Informations about the OLD Beacon-System

I think that the problem with the high beacons (as noted by othr people as well) is that they force the player to make high builds. Or they give insane amounts of possible space (Very much depending on the amount of beacons we get)

1 Like

I don’t like the idea of full height (bedrock to sky) beacons because I like my “Mine” to be below my “Base”… and therefore would like the resources below to regenerate… tho I would like to have some height to protect builds… or even just to keep my entry to the caves below from regenerating.

Questions arise… How fast is the regen?.. Will a well traveled path/road/stair not regen even if no beacon is present?

Why you forced to make high buildings ? you don`t need to build a high building but it is possible. if the beacon still 8 field hight you need to much beacon plots for a high building.

AND you can say the same argument again it. if we have no full high beacon we forced to build no high buildings and only at the ground.

@FeralLoneWolf you don`t need to write nearly the full text bold ^^

the question is how regenerations works. is regeneration active in a beacon or not ? is it possible to set up a special block or area to force regeneration?

my question to you is, do you like full high beacon not only because the regeneration or dou you have some other reasons ?

Because of effectivity, if beacons is a limmited resource building large 1 story building will be much less feasable than building 3232200 towers.

1 Like

There is no need to beacon the whole height of the world if you want to protect the structure in the sky and the building on the ground, you can just beacon each creation separately. So you would effectively only need 64 (+ a few for the sphere in the middle) beacons for the gleam structure in the sky and another few for the structure on the ground. There is no need to connect those plots.

Forced might be the wrong word but I think the devs nailed it when they posted the patchnotes for the beacon patch:


This isn´t true. The current beacon system makes it as easy to expand upwards/downwards as to expand outwards. So it is as encouraging for high builds as it is for wide builds.

3 Likes

I’d say that these 2 statements are probably the most important here… with less plots, as we would already have so much space height-wise, we would never build areas to play together as a community. No one would want to spend a plot allocation making a road if the allocations are a much scarcer resource.

Whilst I’m not a fan of the current fixed-grid beacon system, I do feel that it is headed in the right direction with regards to overall balance and gameplay. My only real quibble with the system is the fixed-grid aspect of it. If we were able to change the physical positioning of the allocation in relation to an adjoining plot, I think most people would be not just satisfied, but actually happy with it.

1 Like

Hey - really cool post. It’s interesting to see the distribution of beacons. I’d never considered visualising it like this before.

Btw - if you want the real beacon data it would be quite simple for me to share it with you. But your data is probably ~90% correct.

A couple of things to remember:

  1. The Worlds will regenerate - so if someone does excavate underneath your beacon it will recover. (Maybe the world closest to a beacon should recover faster?)

  2. Players have a finite # of beacons - so if a player does use the beacons to grief people they’ll soon run out. (I’m not suggesting that this means they’ll be no beacon griefing. But it does mean that griefing isn’t an unlimited fuel.)

  3. We clearly need to consider anti-griefing features.

Just wasted my time posting the above… :wink: Still going to post to make is more official.

A couple of considerations for full height beacons:

  1. I was a major proponent of full height beacons - but the more and more I thought about it - the more I realised that it isn’t the most optimal solution.

  2. What happens if a player is wandering through a cave under your house and falls in a hole. They can’t dig themselves out. We would need an ‘teleport / eject / hara-kiri’ solution.

  3. We have / are considering the following tweak: if you place a cube beacon, all the plots in the column are automatically reserved for you to claim. No one else can claim them.

  4. Why would we favour building vertically over building horizontally? Building towers is cool. Building towns, bridges, roads, flat things is also cool.

  5. What is a player wants to build on a floating island or in a cave? They’re blocking the space below the island or on the surface for other players.

The plan is for the world to regenerate as originally generated but for the resources to be redistributed. So you can’t camp on a known spot of bounty.

Regeneration will not happen within a beacon.

Allowing player control to trigger the regen is something we can consider.

A cool feature of the regen is that it’s more like decay, the world will gradually return to the original state. Holes will fill, poles will shrink, etc. This is better because it means that it can happen whilst players are in the area. Rather than an instant switch that flips the world back to it’s original state - which has all sorts of problems: can it happen whilst players are near by? what if they’re looking? does it mean regen doesn’t happen often near beacons? etc.

3 Likes

Could you give a rough estimate how fast the regeneration is?

How fast do you think the regeneration should be?
What rules do you think it should follow?

