Ruins of an ancient build

[Brynjar]

Back when I first started Boundless, I posted this:

Ruinous decay of unfueled beacons

A week ago there was someone’s build not far from us that had reached village status. This week, that place was entirely gone; the shine of gleam in the distance gone from the view of our meager outpost. I understand that it was most likely a player that had decided to move on long ago, but the loss of all they had worked on seems too abrupt. I’d like to propose the following: When a beacon runs out of fuel, it and the plots associated with it do not immediately become reclaimable by the worl…

Seeing how the regen system has changed since then, the decay is fine now, but I want to change my suggestion a little. I was recently reminded of this when @james mentioned in some thread about wanting a new player to be able to step upon an untouched world with regards to why regen happens for expired beacons.

What if the state of a build that stayed up/constant for a very long time (1 real time year?) could essentially replace the regen state of the world with itself; perhaps in a bit of a ruinous state.

For example, let’s say a house and pathway to the house had stayed constant for over a year. Because it had stayed constant for over a year, the system/server takes the state of the plots at that time and decays them a bit and sets them as the new regen state. By decay I mean:

• The value of a block is stepped back a grade (Decorative->Refined->Stone->Rock, for example).
• Since the colors are unnatural to the world, the world changes the palette to match the planet (this would actually be a neat way to get gleam from lower worlds that currently have no gleam, or Ancient Wood on Lamblis).
• Surface resources are removed since the system would randomize population anyways.
• All machines are removed/not stored as regen data.
• Through randomization, not all of the blocks would take on this new regen state; some would still be their old regen state.

Now the house’s beacon has expired and no one’s been around it and it is left to regen. The brick path has reverted to a stone pathway. Portions of the roof are missing. One of the door blocks is missing and now the doors aren’t working together. The windows are missing panes of glass. The floor has a giant hole to the basement where there’s signs of some sort of work area that might’ve been used to craft a way off this planet, but the machines are no longer there.

I still think finding such ruins would give more enjoyment to exploring worlds instead of slight differences in biomes and a few surface props.

[nevir]

That would be really neat! And players combing over builds would further degrade the builds.

However, I think for really busy worlds, it may end up with a huge amount of decay, and not a lot of pristine places to build.

Maybe missing blocks are replaced at the standard regen rate, but blocks are removed at a different rate. And the rate is slower for higher level worlds?

[Brynjar]

Maybe some weighted randomization on the block removal/replacement based on how long it had been sitting there.

I like the idea of it taking longer on higher level worlds; even the system has to break through block armor.

[Krollbar]

Could have decay based on prestige. A Great City would take a month to decay, regular 10k settlement as-is but doesn’t begin to decay until 24 hrs have passed.