Subject: Annual Minecraft Server Thread.

So, it's that time of year again. I know there's been some talk of it before, but I can't find the old thread and instead of reviving it, I decided to start a new one.

Improbable Island Minecraft themed server? I know a lot of people would like to have it custom modded with Island stuff. Have the map be a replica of the Island.

Ideas? Complains? Limericks?

I, myself, cannot really code, but I'd be willing to at least fund to thing for a while (hosting costs) and manage the back end.

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Well, I'm not too sure about coding, but I'd love to help out with the general building of it! Building Outposts, doing repairs, shaping up the Terrain to make it like the Island. Or other things you need help with that are within my abilities?

I'm willing to dedicate time towards it is what I'm getting at!

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Island Map to Minecraft! Now then, from my understanding each map square is roughly 1km^2 making the total area shown on the map somewhere around 1000km^2. Each minecraft block is about 1m in size. If we were to go in scale that would mean each map square would be a 1000x1000 grid.... meaning there would be around 1,000,000,000 blocks just on the surface.

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The question is, do we want to run a survival map while building the Island?

Server commands can change the world type from survival to creative and back again. And I'm sure that there must be some map making tools out there in the wild internet that would help with map making of such a scale.

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Thoughts:
I am in favor of this project, because, hey, why not?
This is the old thread, just for reference: http://enquirer.improbableisland.com/forum/viewtopic.php?forum=15&showtopic=29190
To address one of Tahvohck's concerns last thread, we may need to bring back trains for Improbable Island: the Minecraft
I feel obligated by the spirit of free software to mention Minetest here, though I have no strong opinions about using it.
Creating two maps would be a waste; there are only 8 canon map locations that could conceivably be messed up by interlopers: Those could easily be protected by some mod which makes certain areas indestructible. I imagine this would be a survival map, because I consider that the most fun.
Having a 3D model of the island could open up lots of possibilities. Shame it would be so blocky.

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Alright, I've decided. Starting next week I'm going to shop around for hosting, then set up a vanilla server. It won't have an exact meter for meter island replica on it. It won't have NPCs, or special mobs, or even special weapons (for now anyway). What it'll have is pleasant people wanting to build beautiful things, respecting one another.

I'll keep you guys informed of the development!

Also, for everyone's info, I'm thinking of making it a bukkit server, so we can have fancy chat plugins and some sort of currency based economy. I'm not sure what version of minecraft it'll have to be under though, so maybe we'll have to set up the map with one of the earlier build. For anyone confused as to what this all means, I'll explain more in details once we cross that bridge.

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That sounds excellent! However-- with no intention of dissuading or criticizing you-- I find myself with more things to say about the possible benefits of Minetest*:

• It could be the native Linux program that can run on a crappy laptop (it does mine, once you turn off all the graphical niceties) that CMJ mentioned he wanted back in 2010.
  
• Given that Minetest is a free and open source game, and dependant on a large group of people to provide it game content, we might have a nicer experience trying to write mods. This may be counterbalanced by how much more popular Minecraft is.
  
• Improbable Island: the Minecraft would always be linked, in some way, to the company that owns Minecraft. Improbable Island: the Minetest, being free software, would be more fully ours, if you catch my drift.
  
• Minetest is free as in beer, so all our Islanders (who, it has been conjectured, may be poorer than the average gaming community) can play it for free. Minecraft, by comparison, is listed at $27 on its website.
  

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I will be looking at this MineTest you speak of. But, there is two things I foresee that might be a problem (for me anyway)...

I'm way more familiar with Minecraft and have actually already run a Bukkit and a Feed the Beast server.

The hosting site I was thinking of specializes in Minecraft. They have integrated Minecraft support, mod support, etc. I'm not sure how I would go about with a Minetest server.

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Here's my worries.

1. We'll get it all set up and comfortable and CMJ will somehow say "Nope." and put us all in an awkward position and we'd have to take all our hard work down.

2. It'll somehow be more popular than I.I. itself and people will have to use minecraft to RP.

Of course, these are probably far fetched worries...

I believe you've already answered these in banter and i didn't see them in this thread, as far as i could see, so i thought i'd raise these questions here.

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So I have a lot to comment on, and I'm going to touch on those topics before I go into the forge idea some have heard me talk about. After looking things over, I've tried to keep it short and sweet....

Mobs
You don't need anything really special to change some mobs. Though it will extremely limit your II mob choices, you can change the skins and give equipment to some mobs. It's something that is done on the MC server that I staff. We have a Herobrine that's no more than a zombie with full armor and a custom head. We also have leprechauns that are baby zombies with an new skin. With this we can take mobs already in MC and add II mobs using them.

OSTs
I've heard some talk about the use of OSTs and using command blocks to make them. Ender pears are already MC's teleportation device. If you wanted to expound upon that you could put in a script that lets you type something like '/warp NewHome' while having an enderpearl in your hand. Thus, you are teleported to NewHome and the ender pearl is consumed.

The Map
Looking at banter and some other comments it looks like a lot of people are looking at making the MC server map to scale- which is really, really big. So why bother? If we're using MC, then it's alright if things aren't to scale. As long as we make sure the outposts fit what they need to and aren't too big on the map, what really matters is the shape, not the exact size.

Keeping The Server II Populated
If we're wanting to make sure that the II MC server is filled with Islanders, then we might want a way to do that. It's possible, as I've seen similar done before, to set up a system where a use first verifies their MC account (maybe set up a login for the MC server) on II with a character, and then uses that for their character to join. If that's the way it is done, a temporary 'log-in' hub could hold people who have tried to join but aren't officially connected. Of course, you could just use whitelist if you know a simpler way.

