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Andrew edited this page May 25, 2017 · 3 revisions

The Living Labyrinth - a modest proposal for a Minecraft Server

I want to do strange things to the SCS (Sponge Community Server). I plan to do something truly ... different. It will definitely stretch the boundaries of Sponge a bit. There are some very thorny issues to overcome regarding protection and ranking, and more … I've been negotiating with a few devs, including gravityfox, on how to enable some of the features I need. It looks eminently and imminently possible with FoxGuard, although some improvements in redstone tracking, and some more subtlety in the flags that handle it, would help immensely. I also grabbed the ear of permissions dev Luck (of LuckPerms), as I need to engineer a rather heavy handed way of changing groups - literally engineer :) That may ring a bell with some, I've had this plan a long time. Now it can live. Once it was called the Tartarus Project. Now the working title is "The Living Labyrinth"

Long ago, in the dawn of minecraft, I had a server called Celeano. It had a surprisingly active forum, and on it we developed the idea that became Tartarus. The mods, players and I all pitched in hard and actually had a prototype up and running in June 2011(?), which ran for a few months on my new PC, self-hosted. Celeano became Yggdrasyl server, also self hosted (There were six pages of complicated debate and argy bargy, with lots of input from the mod staff, all of which were lost when storm flooding trashed the box that held the forum :P)

The central feature of the Tartarus Project was the invention of a new kind of gamemode, very much akin to what we now have as Adventure mode. Players in the Explorer group could not place or break blocks, but had access to the economy, trading and shops. Their job was to explore. Go forth, slay and loot, and return to sell the booty and bask in glory. For rank bonuses they had skills from mcMMO, deathchests, and more, as well as fancy titles and chat channels. What would attract them into the wilderness? The lure of looting dungeons, temples, ruins, strange builds - all put there by the folk from the other rank ladder... Engineer. Engineers could easily swap between creative and survival mode. Fly. Give. (with restrictions based on rank, no command-blocks for Eng1. They had no access at all to economy, and no way to interact with Explorers (no pvp perms). Teams of Engineers got parcels of (protected) land, and set to work building treasure-laden deathtrap-filled wonders. Advanced Engineers got access to WorldGuard settings, more WorldEdit commands, and eventually VoxelSniper.
The aim for an Explorer? get Rich, Go up rank ladder, get the best kit, collect dungeon trophies, top list of explorers (not all of that was implemented) The aim for an Engineer? Kill the most explorers. Oh, and go up the rank ladder to get better ways to kill explorers. Visually or technically impressive builds lead to promotion. Have your deathtrap dungeons be the highest rated on the list. The world Tartarus was customised to prevent native dungeons, spawners, mines, caves and villages, and with average land height around 100 to permit deeper caverns.

The really complicated bit came up when our best Explorer said, “hey, can I become an Engineer?” And immediately you see the problem that needed solving

At its’ root, there are two economies: one of money, and one of souls. Plus the added kudos of leaderboards for Explorers, Engineers, and Dungeons.

There are more hidden complexities within, such as enabling and maintaining separate scoreboard ladders for the two career paths, possibly also ladders for each deathtrap facility. But the main issue came down to achieving a fair, exploit-free change of gamemode, which may still needs to occur in special restricted locations. This includes nerfing special access privileges and protections that might still apply to the player from the previous rank track (eg foxguard region flags, titles, etc). Ideally we nerf them from looting their own builds as Explorers. (Collaboration between Explorers and Engineers is a separate administrative issue.) Note: The LuckPerms permissions setup to do this now appears to be functional, lacking only a mechanism to enable the three commands necessary for a change of career (which ideally should have a cooldown and/or cost, with admin bypass of course). The whole shebang is a weird merging of four disparate ends of the minecraft player base - creative vs survival, and minigame vs free-build.

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