DWC in multiplayer?
Divineaspect opened this issue · 10 comments
Are there any plans to enable Death With Consequences for multiplayer?
If so the ability to toggle if just personal spawn or world spawn move in configs would be helpful.
Ok, @Divineaspect, I've got a plan for multiplayer DWC, and wanted to get your thoughts on it.
When you die, you start a new life. No experience, no belongings, nowhere near where you were before
When you join the world, you start a new life the same way, nowhere near other players (unless you're lucky).
Because of Find Your Way, you won't be able to find other players easily, but will have to build a base, collect resources and venture forth. Of course, if you and someone else can both get to a stronghold, it might be the same one, or a woodland mansion. If you both go to the Nether, you'll be closer to each other. If you both go to the End, you can trade maps/compasses.
What is it?
This challenge is both a new take on the hardcore world type, and a complete reimagining of the multiplayer Minecraft experience. In single player, when you die, your player's spawn point will be randomly moved to a location 1000+ blocks from the current world spawn. Combined with the challenge of Iberian navigation, it will be impossible to know which direction to go to find your old base. It's like hardcore in that you are starting over completely fresh, but different, because you'll still be in the same world as before. But like a fresh world, you likely won't know where you are. Or maybe you'll spawn smack dab in the middle of a base you built four lifetimes ago.
In multiplayer, each new player has a completely new spanw point. There is no concept of a world spawn, where everybody shows up when they first join. Rather, each player starts alone. As each player joins the world, the spawn point for new players moves around the world. And when you die, your spawn point will move randomly as well. But you're all in the same world, and can find each other, build up cool bases or cities together, connect them to each other, etc.
How do I deal with it?
In multiplayer, you instantly have a new and important reason to go exploring. In single player, each time you die, your reasons for going exploring increase, as your old bases become scattered throughout your world.
Of course, thanks to Iberian sleep and navigation, exploring is more difficult. You'll want to build up a safe home base from which to go forth, and you'll need to use the strategies for exploring that help you overcome those challenges.
But in terms of this challenge, the first rule is: Don't die. That's the basic rule for hardcore worlds, and still applies with Iberia. Another thing to do early on is build some compasses that are stored in a safe place at your base. Then, when you or another player find the base, they can take a compass to make it easier to return. But if you do, your best bet is to start a new life and hope that as you build and explore that you'll find your old whereabouts. You can think of it like having a longing to find your way back home, but having no idea how to get there. If you do find an old base while building your new life, then you have a natural opportunity to link up your bases, creating a natural transportation network that may be difficult to find the motivation to build in standard single player Minecraft.
Worth noting that I haven't played with Ibera in months, but your core principle documentation is good and coherant so I reread that first.
Considerations include:
Team Play: Respecting vanilla minecraft's teams, so on death you may respawn where a teammate did last, allowing a sort of generational play even if only occasional / sporadic collaboration. For examples
Resource Depletion / Threat accumulation: some chunks have had players in them for a long time, this means that tougher monsters will spawn there, and that the surface resources may be expended. Setting the respawn randomizer to skip locations with maximum threat accumulated should resolve both of these problems at once.
Personally I like mods like these that make things harder/more realistic. But the biggest barrier for anyone creating and RPG server using this mod is going to be the random respawn at death - i.e. if you are going to spend all that time creating a specific RPG map full of missions and NPCs etc, you don't want your players up and teleporting away from it all whenever they go and die on you.
Simplest solution for RPG map makers is to just have the option to disable DWC in the config.
Having said that, a good RPG map actually has death with consequences in it! There should be a cost in dying, but if you are going for realism then people don't pop out in a field somewhere, they are born in a town/village somewhere.
One option is to allow players to craft their own inheritance (spawn point), only make it a bit of a challenge. First they have to craft a will and testament (make it a relatively difficult recipe). Then they have to lodge it with the registrar - you could make the registrar a block, or if you want to be really difficult, make it a custom villager you have to trade with. Either way, it's only available in a village. Lodging a will just sets your next respawn point there once, so you have to craft a new one and do it again or else you'll end up teleported away again.
Means that if you don't want to get respawned at random, you can set your next spawn point once - but with effort and effectively only at a village. Shouldn't detract too much from the original intent of the DWC concept for single players or multiplayer servers.
Meanwhile map makers going for the RPG angle have a mechanism to add a bit of RP to the RPG part of their map by creating their own Office of Births Deaths and Marriages in their spawn point city/village - leave it up to them how easy they want to make it for their players. If you're creating an RPG server this kind of DWC becomes a bonus - it effectively provides an extra mission to provide players with.
Interesting idea, @Queglar . I do feel like it would be appropriate to have a way to negate/minimize the random respawn. I'll add this idea to the list of ones to consider.
There is currently a config option for specifying the range that spawn will move for DWC, default is 1000 blocks. I can see people wanting it to be larger, or smaller, and once I've been able to play test the mod more, I may change the default. Setting it per difficulty level probably makes sense as well.
Yeah, the nether approach to returning to earlier bases is feasible, though it requires that you have made it to the nether from those earlier bases. And the nether isn't easy to find your way around in, especially with little to no armor and no directional aids. I suppose one strategy would then be to go to the nether using a bucket ASAP after each respawn, just so there is a nether portal marking your location. Hm, I'll have to think about that.
That said, I like the idea of compasses pointing to an individual's spawn point, especially if beds cannot set it, so it's just your last respawn point. If I could make that work, then I could see just moving it each time someone dies/is respawned, just for them, not for the world.
I'm not sure how best to make DWC work in multiplayer. One key aspect of it is that because the world spawn moves, the player can't just make a compass and find their way back to their first base. I've thought of just adding a config, like you mention, and may do that for now. If you have any other ideas for DWC multiplayer, I'd love to hear them.
Ideally I'd want compasses to point only to a bed style spawn, and swirl like they do in the nether otherwise, but I'm not certain how feasible that is.
I think the compass is a secondary issue. Once I have 3 iron I can make a bucket and cast a nether portal in place, and use that to find my way back to any earlier bases.
Fixing that would require changing the nether to overworld distance ratio.
As for additional methods of making DWC:
A lingua Incognito effect after dying that scrambles words in chat messages?
A restart bonus chest like the ssp starter chest?
Something that wipes associated player data, such as thaumcraft research would be a hard option.
Is the rebirth range configable? (I won't be testing this until a week after my present pack gets released) Perhaps have different values or ranges based on difficulty? The server I test on is almost always on hard mode, so a thousand blocks isn't that far for us.
Support for teams would be good.
When the first person on a team dies they get a random location, when the others die they join the first person's respawn location.