Hey all. During my time traveling this summer and not having access to the Internet (and therefore not being on Noobstown), I played a lot of single player Minecraft. Fortunately for me, I had downloaded the map SkyBlock, and it was quite the fun diversion. However, now that I'm back online, I had a few very interesting ideas concerning SkyBlock and potential fun that could be had if some of the SkyBlock concepts were integrated into a new world in Noobstown.
For those of you unaware with
SkyBlock, the basic concept is that you start the game on a small dirt island, floating in the sky. All of the standard blocks from the world are deleted, save for the small little island you start on. Typically you get a tree, a chest with a water/lava bucket, and various plant seeds. The objective of the survival map is to accomplish a series of challenges - building a cobble generator, building a mob grinder, collecting enough string to craft wool, building a lake for squid to spawn, etc. The underlying principle is that you can build a whole lot of things from nothing - and often final SkyBlock maps are quite impressive indeed.
The Pitch:I think it would be really cool to have a SkyBlock-style world added to the server for one to two months, as a fun little diversion from the standard modes of play on the server. My proposition is the creation of a world (accessible from the world junction) that is completely cut off economically, MCMMO-wise, etc. from the rest of Noobstown. It would be its own isolated economy, and players' inventories would not carry over.
That being said, I think Towny, MCMMO, BetterShop, ChestShop, and the other plugins that the server uses could be integrated into a SkyBlock-esque world in interesting ways, to create a truly enjoyable play experience that would also be an interesting lesson in economics. Because such a world would have natural scarcity embedded in it, BetterShop could be leveraged to effectively create "exchange rates" between Sky world-obtainable blocks and ones that would otherwise be inaccessible. Towny would be used to encourage players to cooperate to create the best sky cities possible, and ChestShop would allow the players themselves to develop their own economy.
The best practice for doing this, in my opinion, is for Admins/Mods to select 5 to 10 players to "start" the towns that will exist in the world. In principle, these first towns could effectively be "competing" to accomplish some sort of goal or goals established by site staff. I think it would be really cool for the whole Sky World experience to be tied to some sort of significant reward in the main Noobstown - like a 10,000 nbz prize for all residents of the town judged to "win" by the staff at the end of the whole experiment. Even a concept like "coolest town wins" would be a lot of fun.
The world would be laid out like so - there would be a default spawn area, with signs and such explaining the world. This spawn area would be entirely enclosed, so as to prevent players from leaving spawn any other way than joining a town, which they would do by asking over chat (or all towns would be set to open membership). To keep towns' economies initially separated, /spawn would be disabled, as would public /town spawn commands. These initial towns would all be placed quite far away from one another in the world, so as to give them space to grow and to keep them initially isolated from each other. Each town founder would receive a "starter chunk" initially serving as the homeblock of the town - something along the lines of a 16x16x16 dirt cube (with grass on top) and a chest with the materials necessary for starting the game would do nicely. I've put together a quick little list of things that could be included:
- 10 Water Buckets
- 10 Lava Buckets
- 5 Oak Saplings
- 5 Spruce Saplings
- 5 Birch Saplings
- 5 Jungle Saplings
- 5 Melon Seeds
- 5 Pumpkin Seeds
- 5 Sugar Cane
- 5 Red Mushrooms
- 5 Brown Mushrooms
- 5 Cocoa Beans
- 5 Cactus
- 64 Sand
- 64 Soul Sand
From these starting items, much could be created. The natural progress for each island initially would be to get wood, make a cobble generator, begin the process of creating chests/furnaces/etc, then farming. Cobblestone creation would likely become the major economic activity, as it works well to expand the initial island's area. From that point, each town would have to create a mob grinder to collect bones, then use those bones to bonemeal the initial grass and collect seeds to start a wheat farm. From then on, many courses of action could be pursued - collecting string from spiders to make wool, iron from zombies to make armor/tools/more buckets, smelting cobble to build stone/stone brick structures, etc.
In default SkyBlock, the toolset you are given isn't expandable past a certain point. But with BetterShop, we can change that - allowing items like cobble and wood to be sold to the global shop at a fixed rate would allow people to accumulate wealth. They could then potentially spend that wealth on unlimited global shop supplies of things like redstone, rare ores, and otherwise unattainable blocks (glowstone, netherrack, etc.). So, for instance, if cobble could be sold to the global shop for 1 unit of currency, perhaps a diamond could cost something like 3000 units of currency. This balance could be tweaked by the staff to create a fun but challenging economy in which towns become richer through working, and that work manifests itself in cooler and cooler-looking towns. Additionally, finite resources like dirt, sand, and soul sand are needed in infinite quantities for towns to expand - therefore, there should be a set exchange rate in the BetterShop for their purchase.
Now, in addition to the fixed-rate exchange of the global shop, I mentioned earlier that it would be cool to see players using ChestShops. I also mentioned that the towns in the world should be initially isolated from one another. My logic is that eventually, interest will grow among all of the towns to "connect" to each other, both to look at how other towns are developing, and to potentially trade items. I think the whole process of bridge building and adventuring would be really interesting to watch and participate in, and would to a degree imitate the modern process of globalization. Naturally, these floating wilderness roads wouldn't be grief proof, so I could envision all sorts of things happening - towns giving jobs to residents related to maintaining the roads, or even towns severing ties with other towns for whatever reason. I think the incentive of trading plus general curiosity would really lead to some cool things being built - the world itself would be much more impressive if roadbuilding became a central part of town management. Plus, rounding up a group of people to go adventuring throughout the world by way of floating roads would just be too much fun to pass up.
Conclusion:So, that's my idea in a nutshell. I think the people of Noobstown are quite a creative bunch, and I think doing this for a month or two would really add some spice to the experience on the server, and leave us all with some killer memories. Additionally, there are all kinds of ways that this idea could be expanded - for instance, Admins could conceivably use WorldEdit to act as puzzle masters and create "dungeons" in the middle of the sky wilderness with chests containing rare items to spur exploration. I can see a lot of fun being had. If anyone has other ideas that they want to contribute to the general concept, or wants to give feedback, by all means go ahead. Thanks for taking the time to read this!
SkyBlock-esque World in Noobstown? (Read 2067 times)