Future Worlds

(inspired by Zeusy's idea to have a custom-built world)
According to Deity's reply we are most likely going to have a random generated terrain for future worlds, which still gives us plenty of options, we just have to forget about WorldPainter and start learning the TerrainControl.

Current map biomes
Plains = rather flat biome with few trees. Although boring to explore, it is the best biome to build a town on with little terraforming.
Forests = moderate hills, plenty of wood. This seems like even better place with good terrain and wood supply but 1. most towns grow flat and 2. building the town is much harder, needing to cut most or all trees down and terraform a lot while fighting mobs constantly.
Mountains = few trees, very hilly and challenging biome for all builders or explorers. Not suitable for a normal town - difficult or impossible to fit plots to the terrain unless you do massive terraforming.
Deserts = rather flat biome, no trees. Not suitable for a normal town either - people use deserts as a sand quarry so mayors should keep away from deserts if they dont want to keep fixing the land.
Jungles = small jungle patches, usually not important when building a town.

One special thing worth mentioning here is that all sand patches we expected to see in lakes and rivers have been generated as clay patches. Before the introduction of hardened/stained clay it was a good way to prevent griefing, now the clay is endangered the same way as sand.

Animal spawning
When looking for the best place to move our town a year ago i started looking for a place with combination of plains, forest and jungle to have a chance of horses, wolves and ocelots spawning around. Rabbits will not change my biome preference, they spawn in most common biomes, same as cows, pigs and sheep.

What biomes do we miss
Ocean = i believe that most wishes, complaints and requests about this world biomes pointed out that we have no ocean (the ocean in the capital area does not count). Having an ocean would give more sense to all sea structures we have built here on small-ish lakes and allow some underwater structures or towns to be built. My main concern is that many towns on previous map just covered the ocean surface with a dirt platform, making the ocean totally unnecessary. Another question is, how big should oceans be? Although 2/3 of our Earth is covered with water, our Main World should have way less oceans, probably less than 1/3 to prevent quick need to expand the map.
Mesa = also on "much wanted" list, but bringing even more concerns than the ocean. Easy access to hardened/stained clay means that any mesa biome would turn into a quarry in few days or weeks. I can imagine covering the whole mesa biome with WorldGuard region and allow just few builders to build a quest place there, but building a normal town there means that town staff would have to constantly fight against having the biome griefed by residents or other players.
Savanna, Roofed Forest, Mega Taiga = these biomes were introduced after our world has been created so we dont have them on this map.
Savanna = would be nice, offering similar base terrain as Plains, with some tall hills - now it depends on how clever town staff is, if they would preserve or flatten hills.
Roofed Forest = I havent noticed any request for this biome on forums so i dont know if we need this biome at all. It looks nice as long as you dont cut all trees down - which is exactly what would happen.
Mega Taiga = hilly, foresty, very nice and possibly wanted, but again i am afraid that any town that would start there would just cut all trees and flatten everything.
Swamps = rather old biome, giving the darkest color to the grass, tall grass and oak leaves, makes them fit well to spruce logs. Slimes spawn there but i think they are not allowed to spawn on the Main World (why?).
Ice Plains, Frozen Taiga = If we make ice biomes on north/south edges as mentioned by StrahdZarovich, how much would we be able to expand the map past original border before these ice caps would start to be too large? If we make ice biomes placed randomly, how would they look?
Ice Spikes = another new and very exclusive biome that would be harvested for packed ice in few days.
Deep ocean = no, we dont need Water Temples or Guardian mobs on peaceful Main World.

Biomes list on Minecraft Wiki

So we have flat empty biomes: Plains, Ice Plains, Savanna, Desert, Swamp, Ocean. No doubt we need them the most. Then we have forested and biomes with moderate hills: Forest, Roofed Forest, Taiga, Jungle. Not so suitable for town building but help to separate other biomes (and having the map with no forest would be... weird). Third group is very hilly: Extreme Hills and all hilly variants of previous biomes. They add the variety and some building challenges but not too much for everyones use. Last group is rare/exclusive: Mesa, Flower biomes, Mushroom Islands, Ice Spikes. Just forget about having them.

