Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by solistice 4229 days ago
I'd like to disagree with that because Minecraft ends up turning into a different experience once you're working at that scale.

Similar to EVE, which goes from spaceship simulator to corporate management simulator depending on how deep you get into it, Minecraft turns from house building simulator into project management simulation if you're building things of such size. There's a planning stage, there's a stage in which you aquire resources, people working on the project together need to be coordinated, the area needs to be prepared, and the actual building has to take place. Regarding large projects, this might also require preliminary buildings, such as stone generators, xp farms to improve tooling, complex smelting setups to create glass or lumber farms.

Modded minecraft will bring even more complexity to the table, from automated mining rigs, power production, ore processing, large scale agricultural work and making a disjoint set of technologies from different mods do exactly what you want them to do.

The project I'm working on on our server right now is building a world spanning road network (we have a 30km x 10km world) with safehouses every 500m and access points every 100m. After researching options and testing several designs, i arrived at a design that is both feasible and secure. One of the things I worked on before that is full automation of food production where I took this [http://imgur.com/Np6Ftaj] and converted it into a factory. Or building a computer controlled pebble bed reactor.

But since "that's pretty neat" isn't an argument, my experience managing personal projects outside of the game has also broadened considerably. It's taught me to vigorously test sub components, track figures and validate them, to detail the entire process before jumping into it, and a whole range of other useful planning skills.

I think for something that calls itself a game, that's a lot of use I'm getting out of it.

1 comments

Safehouses every 500 meters seems like such a small scale...why did you choose that number and not something more distant? I'd think 800 meters would be a better distance.
I'm playing on a server with additional difficulty settings, which means you most likely want a bed closeby if any one player gets stuck somewhere at night (we have monsters form into mobs and being attracted to light sources). 1km seemed too distant, and 500m divides evenly. Also, preliminary testing has determined that running 1km on the road will deplete your hunger (I'm planning to put down 70k MFR road blocks, which make you run incredibly fast), and we don't want players accidentally running too far and dying due to starvation. Also, the cost of safehouses is almost negible, 3 beds and an ender chest for food and supplies.
Thats interesting, my first guess was something along the lines of a chunk is 16x16 so your "five hundred" is actually 512 at exactly 32 chunks and you're deploying chunk loaders along the road to keep the road loaded (and maybe also farm fields or trenches full of mobs or pipelines full of liquids or the worlds biggest applied energistics network or ...) Or something like each player can ask for a 128x128 "deed to the land" along the side of the road for megaprojects and there's exactly 4 along each side of every road segment.
Our server isn't quite as dense, and people usually settle several hundred meters apart from each other. We try to keep people settled close enough for interaction but far enough away from each other so that there are no neighbourhood conflicts. Considering we have 15km^2 of worldbordered space for less than 30 people, density isn't yet an issue.

We allready have a functioning nether road system for all 4 cardinal directions, the new road is mostly designed for overworld exploration and finding a place to settle for new players. Also, since we're running ATG with Biomes of Plenty, the landscape is truly stunning in certain areas, with rich sloping mountains and d̶e̶a̶d̶l̶y beautiful valleys. Due to the dangers on the ground at night (full powersuit won't safe you baby), there's rarely much exploration going on in this stunning landscape.

Also I'm absolutely running out of big things to build, having set up a 11x11 chunks base with 60 blocks high obsidian walls, and built the majority of the nether roadways. The project afterwards would most likely be a tokamak reactor or something if i could get the thing working in creative.