Mod Design Brainstorm [RPG harvesting]

[Space Guy]

If you put too many restrictions on it, people will make only the most basic possible thing to follow those rules - restrictions on resources, restrictions on placement.

My basic idea was to make building anywhere possible and easy - chop down a tree and you can make about a 4x cube worth of volume. It's only if you want to make decorative or longer-lasting builds that it takes more effort.

[Ad Bot]

[Treynolds416]

So it works kind of like Truce's Salvage mod?

You break down a brick and then you can take and use it for your own purposes.

[Space Guy]

Well, for further design purposes I was thinking resources give you that much volume to use in bricks of any small size. If you want to use different colours, 1x6x5 walls or ramps/arches you have to invest further - then building larger structures shows your "wealth" or risk you've taken to go get them.

[Treynolds416]

That makes sense

[rkynick]

Three things:

1. Separation of building materials and crafting/whatever materials.
If building materials can only be used for building, more building will be done. This could backfire if you have one of those globalized, server-run shops that basically ruins everything already anyways. If the economy is player-driven, someone has to want it for building for it to be profitable, and if it's intertwined to some degree (e.g. trees can drop building wood or crafting wood and its random which one you'll get) with the crafting/whatever resources, then there will be inclination to build as everyone will have some. In retrospect I'm not entirely sure about this concept but I felt like saying it.

2. I think it's important to A) give the players reason to settle down and B) make those settlements be in danger and C) make building a viable method of protecting those settlements and D) if at all possible, encourage settling with other players.
One idea that comes to mind would be to make it so that settling has large advantages, but also requires a large investment. Settlements can occasionally be accosted by brick-damaging monsters, and if they destroy your original settlement brick (whatever that may be) or other valuables you've placed, you lose that investment and those advantages until you can afford to re-settle. From there, every settlement brick / other important bricks must be X distance from eachother, which forces a more spread out town rather than everything clumped together in a room that has huge thick walls. Suddenly building towns becomes viable and important. Its true that they could just surround the settlement brick with 1xXx5 bricks, but it wouldn't be easy to protect that; a series of walls around the township not only gives you something to defend from but slows down the monsters and makes them less condensed. If they all surrounded a settlement brick encased in x5 bricks, the structure would collapse quickly.

3. mfloor(%brick.getdatablock().getvolume()/4);
Should get about 50-100 wood / tree with that. You could set a max volume that a player could build to set up the other restrictions.
If you reduce it to /12, volume cost measurements are less precise, which may help remove the minimalist in all of us.

[Desolation]

One idea that comes to mind would be to make it so that settling has large advantages, but also requires a large investment. Settlements can occasionally be accosted by brick-damaging monsters, and if they destroy your original settlement brick (whatever that may be) or other valuables you've placed, you lose that investment and those advantages until you can afford to re-settle. From there, every settlement brick / other important bricks must be X distance from eachother, which forces a more spread out town rather than everything clumped together in a room that has huge thick walls. Suddenly building towns becomes viable and important. Its true that they could just surround the settlement brick with 1xXx5 bricks, but it wouldn't be easy to protect that; a series of walls around the township not only gives you something to defend from but slows down the monsters and makes them less condensed. If they all surrounded a settlement brick encased in x5 bricks, the structure would collapse quickly.

I've been working on a system like this for my script, it allows the "King" to purchase land and build a Village Claim that spawns a trigger depending on the initial investment, the king from then on may build Village Flags/Statues which allow for the further expansion of the village. All bricks within the Village may be deleted by the King but being part of a village offers the aspects of Safety, Efficiency, and Trade. I've also planned out an AI Attack/Wave system but I've yet to code it.

[Doomonkey]

More about resources.

The whole wood thing pisses me off. Willow wood is magically better than oak, willow takes 5 years longer to cut down. In reality, there can be a large variety of trees, but they should only be split into two types, hardwood and softwood. Neither of these should be more "valuable" or "rare" than the other. Deciding which one to get should just depend on the current demand.