Calculations
Main World is 20k blocks across, that gives us 314M blocks area. If we want to offer a 1k blocks radius to medium-sized town, it takes 3M blocks per one, so the current Main World size can easily handle over 100 towns (Note that 1k blocks radius means 2k blocks from one town spawn to another at least). We have less than 50 towns, some are very large but most are very small, taking way less than 1k radius.
Lets say that flat biomes should take about 60% of the map, moderate hills biomes should take about 20% to 30% of the map and remaining 10% to 20% can be used for hilly biomes or any special ones.

Throwing in some numbers, comment if you want to change values (percentage means how much of the overall world size is taken by this kind of biomes, size is how big biomes should be generated, 4M = 2000x2000 blocks area, 0,1M = 300x300 blocks area)
Oceans = 20%, size 8M to 16M (very big biomes)
Plains = 15%, size 1M to 8M
Desert = 5%, size 0,5M to 4M
Savanna = 5%, size 0,5M to 2M
Ice Plains = 5%, size 1M to 8M
Swamp = 5%, size 0,1M to 0,5M
Forest = 15%, size 1M to 8M
Taiga = 5%, size 0,5M to 4M
Roofed Forest = 5%, size 0,5M to 4M
Jungle = 5%, size 0,5M to 2M
Birch Forest, Flower Forest, Mega Taiga = 5%, size 0,05M to 0,1M (very small biomes)
Extreme Hills = 10%, size 1M to 4M

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So, we know how the world could look like, but we have no idea how the world should work. Few things to suggest:

Let's get rid of MCMMO.
I used to love MCMMO and i still use MCMMO repair to keep my armor in good condition, but restrictions that applied in past made this plugin useless to most people and the only benefit to the server is that one line of text on Minestatus saying that this server has MCMMO. 3 years ago when players wanted MCMMO back after the december 2011 reset the usual response was that it took too much computing power and made the whole serve laggy. So why do we keep something that just rises the lag and offers no benefits?

Reinvent the wheel - classes.
Why do we keep thinking of some super special perks when we can just offer more grades of current perks?
Craftsman class
All that we need is to allow all blocks except for TNT and Bedrock for the last rank.
rank 0 - lift signs, colored text on signs
rank 1 - same as we have now
rank 2 - same as we have now
rank 3 - all dangerous stuff like lava, dispensers, sticky pistons. Just the price of the placement should be more than expensive.
Merchant class
Just auctions and shops, nothing else is necessary. Some of you may have noticed this screenshot.
rank 0 - one auction per 24 hours, no shops
rank 1 - one simultaneous auction (after one ends, another one can be started immediately) and a chance to bid for a rank 1 shop (5 wide, 4 tall, 3 deep = 60 blocks space)
rank 2 - two simultaneous auctions, a chance to bid for a rank 1 or 2 shop (5x5x5 = 125 blocks space)
rank 3 - three simultaneous auctions, a chance to bid for a rank 1, 2 or rank 3 shop (5 wide, 5 tall, 7 deep, 175 blocks space)
Noble class
Fun fact: Nobles rank 0 can collect the noble salary if they are assistants, which makes them the only class with some perk for rank 0 atm.
Well, lets keep salary for all nobles, also let all nobles to start a town, only with a limit of residents:
rank 0 = up to 5 residents (mayor + 4 others), no logblock
rank 1 = up to 25 residents, wooden pick logblock
rank 2 = up to 125 residents, sponge logblock
rank 3 = unlimited residents, area logblock (e.g. a command that moderators have)
All other perks should be town perks rather than noble perks.

