Continuing my work on the Red Line. I've got it running from Isildur's bridge, down through town, and up to the farms. I thought it might be cool if part of the line ran right through my house. In retrospect, idk why I thought that, but I'm leaving it :) https://duenas.dev/shared/house-metro

I'm also working on placing little markers to denote metro stops. What I really wanted to do was recreate DC's metro markers. Something about the simplicity of it that I love, but I was struggling to make an "M" with banners and it just wasn't coming together. So for now it's that. The block of concrete at the top will denote the line's color once we have more lines.

Now that I have mostly finished my multi-level spleef arena, I am beginning to think about building a PVP arena. This would be a massive project though - I had built one on my old SMP and it was probably about 200 hours of work. It was totally worth it though; my friends and I spent at least as many man-hours playing in it. That said, I would definitely need help both in designing and building a new one.

I have been slowly tinkering with new design ideas in a single player creative world, and I would love to incorporate these into a new build. Just to put all these ideas on a sort of drawing board, I'll post pictures of the designs here. Note that many designs, or at least certain aspects of them, are just taken from YouTube tutorials and the like. The magic lies in how to put these ideas together into a functional PVP arena. Later on if people want to help me build this I can put up a copy of the test world for download.

The first and most important module to my PVP designs (old and new) is the 'equipment tunnel'. Basically, before combat, you'd set your spawn in a 'spawn room', which is connected to the main part of the arena through this tunnel - note that this is a cross-sectional view; the tunnel is a 1-wide passage through several iron doors. The dispensers/droppers along the tunnel automatically equip the player with armor, and provide swords, bows, arrows, food, etc. This makes dying, respawning and rejoining the fight especially easy.

Above this tunnel is an equipment storage room, where shulkers can unload items into the equipment tunnel's dispensers/droppers. This makes it very easy to change the 'settings' (if you will) of the PVP - you could do swords only, bows only, maybe a 'no food' mode so that players gradually tire out. You could add other items like potions, or tipped arrows. Literally anything you can think of.

As you can see in the picture of my original arena, the arena is not simply a flat floor. There are all sorts of walls, staircases, as well as less obvious things like lava traps or retractable walls. I managed to come up with a 3x3 lava trap design. My old arena had only 2x2 traps, but those are trivially easy to make. My retractable wall design is 3 blocks high.

The control of these features is routed to a control room that can overlook the arena. Each feature has can be controlled manually or automatically. Automatic control use an adjustable hopper clock to randomly toggle the features on/off, so by simply changing the number of items in the hopper you can easily change how often the features toggle.

Another feature that could be included is a 'special item dispenser' - when activated, it shoots an item through a block in the floor for the players to pick up. It could be a more powerful sword, tipped arrows, a strong potion. This has a similar control mechanism to the other features, but also uses chains of hoppers to send items down or bring them back back up to the control room.

One last feature that would be more difficult to implement is a mob ejector, which ferries randomly spawned mobs from an underground spawning chamber, sorts them, and then pushes them into the arena. This would allow a player vs. mob game mode, but it also requires a lot of spawn proofing and might not be worth the effort, especially given how many other things will need to be built.

Of course, with most PVP games it is desirable to keep track of the score, counting the number of player deaths. I designed a score counter which uses a chain of redstone blocks pushed by pistons to light up a visual scoreboard. There are probably other ways to implement this that are cleaner. Basically, the score for team A would be incremented when a player from team B dies and respawns, activating a pressure plate where they spawn in next to the bed. A piston then blocks off the pressure plate to prevent accidental double-scoring.

Another game mode I was toying around with was a 'king of the hill' type scoring system. Two pressure plates in the center of the arena toggle the color of a beacon and start a hopper clock timer for their respective teams. Whichever team gets their beacon color lit up for a specified amount of time wins. The time can be linked to the scoreboard as well. I had a lot of difficulty getting this to work, but it's been a while since I designed it. Maybe someone else will be able to come up with a better scheme.