3 Likes

I feel it should regenerate rather slowly taking at least half a day for a full regen of an area (That would be the abselute minimum for me)

Area traveled by players should note regen (Is it possible to do this in beacon sized areas? So we don’t hinder regen from top to bottom)

Nearby beacon owners should be able to activate regen withing a distance of their becaon (depending on the size of the beacon collection) So very traversed areas around town can be kept cleans if the owners wish.

5 Likes

Hey James, I PM’d you a couple days back. Might wanna check on that :stuck_out_tongue:

1 Like

Those questions might be worth to be put into their own thread.


I think @Thorbjorn42gbf is heading into the right direction. World regeneration should be a really slow process that forces player (and the community as a whole) to explore more than just the direct surroundings of their homes and the capital area.
Ideally the world regeneration would automatically adjust according to the active players on the world within certain restrictions to encourage exploration but also guarantee that you can always find some resources if you are trying hard enough (either by exploring further into the wild or digging deeper than the others).


A resounding yes to this. It would just add so much to the atmosphere of the game if frequently used paths would be clearly distinguishable.
Additionally it would be neat if world regeneration would never happen in plain sight of a player.

3 Likes

I’ve edited my original post to show this.

But world regeneration don’t work in beacons if i remember correctly ?! if i grief a beacon with lava + water because i’m able to come over it and place them, this will not be regenereated because it’s within the beacon.

Yep … that’s the problem. And this become espacially problematic with liquids that combine to granite like lava + water. Either the devs need to remove this behavior or find a way that one is not able to flood my buildings with liquids.

that’s a good point i havn’t thought about yet.

I’m with you at this point. I like to add that i think we need also a LOT more plots. But that will be shown by the survey. At the moment it’s hard for me to imagine how the beacons will work over all (guilds, friends, mining, trading …)

Thanks, that would be cool. Can you provide the data as coordinates of the beacon corners ?

as i mentioned in an other post about power-cores i’d like to see mining and terraforming as a sort of environment polution. maybe, if the polution is to high a titan apears and starts to regenerate the world and protects the space like a guardian of the nature.
For minor polutions (like mining for copper or something that is minimally invasive) i think 2 days or maybe one day would be a good regeneration speed. imagine you have a nice mine with copper (8 blocks) under you base and you can come back all 2 days to dig them. but this is a tuning aspect … if the speed is to fast it might harm the economy.

I like this. like paths in the forrest. you can clearly see where people walk often …

1 Like

Disallowing player placed liquids from flowing into beacons should not be that hard

2 Likes

Maybe just liquids placed by players which have no token in said beacon.
Because sometimes you want some liquids to flow from far above into a beacon.

1 Like

that’s what i wantes to imply. but how can you keep track what is player placed and what is natural ? at the moment, placed blocks are not trackable to a player and maybe i like to build in a waterfall ? (don’t know if there are “natural” waterfalls at the moment but it’s most likely that there is someone somewhere)

1 Like

Hmm that is good point I wonder how much more it will take for the servers to keep track of which blocks is placed by who? @ben? @james?

lets assume that user IDs are “only” 64-Bit Pointers (maybe they are 128-Bit GUIDs). Let’s also assume that worlds have a fixed size from -4096 to + 4096 = 8192 on X and Z axis and 255 in high (Y axis).

this are (8192^2 * 255 =) 17.112.760.320 Blocks. If you track every block with an 64-Bit ID for whom placed it it is 17.112.760.320 * 64 Bit = 127,5 GB only to store this information.
An other approach would be to store the informations in a seperate table wich would be an enormous calculation effort if you need informations for blocks because you need to cross-join two big tables everytime … so this is unlikly!

let’s continue with the approach to store the informations for every block. even if this is a small storage value in todays times you have additional costs for this. You need to change your cache-optimization because it is unlikely that you need the information every time so it’s most likely “cold-data”. Furthermore you need to load and store the data evertime you work with blocks whereby the RAM is loaded. overall you need much faster / stronger servers only to store this “little” meta-information …

3 Likes

So if we do the same but only with liquids?

i’m not the engine-architect of turbulenz and this is going off-topic …

but normally you try to avoid special cases like this. normally you would try to strore similar informations in similar tables. if you start to make that one block “special” from the data perspective you are not able to store it with the other blocks (because it would be de-normalized data) therefore you need a new table, new calculations, keep track of additional datas that need to be fetched and so on … all in all i don’t see a chance that the builder/creator of a block can be tracked easily because the cost / benefit ratio is too low.

(this are all only assumtions, it’s up to @james to give a final answer :smiley: )

3 Likes