Smaller, more efficient capital
This will not happen as stated here, but it still is an idea i hope for. The capital itself should be way smaller and easier to explore or get out of its gates at least, shops should be arranged closer to the capital, leaving the rest of the capital area empty for quest villages - and these quest villages should be built by approved players, not by staff/build team. Although they would have to bring their own resources (no creative mode), i believe that many people would be honored to have a chance to build something for all people on the server.

okay, 10000 characters limit is close, lets go on in the next post..

 

Change Gold Vault to Gold Ore Vault
- ever since the introduction of the Gold Vault, people complained about being unable to use gold for crafting or building. There was one suggestion that only the gold ore in the Mining World would have a value of 25 dei in Vault, not gold ingots.
- change the "Sell Gold for Money" button to "Sell Gold Ore for Money" and give players 25 dei per one ore
- add a button "Exchange Gold Ore for Gold" and give players one gold ingot into inventory for one gold ore in vault. Also charge them 1 dei per ingot.
- do not move picked up gold ingots/blocks/nuggets from inventory into vault.
Conclusion: Gold Ore keeps its value of 25 Dei, Gold Ingot value drops down to 1 dei (actually is even less because the server doesnt buy it back).

Reinvent the wheel again - donor perks
We know about that "EULA fiasco" as it has been called here. Some perks could be changed/nerfed/removed. I will give an example in the next chapter.

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Future World, scenario 1: we have new world with new biomes, we have got rid of MCMMO, we keep the same class system with no rank 3 (rank 3 coming soon! you know), we have still the same vault eating all gold, and we have all donor perks we are so used to have.
T=0, new map started, people rushing into wilderness to find places for their new homes, many dying of mobs, respawning, struggling, begging for food at spawn.
T+30 minutes, Tallpines flew far enough from the spawn and used his 50k to start Anvil as the first town in the new world. Machiavelli rises an objection against the name, Tall asks for small 10k bribe to change the name.
T+50 minutes, Niall got far enough and used his 50k to start New Nordale. Unfortunately he forgot to put an underscore in the name so his town is called just New.
T+55 minutes, Niall renames New to New_Nordale.
T+ 2 hours, Heinz starts CrystalGard and welcomes all old buddies.
T + 4 hours, Eltono starts Oakdale and goes inactive.
T + 5 hours, Majora, Rafi and Teh put money together and start Termina.
T + 8 hours, Tall agrees with 2k bribe and renames his town. Mach is looking for someone to donate to start Anvil.
T + 24 hours, first day summary: 10 new towns on the map, most people busy mining.
T + 2 days, Yogs comes home from vacation trip and starts Doha.
T + 2 days, Retro, Zeuq and Savie put money together and start Amityville.
T + 3 days, Barry pays 50k to Legoap and goes inactive.
T + 3 days, BriarRose starts Eclipse.
T + 3 days, ImNotDeity starts Delos.
T + 4 days, Legoap starts New_Veligrad.
T + 5 days, CrystalGard is the first town to reach 50 residents.
T + 6 days, Xplosions and Takhz put money together to start Skyhold.
T + 7 days, first week summary: 20 new towns on the map, most people busy recruiting and mining
T + 10 days, cobrex mined enough to have 50k with his donor money and starts Pegasus.
T + 14 days, first shop auction, shops go for 40 to 60k.
T + 15 days, CrystalGard is the first town to reach 100 residents
T + 17 days, willrymer asks why is Camelot gone.
T + 19 days, Mojinax starts banking business.
T + 3 weeks, 24 towns on the map and very minor issues.