Overcrowding
Obviously the island is, well, an island. If it's not going to be super big then it's going to run out of room some day. I was one of the people concerned about this. As someone suggested in banter, new seasons would be great for this. A reset every so often, a solid schedule would be best, would keep the island fresh and on its feet.

Protecting the Towns
Town protection is one of the most important parts for any server that has a server spawn area. Unless you want to have a war zone as a server entry, they'll have protection. This should be really easy to find and implement. You can use smaller protection techniques to allow players to keep their builds safe.

Requisition
One thing I've seen done is that in some MC servers players earn coins for killing mobs. This could be important, as the same thing happens in II. It definitely has my recommendation to be put to use.


The Forge Idea

It seems that things are going a totally different direction, but I'm going to share the idea anyway. You never know when one idea could spawn another! In this idea I'll be discussing a route where the server was geared more toward being played like II and less like MC. There are obvious things that can be done with Forge, such as the mobs and items like the OST, but I'm going to cover some other possibilities. Not all of these are 100% unique to forge (See PvP for an example).

The Map
Unlike what's been discussed, the map for this can't really be touched. The point of it for this is exploration. Mind you, you can still cut down trees and mine some rock (see Material Collection), but overall the goal is to complete quests and fight monsters (maybe even each other, see PVP).

PvP
Since PvP has typically been an opt-in sort of story, it would be interesting to see that here. A player would be able to send a combat request to another player via chat commands, and that player would be able to accept or decline it by also using chat commands. If that's too low risk for a player, they can turn on PvP before leaving an outpost (to prevent people from cheating by turning on and off PvP) and can freely engage anyone else outside of an outpost.

Material Collection
In II there are two main natural materials- wood and stone. This gives a use to the traditional MC ax and pickax tools. Any tree can be cut for wood except for the trunk (which will allow for, with modding, the tree to grow back as it was) and there are special stone deposits in the mountains that can be mined and slowly regenerate. For use of ores see Equipment and The Down Below.

Homes
This idea someone deviates from Island canon. Rather than anyone building a place in any location there are portals that players can access (once they buy a plot) that will take them to, well, a large box. While in this box they have creative and can build what they like. If they wish to expand the home, like what would be done with doors and such, the player can use the wood and stone they have collected to do so.

Equipment
This one was the trickiest for me. In the end I went with the idea that, just like in normal II, this is where you get your good armor and weapons. Higher level equipment is only available here, which means you need req to get the goodies. This also means that ores, unlike normal MC, don't have as much of a use. To make up for this, it would be interesting if they could be used to level up equipment, thus adding another little bit of fun to the game.

The Down Below
The DB is pretty interesting, and it's difficult to connect it to different outposts on an MC server without portals. So, in each outpost the DB entrance would have a small tunnel that leads to a portal. This portal spits the player into the actual maze that is the Down Below where they fight monsters for loot and can mine ores depending on their DB level. These MC ores, ones a player leaves the DB, can be kept to upgrade equipment, sold for Req, or exchanged for favor.

The Failboat
This could be accomplished with a different hub for characters that die. Monsters that they kill here don't give req, but instead favor. Favor itself is easy to track, as it's just another currency. When in the failboat, should a player have enough favor, they can do a teleport command that'll take them back to one of the outposts in exchange for 100 favor.

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Well, it's almost 3am now and I'm just hoping what I've written makes sense. Good luck to you all!

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Oh, and I also want to add this. Even if we go ahead, we're having bunch of fun, and then for some reason the MC servers becomes a problem regarding intellectual properties of anything, I'm going to put an end to it. As for any MC server, the players have to realize that their "work" may be lost at a moment's notice, either due to updates, bugs, crash, acts of God, anything.

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How well does Minecraft work on a smartphone?

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Yes, I plan on starting even if I don't find exactly what I'm looking for. There is a mod called ForgeEssentials that will provide me with almost everything I want anyway.

I'm waiting now because of other considerations, but with luck, we'll be able to punch our first tree in a week or two at most.

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Just a quick update. I'm still working on this project, and I still want it to happen. It should happen at some point in one form or another. Patience, my fellow minecrafters.

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Here it is! Improbable World the Minecraft server is finally in its Beta stage! What does this mean? It means you can connect right now at

improbableworld.beastmc.com

What will this awesome server feature, you ask? Well, wonder no more, hypothetical person, because here is the skinny:

- Survival Map, mostly vanilla with added features.
- Economy (still work in progress).
- Ability to fly in survival! If you guys want it. I find it's incredibly useful for building.
- Many-shots teleporters! (various teleport and warp commands)
- Greylisted! What is that, you ask? While whitelisting asks for the player to be registered to connect to the server, new players will instead start with the Rookie rank. They'll be able to chat, look around, activate doors, buttons, pressure plates and the like, but they won't be able to do much else. Once you're on, you can distract me (Kolojang) on the Island and you'll be upgraded to the rank of Contestant. You need to connect at least once on the server to be upgraded. Also, that means you can bring non island friends along to gape in awe at whatever you'll be building, but unless they can distract me themselves, they won't be upgraded to Contestant.

* Don't forget to tell me what is your Minecraft name in the distraction!

There is still a LOT of kinks to work out, and unless it is asked by popular demand that it stays, consider the present map to be only a temporary one. I was thinking of holding a seed contest, so you guys can propose your favorite seeds for the map!

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If anybody can track down the retro Glacier seed, i will be on that one like flies on shit.

Glacier is my home land... back in the day. It had a wicked monster infested cave a few meters away from spawn.

The Improbable Island Enquirer - Forum
http://enquirer.improbableisland.com/forum/viewtopic.php?showtopic=33470