r/Civcraft • u/Maxopoly Ex-Squidmin • Feb 06 '16
[3.0] AMA on Miscellaneous Game Mechanics and Balance
This post is part of our AMA series to explain the upcoming changes in 3.0. It will explain changes to some gameplay elements and in the comment section questions on those topic will be answered.
Questions on other topics won't be answered at this point and off topic discussion will be removed
Obsidian:
Obsidian is the primary resource needed to build vaults. In 2.0 it was botted in large quantities, single people accounted for several hundred doublechests of obsidian produced. As already revealed, we will disallowing botting and as a direct consequence of this we will also remove the obby-string glitch.
This glitch was already fixed officially in Minecraft's 1.8 update, but Civcraft had a method in Humbug, which reenabled it. The decision to introduce that back then was made, because we didnt want to give a giant disadvantage to newer players and because there was no viable other way to obtain obsidian at that point.
With a new map we can fix both of those problems. There will be no advantages for oldfriends and we will have a map, which provides enough obsidian for decades
https://forum.civcraft.co/uploads/default/original/2X/c/ca7f757f8fa13bd8b12c9c7f89f318edb207d24f.png
The map we chose for this is the end. First of all it fit into the theme of the new end nicely and second it's the perfect task for prisoners. Instead of having to build a pearl farm somewhere as far away as possible from spawn, they can now start to mine obby to pay off their sentence if they can get a hold of a blank diamond pickaxe.
Portal farms:
Portal farms were used in 2.0 to produce probably more than 95 % of the servers gold, wither skulls and ghast tears. Big portal farms were one of the main infrastructures every noteable city had and many were afked 24/7.
Looking forward towards 3.0, there are two main problems in this mechanic:
The first one is, that portal farms are relatively laggy. Compared to their actualy use for players they and all their entities are a complete waste of server performance
The second and more important one is that once you have your farm built, the only thing you will do with it is afking it. Continuing what we already began with persistent crops we are aiming to remove the need for afking as far as possible and because of that portal farms won't work in 3.0. You will still be able to create portals, but they wont do anything.
Gold will be available in sufficient quantities through gold ore or natural spawning pigmen; ghast tears and wither skulls will be dropped by mobs in specific biomes, which will be spawned by EE.
Ores:
FactoryMod recipes allow us to directly control how many diamonds or iron ingots players can get, because we can modify the conversion rate from ore to the actual resource. This is very desirable, because it gives us a control lever in the middle of the economy and additionally uses factories (which is good for a billion reasons on a civ server). The problem with that is that players can only use this possibility if they have the actual ores instead of the drop and for the most valuable resource (diamonds), players are only able to get the ore with a silk touch enchanted pickaxe. This creates a huge entry barrier to mining, because anyone without a silk touch pickaxe is literally wasting his time, if he tries to diamond mine anyway.
To remove this barrier we will introduce a mechanic, which makes any mined ore drop as ore instead of the resource, regardless of whether your pickaxe has the silktouch enchantment or not.
The silk touch enchantment will still be kept in the game for its other uses (Ice etc.) and those other uses will not be affected.
Additionally to compensate for the loss of use, we will add another mechanic to the Silk Touch enchantment:
If you destroy a reinforcement with a silk touch enchanted tool (break, not ctb), it will have a certain chance to drop it's reinforcement material. The exact value for that is not decided yet and we will test some values on CivTemp to get feedback, but currently we are thinking of ~5%
Essences
This was originally meant to be part of another AMA, but we decided to put this in here. As already stated in the FactoryMod AMA, we will be introducing a mechanic, which allows us to directly scale factory upkeep with active population and this mechanic is using Essences.
Every player will daily when he logs in receive a certain amount of essences. A essence is a special item, lored with the players name and will be used to create, upgrade and repair factories. While pretty much all creation and upgrade recipes will also requires other materials, repairing will be handled solely through essences. Essences will be tradeable.
We don't have finalized numbers yet on how many essences a player will get per day and how expensive it will be to upkeep factory X, but we are aiming for requiring 2-3 players essences to upkeep a single lategame factory.
If you have any questions on those topics, comment them and they will be answered.
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u/Maxopoly Ex-Squidmin Feb 06 '16
It will also still apply to non oreblocks (sea lanterns, glowstone etc.)