Hello All,
With rumors of the siege plugin being functional soon, I wanted to propose an idea that would increase the raidability of bases, while also reducing the destruction of bases. No one wants the build they just spent 10,20,100+ hours on looking like swiss cheese.
I would suggest allowing a system that permits explosions to destroy hard blocks during the 20 minute siege. After the siege is won or lost, for the next minute (or 5 minutes, could be decided later) all blocks would be replaced. No blocks would drop from the explosion. Chest blocks would not be destructible to prevent mass amounts of items being dropped, but the blocks locking the chest would be. Explosions would be weaker than their normal amounts to prevent people from immediately busting into a base, but still appropriate for the ammunition type used by a cannon. Placing the blocks over time would greatly reduce the resource use on the server making its effect negligible as only a few blocks are being placed every second.
The same protection time on that person would apply after the raid, so they don’t have to constantly deal with sieges, but it would allow raids to finally be more exciting again. People could blow holes into large forts to pillage them. And after the raid is done, the base would regen block by block so it appeared nothing ever happened. The only losses would be from items taken from chest, and if the player died. I would even suggest this for soft blocks. So greifing wouldn’t occur during a siege.
Ships would become incredibly useful, as they could now sail into a port town or ocean box, and be used to lay siege to the enemy. Its cannons would fire and strip layers off of the walls, as the defenders fire their cannons back. Gates would fall as the ship roles in to port, warehouses would be laid open and pillaged. The crew stealing what they can, and sailing away just as quickly as they came. Ships could be stolen, their lock blocks blown clean off in the canon fire to be sailed by enemy crews. All that would be left of them would be the blocks destroyed by the cannon fire which would reappear after the block regen had finished, a stark reminder of the horrors witnessed that day.
Treasures, long burred underground would become the next big heist. The assailants would sneak in, setup cannons and supplies underground outside the claim. After the siege begins, so does the drilling. With each explosion, a base never before raided will soon fall if the attackers can blow their way in during the siege time. If they fail, the defender looses nothing while the attacker look at their empty powder chest.
Some ideas of implementations would be a simple queue or stack containing the block data as it is destroyed. I prefer a stack, as when a block is destroyed, the data is added to the top of the stack.
When its time to regen, the first blocks to be regenerated would be the ones at the top of the stack so the base would appear as if it was healing from the inside out, with the first bit of damage being the last to heal. It would be a fairly simple action, simply reading the item off the stack, placing it back in the world, then scheduling it to occur again in x number of ticks.
If there is a server stop mid heal or attack, you would implement a function to store the stack to file. Then upon a reload, it would check if any files exist and begin processing them. While the raid is going on, (I am not fully sure on this parts implementation without trying it myself) have an asynchronous write to file for the stack. So that it wouldn’t effect the server much as new blocks are being destroyed and added to the current stack. There would be no wait for the file to finish writing on the main thread. That way in the event of a crash, only a few number of blocks, if that, would be lost. And once the server is back up it could process the file and replace the destroyed blocks. You would also store which claim the file is pertaining to, not that it would really matter as the block data would have the coordinates included with it. I haven’t looked at how block data has changed though in multiple updates so my information may be outdated.
There are other potential ideas I have to expand on this playstyle of raiding, but I would like to hear peoples thoughts on the base idea first. Thank you very much and have a good day.
-Nahadoth
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