enjoy building farms and working with redstone. That being said, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen a past post or rule that you have already posted about if farms create more than one chest, then thats too much. As for secret police, I think that is a terrible idea. Anyone who sees something they shouldn’t should already be reporting it, we don’t need the server devolving into Mccarthyism.
Yeah, I think the economy on high-end items works pretty well. Emerald is particular though, because it is probably produced today with agriculture and trading villagers. Emerald ore is the real stuff :)
When Kingdom first came out, it was proposed that a certain amount of progress had to be made a build after a certain amount of time or the lots would be reset. It seems that we are back to that – I don’t believe there is quantifiable way to track progress that would work with the needs of both the server and the players.
I did the kingdom lots to build with people, as a community. Unfortunately as people have RL issues come up and they stop playing as frequently, the building slows or comes to a stop. Heaven’s Reach or Skillet’s (I think Xecaria is the current owner now) futuristic city comes to mind. They aren’t anywhere near completed, but they also haven’t changed in years – at least by anything measurable on the surface. Mine hasn’t either, minus underneath – none of which was mining. I made a gorgeous storage and I connected lots with an eye-appealing mine rail.
However, this post has made an effect, at least on me. I know my time online has been _extremely_ limited – being a mom for 3, 3 and under has left me no time to myself and no time to sleep either. I know my one lot looks like open air strip mining in kingdom, even though all I’ve done is removed dirt (which I had way too much of before kingdom anyways) to terraform it. But its ugly, I’m not going to be done terraforming it into a hellish landscape anytime soon, nor finishing city that is currently a cobblestone shell above it in any sort of timely fashion. I went through and abandoned it as well as a ton of kingdom lots. Once I move my storage the remaining lots will be abandoned also.
I would suggest build proposals for kingdom, and using that as a jumping off point for people to get the community involved for the builds. I know that was mentioned when Kingdom was first put into place prior, but I don’t remember the cons to that. Maybe not even a proposal system but there needs to be a place to post community builds in progress for people to review, or inquire on helping etc etc.
Final note, if you take time out to gather resources in the darklands, you’re not building. Not that I’m negating the validity of the darklands and having a resource gathering world…. but if you have an hour per day, 7 days a week you have 7 hours to which you go out to where you need to in the darklands, find what you need, harvest it, and hopefully have enough to build – and that is just in 1 weeks time. It takes time to find the right biome, or keep going back because you died – all of that isn’t progressing the kingdom lots either.
TL;DR
The point of this all being – I don’t want to appear to be breaking the rules, nor can I work at the pace (right now) that is being expected of me, but also the point of kingdom is working as a community and that will also ebb and flow as players come and go due to real life circumstances. You can have more people in the darklands for resources (vs mining out their lots) but the tradeoff is building will be slower. I’m not sure there is a solution that works for every aspect.
P.S. Yes this post wasn’t directed specifically at me (or maybe it was, who knows) but it caused me to take a hard look at my lots and my future building plans and act accordingly.
I agree with psychodrea about the whole RL issues, i myself have not been able to play much because of them, i actually feel bad just popping on for a quick reset but I do come on for as long as i can, when i can.
The economy situation i do agree does need to be sorted out, as much as cobble and dirt is easy to come by, selling it in the shop for 0.00000000000000000? is a bit daft even if it is for about 1 out of several thousand, either 0.5 or 1 unc is better, the lottery i would say, couldn’t the action of voting be where the uncs come in or minimize the any uncs won in the lottery to less than they are now.
Well, to start off, I am likely the cause with #1-ish and #3. I don’t have any unchanging 1/2 done builds as I am always working on them, so not #2.
#1: I do have four items in ridiculous quantities for dirt cheap prices (I matched the lowest current market price). One is from an “auto” farm, the other three are from manual farms. They are ender pearls (manual), spider eyes (manual), arrows (manual) and raw fish (auto-no redstone, just straight fall damage). They are a result of me intentionally gathering one item for a build (such as string for wool, or bones for dyes, or prismarine shards for lights and blocks) and then also getting another item I do not need. The fastest way to clear them from my inventory is /offer for the current market price. Creating a /clear command or something would stop this for me. Chucking them all in lava either requires a lot of time or a redstone trash can which makes lag as it dispenses the items 1 by 1 into lava.
That said, I do not feel the market is broke as these items are not in demand, they are more junk items. Maybe the pearls (I massacre endermen to mend my end gear) have some small value but I have sold only 13, even at dirt cheap prices. The desirable items are never in stock and highly priced. I always need iron and it is never available, but when it is , it sells for 15-20 per ore (1280 a stack). Shulker boxes run 2000, beacons run 9000, diamonds still run 50 each even with mending gear. I would ask for a /clear command in survival that clears just that item permanently from inventory.
#2. I agree that builds should not be stagnant for years. at least visible builds, see #3 for solution.
