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[forsaken1111]

I used to play Better Than Wolves, but FC stopped updating it a few months back.

Yeah, unfortunately he's turned his attention to Kerbal Space Program instead.

[Mephansteras]

I've started playing Minecraft again, but the mod I used to play with has gone horribly out-of-date. Does anybody a) have any preferred difficulty rebalancing mods? It's all rather trivial, even on hard and b) know of any good low-tech automation mods?

I used to play Better Than Wolves, but FC stopped updating it a few months back.

Ancient Warfare 2 does a decent job of low-tech automation for some stuff. Both through the use of people doing labor and simple machines like windmills and watermills.

[FearfulJesuit]

I recently discovered a Minecraft map where somebody had taken the entire Earth and shrunk it down to 1:1500 scale, at which point a number of relatively small features (Cape Cod, the Aegean) become scarily visible.

It would make an awesome Civcraft-type server, I think. Take the monorail from New York to Los Angeles, or have an underwater train track running from Cape Town to Perth?

The way I'd do it is that when you log on, you get put at your "real" coordinates (ignoring the how for now). Build your home town or just bury it in TNT!

Note that at 1.5 km per block, most towns would be difficult to fit onto the map. I think the best approach might be more like 10:1 to 100:1 scale, fine enough to allow voxelized versions of landmarks to fit while minimizing the problem of having way, way too much spaaace on the map for the number of players.

We would still need to enhance Nether transport so it's a further 20+ times more compressed. On a 100:1 map, you could sprint from New York to San Fransisco through a x20 Nether in 25 minutes.

That'd be, what, 225 times the size of a 1500:1 map? How big can servers get? I mean, obviously a vanilla map can generate new chunks pretty much as far as it needs to, but we're talking about creating the whole map before anyone sets foot on it...

EDIT: OK, I pulled out Wolfram Alpha and got some math done. The circumference of the Earth is 40075 kilometers, which, at a 100:1 scale, means 400.75 kilometers east to west by 200.375 kilometers north to south- which means 400,750 blocks by 200,375 blocks.

The largest Minecraft world currently under construction is called Aerna (NSFW due to an obnoxious sidebar advert), and its area is about 5.24 billion blocks. A 1:100 Earth server would measure about 80 billion blocks, so we're talking something well into an order of magnitude larger than the largest Minecraft world in existence.

Now, if you shrink this down, you can still get a really large and buildable server- a 1:300 map would be about 9 billion blocks in area, which is within striking distance of Aerna.

The real question is: what can you build on a map of that size? I downloaded the 1:1500 map and flew around it in Creative mode for a while. There are a lot of quite small features that are recognizable but too small to build much on. Cape Cod, for example, is a peninsular a block thick jutting out into the Atlantic, and although you could build a New York, a Minecraft town of serious size centered on New York would probably stretch from Maine to Baltimore and west to Buffalo.

On the other hand, regions like Antarctica and the Sahara will be no less habitable than any other part of the map, so the big cities might develop there. (But of course there's a certain emotional attachment people would have to building Chicago or London or Cape Town, and those will be prime real estate for that reason.)

As for a 1:10 Earth...that's 8 trillion blocks of area. Are there any servers that could run something like that that don't belong to the Pentagon or the NSA?!

[andrewas]

No, but in theory you could write a world generator that uses a high res heightmap and biome map to generate the parts of the Earth that people actually wanted to play on. I'm not sure how well minecraft currently handles huge distances from spawn, but a practical implementation would probably center the world at a chosen site and those who want to travel to distant locations can put up with whatever artifacts that causes.

[miauw62]

Currently you just get infinite, boring ocean if you go too far, iirc.
That's with vanilla worldgen, though.

[Orange Wizard]

90% sure the world just stops 30 million blocks. Used to be the Far Lands quirkiness due to integers rolling over, but Notch "fixed" that a while back - now you just can't go that far. No idea if it's been changed since.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

my favorite thing about the game is building cool looking shit, but there's not really a reason to build cool looking shit. nothing to put inside 'em. nobody lives in them. no furniture. just sorta sits there, being all structurey and stuff.

Right? There are NPC mods and what not for that so check that out first. If that doesn't do it, maybe consider getting your build game on and take a look here or at other such build groups.

[Arx]

are there any mods that reward the player for building structures, or inspires building structures in some way?

my favorite thing about the game is building cool looking shit, but there's not really a reason to build cool looking shit. nothing to put inside 'em. nobody lives in them. no furniture. just sorta sits there, being all structurey and stuff.

It makes the game a hell of a lot harder, but Better Than Wolves (which actually updated four hours before my previous post...) does a ton of cool stuff that you have to build immense housings for. You can automate basically anything, but it takes up enormous amounts of space.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

But nothing dictates you build anything cool... Like usually all the factory housings in MC are hideous.

[Arx]

But nothing dictates you build anything cool... Like usually all the factory housings in MC are hideous.

Well, Taz's complaint is that they build cool-looking structures already, but they have no purpose. I'm suggesting a purpose.

[Aklyon]

That purpose could be for any heavy automation-potential mod or mod group, though.

[Arx]

That purpose could be for any heavy automation-potential mod or mod group, though.

Of course. I was just suggesting one I personally like, and that naturally lends itself to absolutely immense builds.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

Kind of gets me interested... What are the best NPC mods these days?

[i2amroy]

90% sure the world just stops 30 million blocks. Used to be the Far Lands quirkiness due to integers rolling over, but Notch "fixed" that a while back - now you just can't go that far. No idea if it's been changed since.

There's just an edge now. That said with the current "edge" limits at 60 million x 60 million blocks (each 1 m x 1 m) you have a total area to play with that is a bit over 7x the total surface area of the earth. There's plenty enough space to define an area equal to the entirety of the earth. With a bit of server commands to teleport people who cross over a given line, you could even probably set up proper looping so that if someone went off the "left" side they would reappear over on the "right" one and vice-versa.

[Orange Wizard]

So we could have a world that's a 1:1 scale model of Earth?

Something tells me 1:100 or thereabouts would be more playable.