Loitering

The server was acting grindy yesterday and now it appears hung. It says there are 2 people online, but I'm willing to bet this is wrong.

I can't craft the sewing kit on official MP. When I click craft it returns "Failed." I have the required supplies.

I'm responding to the Sneak Peak in an indirect way.

The point of this sort of system is the following: A form of offline (and online) protection. Protection that is not permanent. Sites must be maintained or they will fall to ruins and other players can remove them. PvP and raiding are not prevented, but encouraged. The work of builders is respected and has longevity. A system that allows player created dungeons and castles in a PvP setting that wont be destroyed by the first player who wanders through. I'm going to call this block a "Shrine" but it's basically the protective barrier generator with the following behaviour... Blocks within the protected area can be destroyed, but an NPC workman will appear and slowly rebuild them. The shrine is indestructible as long as it has gold in it. Area of protection cannot overlap with areas of protection from other shrines. The shrine only operates when it contains gold. The shrine is a container with 12 or so slots. The shrine can be shared by members of a guild. The gold is depleted over time, so if it is not refilled, it will eventually empty and protection will stop. If the NPC Workman is killed, after a short time, another will appear. Only members of the shrine's guild, or an owner, can build blocks in the protected area. If land is changed, the worker NPC will return it to it's previous state. When protected blocks are destroyed, there is a chance that gold will drop. The gold is taken from the shrine, in turn, reducing the amount of time the protection will last. The workmen should rebuild slow enough to slow the rate at which raiders can deplete the shrine and ultimately destroy it and the blocks it protects. Ship Hulls should basically be waterborne versions of the shrine. It means that ships can be blasted until there's nothing left but the hull, but they can't totally be sunk until they're emptied of gold (which requires waiting until a deck hand rebuilds the ship so you can drain it of more gold). The Ship's worker NPC could be called a deck hand in my ideal world. This isn't perfect, but I think something like this is better than a MP environment packed with abandoned monstrosities no one can interact with. This kind of approach let's people go nuts on the environment while still respecting the work of builders (provided they keep delivering that gold!).

I'm not sure how far Devs plan to go with NPCs, but a possible solution to people's frustration with tedious hardened block removal would be to let a workmen NPC do the labour. A player could run around marking blocks for destruction, and an NPC labourer could take up the task of actually hacking away at the blocks to remove them. It removes the tedium without making block removal instantaneous.

That's not a great solution for MP where you'll REALLY regret bad choices. A blueprint mechanism would be great. Maybe you have to build paper, then import a design made in creative onto the paper. Then add an "active idea" slot to the paper doll, so when you drop the blueprint into it, the outline of your creation appears in the game world and you just need to fill in the right blocks. You could have a "cornerstone" block that aligns the blueprint with the game world (the hull works for ships). You can make copies of the blueprint so a team can work on the same design, or sell the blueprints in game to other players. Maybe blueprints allow players to create blocks they haven't unlocked yet, creating an in game economy of blueprint sales, and maybe certain blocks can be incredibly hard creating scarcity to help drive an in-game economy.

I actually enjoy human adversaries and the thrill of avoiding griefers, so I don't really find preventative mechanisms a boon to the game experience. All the solutions of the sort that turn off friendly fire or create safe bubbles are not the sort of things that work on public servers. There are two typical outcomes when games go these routes: A) miles and miles of abandoned monstrosities on every inch of available real estate or B) griefing by other means (I'm looking at you Arc). In Arc, 7 Days to Die, and Space Engineers, I have a combined play time nearing 10,000 hours, and thousands more in minecraft. None of those games could stop griefing without creating a dead game space. The key to a creative game, I would say, is to remember that you aren't creating art to be looked at and admired, but are creating objects for people to interact with--a security bubble doesn't help that. I'd like to suggest a different sort of solution. The basic idea here is that every faction/guild/township/whatever has an indestructible chest they can put gold into, and an engineer NPC who will deplete that gold to automatically rebuild any hardened structures in its range that were hardened by a member of the guild, and destroy any blocks built by non members. So what happens is this: griefers offline attack, they destroy everything but the chest (because it's indestructible when there's gold in it); the Engineer hasn't even begun rebuilding because they keep killing him; they then can wait the 24 hours or so it takes for the engineer to rebuild or go home. I would also provide a chance of dropping gold for each block destroyed by raiders as a reward for their piracy (some blocks have a higher chance of dropping gold than others). The Benefits: What this effectively does is allow players to calculate how much gold they need to put into their chest to protect their base for X number of days of constant attack. Because the system knows how many blocks it has to protect and how fast the NPC could possibly repair them, it can tell the guild how many hours of protection they have. So, it provides security and respect for people's artistic work and a viable option for people who want to use a defensive strategy. It allows players to build dungeons and fortifications for other players to play against, play in, and adventure with. For me, an essential part of the creative experience is creating a living world that wants to murder strangers and allows strangers to murder it back. Limitations: It doesn't do much for online griefing. But I'm of the mind that online griefing is what *public* multiplayer is all about. Allowing each playing a hidden stash container that only they can access can alleviate early game harassment. There are a bunch of technical details that would need to be ironed out, and maybe guild members would need the ability to ACTUALLY destroy blocks in their territory. Maybe it's the sort of thing you can turn on and off (so a snapshot of what will be repaired is taken), or maybe it has an adjustable range. And maybe we have NPC defenders that can slow down the destruction process. Long story short, I think this sort of route (if not precisely this) is a better way to go. The philosophy is this: don't shut griefers down; use them as a sort of interesting antagonist. EDIT: this occurred to me. Guilds (I actually like calling them Townships for some reason) could provide vendors that allow players not in the guild to pay gold to park their vehicles or mounts, have the guild take a snap shot of its state, and rebuild it after any attack. It might also be an idea that containers would be rebuilt with their contents intact.