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Future World, scenario 2: new world with no changes in the gameplay, except for the fact that sponsors dont get any dei (other perks remain).
T=0, new map started, people rushing into wilderness to find places for their new homes, many dying of mobs, respawning, struggling, begging for food at spawn.
T+20 minutes, Tallpines realised that he has no money to eventually start a town.
T+30 minutes, as Tallpines started complaining, other donors started checking their balances too.
T+1 hour, Donors complain on forums about not being given any dei to start with.
T+ 3 hours, staff struggles to keep the chat and the forum calm. Some people are tempbanned to cool down.
T + 4 hours, an official response from Deity that Dei as donor perk is no longer available but all other perks remain.
T + 4 hours 10 minutes, there is four times more people in Mining World than in all other worlds and webchat together.
T + 7 hours, the chat is full of people looking for towns and others complaining how the mining world is mined all over already.
T + 24 hours, first day summary: no new towns on the map, everyone busy mining.
T + 2 days, /trade channel spammed by people trying to sell redstone, coal, iron, even diamonds and emeralds but nobody cares for anything else except for gold ore.
T + 3 days, still no towns on the map.
T + 5 days, town starting price is lowered to 30k.
T + 2 days, /recruit channel spammed by people looking for towns but nobody cares, everyone is busy mining.
T + 7 days, first week summary: no new towns on the map.
T + 10 days, town starting price is lowered to 20k.
T + 11 days, Majora, Rafi, Teh, Stormmay and Mach put money together to start Anvil as the first town on the map.
T + 12 days, Anvil has 50 residents.
T + 13 days, Anvil has 70 residents.
T + 14 days, Steph, Tran, Sweet and Versh put money together to start Versailles.
T + 15 days, Anvil has 100 residents, Versailles has 30 residents.
T + 16 days, Xplosions, Takhz, Goober, Rihue and Venithar put money together to start Skyhold.
T + 17 days, Zeuq, Retro, and Savie put money together to start Amityville.
T + 3 weeks, 4 towns on the map and everyone still busy mining.

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10000 characters limit is close again, lets go on in the next post..

 

Future World, scenario 3: we have new world with new biomes, we have got rid of MCMMO, we keep the same class system with no rank 3 (rank 3 coming soon! you know), we have still the same vault eating all gold, and we have all donor perks we are so used to have. The only thing missing is /t spawn, /t warp or /tpa.
T=0, new map started, people rushing into wilderness to find places for their new homes, many dying of mobs, respawning, struggling, begging for food at spawn.
T+30 minutes, Tallpines flew far enough from the spawn and used his 50k to start Anvil as the first town in the new world. Machiavelli rises an objection against the name, Tall asks for small 10k bribe to change the name.
T+50 minutes, Niall got far enough and used his 50k to start New Nordale. Unfortunately he forgot to put an underscore in the name so his town is called just New.
T+55 minutes, Niall renames New to New_Nordale.
T + 1 hour, people tried to /t spawn to new towns but they got an error message "this command does not exist".
T + 1 hour 10 minutes, some donors tried to teleport to Niall but they got an error message "you cannot use this command".
T + 1 hour 40 minutes, chat and forum are getting spammed by complaints about inability to use /tpa or /t spawn.
T+ 2 hours, Heinz starts CrystalGard and welcomes all old buddies.
T + 2 hours 10 minutes, nobody can spawn to CrystalGard either, people start to complain about broken command.
T + 3 hours, an official response from Deity on forums that we are going to have the real survival world, that means no teleport.
T + 3 hours 10 minutes, complaints about broken commands changed into complaints about having to walk too far. Staff and experienced players have set a hotkey for usual response: "This is survival server. Walk."
T + 4 hours, Eltono starts Oakdale and goes inactive.
T + 5 hours, Majora, Rafi and Teh put money together and start Termina.
T + 8 hours, Tall agrees with 2k bribe and renames his town. Mach is looking for someone to donate to start Anvil.
T + 24 hours, first day summary: 5 new towns on the map, some people busy mining or building but most people lost somewhere on the main world while travelling.
T + 2 days, Yogs comes home from vacation trip and starts Doha.
T + 2 days, Retro, Zeuq and Savie put money together and start Amityville.
T + 3 days, Barry pays 50k to Legoap and goes inactive.
T + 3 days, ImNotDeity starts Delos.
T + 4 days, asdfjkll starts M1 freeway from the capital border to Doha
T + 4 days, Mini starts HM_Quest.
T + 4 days, Mini suggests on forums that people who move from Mining World to Main World should respawn on the same place from where they moved to Mining World and not on the main spawn in the capital.
T + 4 days, Legoap starts New_Veligrad.
T + 5 days, CrystalGard is the first town to reach 50 residents. 15 of them have never seen the town though, as they got lost on their way from the spawn.
T + 6 days, Xplosions and Takhz put money together to start Skyhold.
T + 7 days, first week summary: 12 new towns on the map, most people busy travelling
T + 8 days, asdfjkll postpones work on M1 because nobody wants to supply him with sandstone because it is too far to go there.
T + 9 days, Mini's suggestion is approved and people respawn at their original locations when returning from mining world.
T + 10 days, people learned to go to mining world to trade with others at mining world spawn so they dont have to walk all the way from the main spawn.
T + 10 days, cobrex mined enough to have 50k with his donor money and starts Pegasus.
T + 11 days, admins set respawn to /main spawn again so people cannot use mining world for trading items.
T + 11 days, huge uproar against respawning at /main from mining world.
T + 14 days, first shop auction, shops go for 6k to 10k with two exceptions bidding 30k and 35k.
T + 14 days, people realised that they can use /mall teleport but they have to walk back to the town. Shops get no sales, no profits. Merchants who bidded 30k and 35k ask for money back.
T + 15 days, CrystalGard is the first town to reach 100 residents, about 40 of them lost on their way.
T + 17 days, willrymer asks why is Camelot gone.
T + 19 days, Mojinax starts banking business.
T + 3 weeks, 14 towns on the map and towns start to struggle to keep up because nobody wants to go mining and then travel back from the spawn. Price of diamonds, emeralds and iron rises every hour.
T + 5 weeks, respawning from Mining World is set to original player's location again.

