So for next map, you've mentioned going to more wasteland. I've played with MT before, and it seems to have 3 worldgens:
-Green, with water, normal trees, gardens of veggies and plants.
-Dry, mostly sandstone/sand, water is in patches underground. No plants for food, other than potatoes/carrots that can drop off of zombies, and of course, eating zombie. Sewers have water in them. Dirt should be pretty rare. Although i recall a few areas it lurks....
-Ruined. Like Dry. But buildings are much more chaotic and jumbled. Loads of craters. Sewers have lava in them.
Dry/Ruined is much more challenging and adds the feel of a wasteland. Ruined adds the huge problem of thirst, since water is going to be damn hard to get. So it depends on how hard you want to make it.
MiningDead started off with a server that used the green setup, then added outlands which used the dry setting. Turned out to be vastly more popular. Eventually Skuli got rid of the world border, but made areas past about 2k be the ruined version. (We also had radiation from sun/rain/zombies and some other fun stuff to deal with. But it was also tekkit, so we had jetpacks at some point. None of the ee, matter fab or other op stuff though, about the same tech level as we have in cataclysm). Outlands started out with nearly no plants. I think seeds were found in a chest in a bunker, and an oak sapling. One town, Sanctuary figured out IC2 crop genetics and crossbred many other plants, and had a monopoly on rubber and food for a couple of months. I joined the server, crossbred and made farms...then joined Sanctuary. I love a good monopoly. The server had a real hard edge to it with much death.
If you started with most of the area dry, people could still get water/potatoes/carrots eventually, but would mean some zombie killing to do so, and new people would have to eat zombies. Spawn could sell water and food for iron ingots, so people could make a living mining. And spawn could sell/trade 1 wheat seed, 1 carrot, 1 potatoe etc for something extravagant, like a stack of iron. Dirt could also be sold. A faction with a garden would truly be rich
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