I can understand different ores with different difficulties, but the whole tree thing is pretty dumb.

[Doomonkey]

Mining:

Like I said, some ores are harder than others, but when mining, the main difference should be the rarity of the ores. I just thought of a neat way to take some of the grinding out of mining. It would work somewhat like the trench mod, you mine out some rock, and get a bunch of rubble. Here comes the twist, you place the rubble on the ground, and search through it using a different tool. The more you search through a piece, the more likely you are to find ore.

The more time you spend, the more resources you get. Also, the finding of the ores could be made into a fun little game. Pan the gold without spilling any.

[rkynick]

The more time you spend, the more resources you get. Also, the finding of the ores could be made into a fun little game. Pan the gold without spilling any.

This gives me an idea:
Something like bejeweled for mining.

[M]

This gives me an idea:
Something like bejeweled for mining.

The more of one type of ore you remove, the better your weight towards that type of ore is, and the higher your score when time runs out, the better your chance of getting anything at all?

So you score like, 27 lines in the 30 seconds you get. That gives you like a 90% chance to get ore and the type depends on what types you removed the most of.
Scoring above 30 lines would start giving you a chance to find gems as well as ore.
So I'd get my mum to mine for me and become a billionaire.

[rkynick]

The more of one type of ore you remove, the better your weight towards that type of ore is, and the higher your score when time runs out, the better your chance of getting anything at all?

So you score like, 27 lines in the 30 seconds you get. That gives you like a 90% chance to get ore and the type depends on what types you removed the most of.
Scoring above 30 lines would start giving you a chance to find gems as well as ore.
So I'd get my mum to mine for me and become a billionaire.

Certainly seems like something we could make work well.

We'd need a good GUI scripter, though.

[Demian]

Holy crap. I though of making this thread like a month ago but was too lazy to write all the walls of text. I guess I should read thru this.

[M]

Certainly seems like something we could make work well.

We'd need a good GUI scripter, though.

The main issue would be confirming that moves are valid with the server; you could probably do something like sending off the command to check the move (with the server being in control of the grid) and pausing the timer, then waiting for the server response before resuming it. The server response would send back any changes that occur in the grid, these are applied, the timer is resumed. That way the client doesn't have any control over the data, which prevents hacking or at least makes it harder.

You'd also need some kind of 'no moves' detection.

Something else that would be interesting is dynamic alloys; you talked about dynamic materials in another thread a long time ago. Dynamic alloys would be created by adding ores of whatever type into a furnace; for instance you could smelt copper, copper and tin to get bronze, then bronze and silver to get something else. (Silver-veined bronze!)

If only there was a good reason to do something like this.

[Space Guy]

Something else that would be interesting is dynamic alloys; you talked about dynamic materials in another thread a long time ago. Dynamic alloys would be created by adding ores of whatever type into a furnace; for instance you could smelt copper, copper and tin to get bronze, then bronze and silver to get something else. (Silver-veined bronze!)

If only there was a good reason to do something like this.

Have it so smelting every one of the "rarest" materials produces some kind of unique colour that can't be obtained any other way. Building the fortress or walls out of these blocks then shows how rich you are.

[Deathwish]

Regarding mining, ores could be totally invisible, and nodes only uncovered if you prospect within the radius of the 'vein' (A trigger? Some kind of point?), and eventually the vein will run out and be relocated after say, an hour or two. Veins should spawn more often in obscure places or further away from the centre of the map, perhaps rarer metals/resources would spawn their veins underwater or be rare products of mining a vein of a more common material. Perhaps you could even make pure ore a fairly rare product from mining or a result of high skill, and you'd have to refine it somehow. Being a mineralcigarette due to too much dwarf fortress, veins could produce a whole range of products for a single mineral, like copper veins producing malachite/azurite for gems/dyes, whilst still being ores of copper, gem-grade specimens being rare, or perhaps depending on skill.
Just getting that out there.