Eh, enough with scenarios for now, we all know that Kingdoms will remain the same or there will be pretty minor changes. Let's rather focus on Terrain Control.

 

Hey, you forgot to put in that T + 4 hours mini found the perfect spot beside some savannah mountains, desert and plains, and water, changed her mind and started HM_Quest too

 

Qusetion I've had for a bit, does money Carry across? Because towns are 50K to start, and I don't have that. And people are apparently able to set up towns in the first 24 hours. If it doesn't do some people just get starting money randomly.

 

Last reset (October 9th 2012, two months before you joined) donors started with the same amount of Dei as their donation perk. Non-donors started with 30 dei, same as new players.

 

Right, so mayors are usually the donors

 

Another edit to your scenario 1:
"T + 3 days, BriarRose starts Eclipse." - not going to happen by me if at all.

Interesting scenarios - wonder which one would provide the most challenge without being too painful to protect our goods wrested from the mine world.
Though I imagine hundreds of wild builds popping up while players try to get the dei to start a town to protect their stuff would not be desirable. Poor Mods would get overworked by tickets because of thefts and griefing.

I would love to see Mega Taiga on the new map - such a beautiful area for building.

 

I will gladly give some input after fiddling with settings.

Everyone who wants to help mapping - you need Forge modloader and TerrainControl mod, then follow this Beginners tutorial to get started and this Custom Biome tutorial to get more involved. Once we get to this point, we can start developing custom biomes because TerrainControl allows us to have biomes that are unlike anything we have in Vanilla - first ideas are Volcanic (stone/gravel/lava) and Archipelago/Atoll (island biome). I would like to see more variations of Plains (Heath, Steppe, Tundra) as well as different forests and mountains.

If anyone have a request for some biome, just ask here and we can try our best.

 

Twilight lakes in? It would be nice to see that lake of mine be a touch deep. Ocean is good too though. I'm easy to please.

 

If you can, could you design the terrain so a snow biome isn't next to a sand biome, and the whole hot/cold biomes actually make sense?