#3. I’m the sand lot guy. I reset the lot as soon as this posted. I needed bulk sand for glass for a planned build. The key issue is that mining sand (a falling block) in the DL was too glitchy except for fire day and only mining one day a week did not provide enough resources for the other 6 days each week. The issue was it would take thousands of sea lanterns to light up a desert 256×256 (standard kingdom lot). Without lighting it up, I would constantly be hit by mobs (this was ok, except for the glitchy falling blocks). Each time I was hit, a ghost block formed and I was hit regularly. The ghost blocks would trap my character in limbo like a spider web until I could jump or find a way to get out. Then I would constantly hit these unseen blocks. In the kingdom, I could home to another world a back and the blocks would be visible or I could do it to get free. Regardless, It was an ugly lot and I will never do it again. Lesson learned. A command to do whatever reload process happens when you change worlds would fix this issue in the DL. When I played WoW, there was a /refreshGUI command that reloaded the graphics which fixed glitchy stuff like this. Is this something simple to do? Ghost blocks are annoying, but falling type ghost blocks are worse as they form at a far far far greater rate and often trap a player inside the falling block.
TL:DR: Create a /clear command to clear a players inventory of the block type being held. Create a /resetGUI type command to reset the graphics rendering to show ghost blocks. Sepengo needs to tone down his stuff a bit but really wants to build his 9 lot water build (picture in forum) if Uncovery is ok with it.
> auto-no redstone, just straight fall damage
hoppers in large quantities/chains are essentially the same as redstone.
> Creating a /clear command
Yeah that’s easy. we have that in creative mode already (/ci). I would prefer however for things to be actually harder to get instead of getting and then dumping them
> that mining sand (a falling block) in the DL was too glitchy
I did not know about this and please escalate these things. I am surprised that there is a difference between worlds.
> A command to do whatever reload process happens when you change worlds would fix this issue in the DL.
I am not sure what it actually does. It sounds like a client-side issue to me. Can you maybe try to re-install your client to solve this?
> wants to build his 9 lot water build
Yes, I am fine with it of course. Looks great!
Have you thought about getting yourself a sandy part of Aether (for example Aet_M9, close to your current one)?
I have picked both of my aether lots with the idea of mining sand. Admittedly, the south-east part of Aet_K9 is ugly because of it.. I could recover it with dirt if needed though.
Pb: if you want to mine all of it (I hate to waste), you have to build a floor underneath because a lot of it is hanging over the void.
Frankly I rather have a thorough discussion why we cannot mine in the darklands and fix those issues instead. The darklands is finally reasonably “disposable” and the ideal place for that.
I already now installed a plugin that should get rid of the ghosting issue. If this issue would have been escalated instead of just circumvented sooner, a lot of people could have benefited from it months ago.
Thank you.
The difference between world stems from the lack of a day/night cycle in the DL (except fire day which is awesome with a few fire resist pots). With no day cycle clearing the mobs from the surface, and a desert having great sight lines for mobs, you get hit far more often. If you get hit while digging a block, it almost always becomes a “ghost block”, if you are hit into the block from behind, you glitch into it and get stuck for 30-45 seconds. In the Kingdom or Empire, you can just mine daytime on the surface. I also would use homes between Empire and Kingdom, which for some reason makes the ghost blocks reappear.
As for the GUI reset. Reinstalling the client will not solve it, the “ghost blocks” remain invisible until either a server reset, switch worlds, or relog. Relogging is the only effective option in the DL, but given the constant mobs, would need to be done constantly. It is more effective to just work around the invisible, undiggable blocks you bump into. This is a well known minecraft bug that may get fixed in 1.13 as the fix has been posted for mojang to do. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIWCdSMHIkQ Regardless, I took the easy way out and made an ugly lot and that is on me. It is not a huge concern, just generally really annoying. There is a Spigot plugin to fix this, giving users a command /ghost which makes all ghost blocks visible again. The plugin page is: https://www.spigotmc.org/resources/ghost-block-remover.26820/
Ok, added the plugin, please test it!
It works. It is awesome. I ran into the DL, started digging sand and got hit by a skellie and started glitching on a ghost block. Typed /ghost and 2 blocks reappeared an it pushed me out of the same space as the block, allowing me to move.
Recommend upping the distance slightly from 5 to 8 or 10 as on other tests, when I ran down and killed the mob, it took a while to find the ghost blocks with a radius of only 5.
I have a 2 part idea
1. Uncovery specific achievements for behaviors you want to encourage. There should be badges on our user info page. Some will be permanent badges, some are special limited time available badges. Examples: Built out first lot, built out 10 lots, most beautiful lot spring 2018, 1st 2nd 3rd honorable menyion in super jammy contest, Most innovative mechanism, Most useful public building, Speed builder for fast completions, most persistent for completing long unfinished projects etc
2 A lot or build voting system for community or elder or whoever to determine the subjective components of #1
Sorry if this is sparse. I am at work doing this on my phone and can’t take more time to flesh it out.
What about making the shop just a little bit more difficult to put items into, make it so you have to go to a physical area on the server, outside of the lot areas to put items into the shop, it’d add a bit more inconvenience but would quickly discourage people dumping mass items into the shop. I’d keep it the same way for buying items as it currently is, however, because many reasons people purchase from the shop is because of they need something they didn’t account for.
I think the only realistic thing would be to make someone pay to put stuff into the shop and when you take it out there is no refund.