Anyway, let me know if you are interested in helping me with this and then we can discuss preliminaries. Obvious first-line questions would be 1) where to build this (proximity to town and biome), 2) how big to build it, 3) whether to make it for 2 teams only (like my original design) or more of a 'free for all' type design, and 4) what specific features to be included. As mentioned before I could use some help designing features, but also could use some help simply collecting materials, copying/building designs, and in the last stages of the project, beautifying the arena. So you can still help even if you are redstone-illiterate!

Moss farm is done! I located it South of the tree/iron farm area. Just raw redstone machine for now, but I plan to put a pretty building around it soon.

There's a new fully automatic honey block farm just south of the community farm area. I'm hoping it's just close enough to town to stay loaded, but far enough out to avoid lag. We'll see I guess. The farm is designed to run all day on a clock, and shut off at night when the bees are resting.

It's just uncovered redstone for now, but I'm planning to put a nice building around it as soon as I settle on a design.

Not sure how it happened, but my boats have been hijacked.

I'm finally gonna start actually building a """house""" (is it a house if it's in the sky?)!

I looked through the terralith biomes and just fell in love with the lavender valley ❤️ found a spot pretty close to town, it'll still be a heck of a time moving all my animals though; but that's a problem for future Noox LOL

Post more gameplay screenshots!

https://imgur.com/LxWK0z1

So, in creative, I think I finally built a kelp processor that doesn't jam, doesn't waste (too much) fuel, uses all smokers (kind of) evenly, fits into the semi-chunk available at 5x10x8 (while leaving room for redstone to "turn on" the giant furnace), and, at full input capacity, should be able to continually power 12 furnaces.

Trouble is, translating that over to the server is going to be difficult. Taking phone pictures of the device at different angles has proved to be ...inefficient. I've heard people talking about importing templates, or build plans, but I have no experience with anything like that. Does anyone have any suggestions/advice for correcting translating a complex redstone device into survival?

I don't remember who had asked about this but someone was requesting leather worker traders
There are a few in the basement of the trade hall now.

So I finally have started making my starter house, and have since removed the mess on the north cliff, where I had chests, bamboo farm, and carrot farm. Since I am no longer making my house there, if someone else wants to build there, feel free to

Yesterday and today I worked in the Nether portal/bean stalk/warp pipe hub. The Nether portals from town now enter a mob safe building and have been connected to the roof as well through the beanstalk. I made heavy use of glass so you can still enjoy the view of lava and the dozens of magma cubes hopping around ;)

I also made sure to try and connect to the various paths I already saw and will be connecting some other portals as well.

Edit: Tea fixed it, everyone can safely log back in. Thank you Tea

For the crash that is currently happening, I have a tentative map of where the borders are. I would caution people from getting too close to these borders, as they are a rough estimation, and once inside you cannot join the server until the problem is fixed. If anyone knows of an inaccuracy of my border map, comment and I will fix it.

https://imgur.com/a/OKSbWJa

@teaearlgreycold Once it is solved, can you please post a comment so that those within the border know it is safe to join? Current residents within the zone are @GravySleeve, @ThrowdoBaggins, and myself (if you are within the crash zone, let me know and I will edit this to include you)

I ran out of diorite, anyone got a stack of that stuff hidden away somewhere by any change?

I'm working on a moss/bonemeal design in creative, but I need some help with a decision. I'm currently saving moss and both bushes (flowering and normal) and composting everything else to bonemeal. So here's the question:

Poll: Would you rather I save the bushes, or use them for more bonemeal?

@teaearlgraycold Something is up with the server. I keep getting kicked with a Server Closed message. Occasionally, it says "Connection refused: getsockopt". Seems to be affecting everyone.

Edit: Maybe not everyone.

Little off topic, but I just came across this Hermitcraft animatic and it gave me a good laugh.

@sparksbet I left a note for you in the book in front of your house!

FYI if you notice certain tuff variants not rendering on Dynmap, it's a known issue and the fix is waiting to be reviewed/merged:

https://github.com/webbukkit/dynmap/pull/4124