 

I loved all those scenarios

 

Adding Mega Taiga or Twilight Lakes (even with this biome name and special properties) will be easy, but hot/cold areas are quite a challenge. I would rather do elevation-based biomes e.g. snow-covered mountains.

Few more notes:
- large jungles cause HUGE client lag so i prefer to keep jungles only a bit larger than current ones.
- LandRarity setting used to calculate the ocean area doesnt offer enough grades between LandRarity=100 (no ocean, as on the current map) and LandRarity=99 (large ocean, 5k blocks across).
- Oceans are generated different way than normal biomes so we should use custom Sea biome that will be scalable the same way as other biomes.

Small tweak to Plains biome, less lakes, more flat terrain and small groves with variety of flowers


Sea (deeper, with abundant gravel and few sand patches) and Shelf (shallow, more sand and clay)

 

Current map started in MC 1.3 and you were able to expand it in MC 1.6, so i assume that 1.8 changes would not affect basic terrain generating - or did you have to downgrade back to 1.3 prior to expanding the map?
Ocean generating still behaves quite uncontrollably (MC 1.7.10 + TC2.6.3) so i prefer to create a custom biome with similar properties as generic ocean - its size can be controlled to some extent by setting BiomeSize. Then we can add "islands" with deeper bottom to mimic Deep Ocean biome if we really need to (my custom Sea biome has a bottom at around Y=40 e.g. 20 blocks deep water). An example about the size - a sea with BiomeSize:1 was 1200 blocks across with GenerationDepth:8 so we can extrapolate it to 5000-ish blocks with GenerationDepth: 10.
To estimate how big the sea will be we can generate a world with smaller biomes (GenerationDepth: 7 or less) and examine the biome layout before going full scale (i assume GenerationDepth: 10). It will also allow us to quickly check if there is just one sea and majority of land or if we would be flooded all around.
I totally agree with no mesa and rather few deserts.

What was the Generation Depth for the current world map and what was the BiomeSize for current Plains and Forest biomes?

EDIT:
added DeepSea biome, changed sand/clay/gravel patches at the seabottom

Ocean biomes are:
DeepSea, up to 30 blocks deep, plenty of gravel on the bottom, rare spots of clay or sand.
Sea, up to 20 blocks deep with some underwater terrain, less gravel, rare spots of clay or sand.
Shelf, up to 5 blocks deep and rather flat, some gravel, some clay and few spots of sand.

added Lagoon biome, surrounded by Atoll biome. Remember that its nice only until you build something huge there If these would be added, they would be RARE.

 

But, But,,,a place with correction: Savanah plateau, plains and desert is the only place I found decent horses on these new maps...Doesn't need to be a big desert. But honestly, Im sure it will be a lovely map however you all make it.

Like this:



or
http://s1058.photobucket.com/user/mcmomstorm/media/2014-12-18_184958_zpscfdd28f8.png.html

 

Examining and copying original settings (thanks smcallah) didnt help me to convince biomes to settle according to biome temperature settings e.g. i still have taigas and deserts beside eachother. (Still MC 1.7.10 + TC 2.6.3 because there is no TC/Forge for MC 1.8.1 yet and MC 1.8. glitches my screen with render distance over 8 chunks).

Time for plan B = to set some biomes as islands or borderlines: Savanna should be put as a border biome between Desert and Plains/Forest. Jungles can create islands (oasis) in desert, similar way as we have them now. Taigas should surround mountains (elevation-based climate).

Any ideas/requests about Roofed forests or swamps?

Also, do we need Granite/Diorite/Andesite veins on main? I am quite afraid these new stone materials may be in big demand for some time.



EDIT

Mini, according to Minecraft Wiki horses spawn in Plains and Savanna biomes only so i wouldnt worry about deserts.

 

They would become a major destruction magnet - dirt, stone, and gravel would be the safest materials to use on main (yes Deserts would be sand and a destruction magnet)