Intro to GeoCraft (0.1.0)

What is GeoCraft?  

Current IP: 52.22.8.75
GeoCraft is a combination of a mod suite, a custom map, and an official server.   This combination is tuned for "civilization" or "politics and economy" style play; in other words, it's been tuned to incentivize group-play and town-building.

The main philosophy of GeoCraft is to accomplish its gameplay goals without arbitrary or direct game constraints.  We aim to design bottom-up from the level of basic incentives, rather than mandating player interactions top-down through mechanics.

GeoCraft is a two-phase project: in early development, it will be a rapid iteration test server.  After the project has been sufficiently developed, it will move to longer cycles so that communities have a long while to spring up, develop, thrive, and compete.  Its main goal is to be both a game and a social experiment -- a test-bed for styles of group-play in which economic incentives are a bit more realistic than vanilla Minecraft.

In-house mods and features

Mood mechanics
Mood is a new meter to manage, much like HP or stamina. It can be viewed by punching with an empty hand at air.  Mood is whole number between 0 and 100 (worst and best), and is consumed by two events currently: (1) when destroying a block; (2) when taking hunger damage.

Mood can be recovered by resting in a bed.

Mood affects crafting durability; it adjusts durability by its own number, as a %.  Thus if you have 50 mood, all tools and armor you craft will be at 50% durability.

Encumbrance mechanics
GeoCraft has harsh encumbrance mechanics. This is both to encourage working together (making hauling more of a distinct task) and to encourage capital investment (chest mules, minecarts, etc).

Different materials have different weights.  Once encumbered, a player cannot move until unencumbered.

Using "/lug", the player can toggle whether or not blocks are picked up at all (such as to avoid encumbrance altogether when fighting, for instance). 

Lockable chests and doors
GeoCraft has mechanics for locking chests and doors.  Rather than using scripting commands, the system is combination based.

To set a lock, approach an unlocked chest (or door).  Clear the 2nd and 3rd rows of your inventory.  These two rows will be used to set the combination for the lock.

To determine the combination to be set, place any combination of items in the 2nd and 3rd rows of your inventory like so:

Now, whenever this combination of items is in the 2nd and 3rd slots of your inventory, you will have access to the locked chest.  This is true for anybody!  So you can share the combination with others, but be careful who you share it with (there is no explicit white or black listing).

One can hold multiple combinations at once; empty spots don't count.  Suppose I form a second lock with the following combination:

I can then hold both keys at the same time and access either chest.

Keep in mind that the number in the stack matters!  This means that the following inventory would NOT open the locks depicted by the seed-based combinations above:

Imprisonment and player-versus-player enforcement 
Social life sometimes requires enforcement. To give players this option, GeoCraft has imprisonment mechanics.

To imprison another player, place a cobblestone fence down.  Holding a stick, right click that fencepost.  A message should alert you that you are ready to use that post as a "prison post".

Upon your next player kill, that player will be teleported to the prison post and bound to it until the post is broken by another player. 

Durable materials
Many materials will require multiple breaks before they are destroyed and drop.  Construction-grade materials are intended to give defenders an advantage against petty grief and small-time vandalism.  If these blocks are not broken in the course of a day (before server restart) they must be broken all over again; their "hp" so to speak is restored.

Semi-sustainable ore veins
On GeoCraft, all ore veins peek out a bit at the top. This means that prospecting can be done by exploring the map.

Ore blocks can be broken many times, and yield a drop each time.  (To balance this, ore blocks cannot be placed.)  Once per day, if they reach a pseudorandom number of breaks, ore blocks break for good.  Thus, if managed carefully, ore veins are stable.  If not, they will dwindle and be depleted.

Farming, animals, and desertification
Farming now has a chance of causing desertification -- the tile's biome itself changes to desert.  Desert tiles cannot grow grass, or anything else for that matter.

The only way to restore desert biomes to their original biome is:

1. when a sheep eats grass within one block
2. when a cow or pig is fed within one block 

Hunger depletes more rapidly, making these constraints more of an issue.

Third-party mods and features

WorldBorder
WorldBorder is used with a hard-wall placed around Crater Lake.  The total area of playable surface is currently 1km x 1km.

Random_Spawn
Random_Spawn is configured so that players spawn in a random 800 x 800 meter area if a bed is not set.

Rules and code of conduct

GeoCraft is an in-game anarchy server.  This doesn't mean there are no rules on the server; it means that people can play the game however they like.  "Play", as in any game, is defined carefully such as to create a personally safe environment for all players.  PVP is absolutely allowed, but people are not allowed to engage in verbal and/or personal attacks on fellow PLAYERS (that is, the humans behind the avatar) in any way.  This includes name calling, disrespecting another player's gender or race, and other abusive behavior. Basically anything you'd be ashamed to tell your own mother about having said or done to another human being.

This line is tread on almost every server, where bad apples try to intimidate and threaten each others' persons to gain an advantage on the game board.  GeoCraft takes the notion of "on board" play very seriously.  To illustrate the difference: griefing a person every single day is perfectly fine (it is all "on board"). Launching a personal and verbal invective about that person outside of the context of the game (attacking who they are, where they're from, etc) is completely out of bounds.

In chess it's not appropriate to flip the board, intimidate, or harass one's opponent.  This is not just for the sake of common decency and respecting others, either; without this guarantee, the boundaries of the game itself become fuzzy ("let the wookie win!").

The rules of conduct are remarkably simple: do not harass, intimidate, or otherwise personally attack other players.  Any actions directed at one another out of game (this includes directly addressing the player in any threatening or aggressive tone) are grounds for a temporary or permanent ban at my discretion.  Keep all play on board.  Anybody seen trying to make the space uncomfortable for other players on a personal level will be subject to disciplinary action or outright removal.