Informations about the OLD Beacon-System

[james]

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.

@Stretchious

Admittedly, the potential for griefing with the new beacon system, has been one of my concerns as well… I keep envisioning building a house on top of a hill, then not being able to come online for a couple of days, only to come back and find that someone has excavated the entire hill and my lonely house is floating somewhere up in the sky… unreachable

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.

@Stretchious

In that case I can sleep more easily knowing I don’t need a grappling hook to get home

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

@Saint_X

yes. i think full high beacons like the old beacons much more better. i don`t like the new beacons.

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.

@FeralLoneWolf

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

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.

@Saint_X

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?

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.