“Often travelled paths shouldn’t regen” This is a statement that is a bit… double sided to me.
Because on one hand it is a good idea on the other hand it is not.
The problem
It allows for often travelled places to not be regenerated, BUT this doenst only include paths, this would also then include holes, or things removed in the terrain or whatever. The second problem is how it is done. for example does it only stop regen for those precise Blocks you touch? what if there are 3 blocks making a path, then obviously they need to not regen either. Which mean it is safe to assume that if this was done, it would most likely be a certain pattern around you. Should we have it go upwards too? if no then how about people who might make a “Grappling hook road” which is a road in the air, would that never be possible? So if we assume that it goes up a little does that mean we have to physically touching or atleast be very close to the grappling road, in which case it wont matter. But we can compensate for that by expanding the area of things that wont get regenerated. Now by doing this we run into another problem and my biggest problem, depending on how it is done. First thing, we would have to decide if being near a thing RESETS regeneration or PAUSES regenration. Say that it takes 24 hours for something to regenerate. a path is 12 hours into the regeneration progress. it can either be made so it pauses when you touch it, which seems useless or it resets to 0 hours into the regen process, which is the most likely. This leads to the problem. Again remember, we assume we have a square area around us which doesnt regenerate, we do not know the size but if we want cool paths and tunnels and stuff it would have to be rather big. Which leads to the problem of…
Caves: Imagine that a cave or cave area or mountain. Person X goes there to farm stone, ores and gems. Person X knows that he wont always gets ore and gems at the spot, and he knows that it takes 24 hours to regenerate. Now imagine that person Y just goes through the cave, looking for stuff. he wont find anything because it has been mined, BUT even then he restarts the regeneration, now person x comes back 12 hours later and it still hasn’t regenerated but he ALSO restarts it. and the cycle continues. This situation can be applied to a variety of things, but the foundation of it is basically There is no logical way to make a difference on paths often travelled who DOESNT want it and then just places people visit for other reason who WANTS those places regenerated
The argument against this though will most likely be “But that just means people have to check other places” True, but the problem is that if all it takes to stop regeneration is a single person then it will lead to problems, then the counter argument to that is “But we said often travelled places, how about just getting more people?” The problem with this is that those people have to use it WITHIN the regeneration period. and either you can set it so low that we run into the same problem as above, or set it so high that most things which should benefit from the system wont.
I still hold to regenerating everything outside a beacon But make a special type of “Infrastructure beacon” which can be shaped in a special way and be used for things such as roads and paths, but be more expensive to create than the average “building” beacons. To counter for convinience you can increase the price to be double or triple the price of placing a normal 8x8x8 beacon.