I've got a plan and I'm looking for feedback

[Narc]

Hi, all,

I've got a mod idea I'm kind of considering and I'd like to hear some thoughts on how it might play out. Now, I'm not promising I'll actually make this happen (especially if it turns out someone gives me a really good reason why it wouldn't work!) but it's been stuck in my head for a couple of days now and it demands to be let out.

But first, a little backstory: way back when I was still playing mostly vanilla, and hMod was a thing, a very good friend of mine wrote an hMod plugin that created a continuously-advancing wall of ice that basically traversed the map from north to south. Players were limited (if memory serves) to a ~64x64 chunk region with the wall of ice at one edge, and if they left that area (or died), they would be respawned back inside it. Going too far into the ice wall would give you status effects and text warnings, and eventually kill you "from the cold". The wall of ice advanced steadily, and you had to keep moving ahead of it (but you couldn't get too far).

Having now explained most of the pertinent parts of how it worked, what I'd like input on is how you think this would work in a current Forge modded environment. What mods would help, what mods would hinder? Assume you still couldn't get too far south of the ice wall, but would be perfectly free to travel east and west as far as you wanted (with the caveat that the ice wall would still be advancing southward while you did it). Further assume that, as chunks fell behind the ice wall, they will eventually get deleted (so no leaving your generators running embedded in the ice behind you).

If memory serves, the Nether wasn't a thing yet when we did this; I'd imagine disabling it somehow would be a good idea if I wanted to resurrect this thing.

That's all I have for now; what do you guys think?

 

[Golrith]

Interesting concept, has the same "survival" element as that Sorched Earth mod where the surface temperature increases, where you have to gather everything you can from above ground, and hide underground as the sun will kill you (and anything else) on the surface. But where that mod lets you live quite statically underground, your's requires constant movement.

That by itself will cause an issue with many mods, as they are designed around "building a base" but I wouldn't worry about that. It's down to the users to work out what would work with it or not.


Hmm, suddenly the Liche King Dungeon from WoW comes to mind, where he slowly advances on you with his barrier of cold. Ah the memories of wipes doing that....

 

[Narc]

That by itself will cause an issue with many mods, as they are designed around "building a base" but I wouldn't worry about that. It's down to the users to work out what would work with it or not.

Yes, I'm not too concerned with fixed structures; that was, in fact, the primary reason the IceAge plugin was created in the first place (and it's lots of fun with friends!).

That said, I do want to explore the ramifications of a constantly-moving base: how much can you do with it? If you set up a power grid, how big is it, and how do you plan on shifting it when the ice wall inevitably approaches? Do you try to make AE work and keep your stuff on drives for easing inventory troubles, or do you keep your stuff in chests? Chest carts? Locomotives? Build a railcraft tunnel bore and just keep moving?

It's... certainly very different from how things are now.

 

[psp]

Yes, I'm not too concerned with fixed structures; that was, in fact, the primary reason the IceAge plugin was created in the first place (and it's lots of fun with friends!).

That said, I do want to explore the ramifications of a constantly-moving base: how much can you do with it? If you set up a power grid, how big is it, and how do you plan on shifting it when the ice wall inevitably approaches? Do you try to make AE work and keep your stuff on drives for easing inventory troubles, or do you keep your stuff in chests? Chest carts? Locomotives? Build a railcraft tunnel bore and just keep moving?

It's... certainly very different from how things are now.

You could have it so like "escape from earth" or "escape to ect." and have like a machine that teleports you to a new dimension so you win the game> you would have to have tons of things to make it but have like a certain time limit before the ice swallows everything?

 

[Narc]

You could have it so like "escape from earth" or "escape to ect." and have like a machine that teleports you to a new dimension so you win the game> you would have to have tons of things to make it but have like a certain time limit before the ice swallows everything?

I'm not too keen on putting a win condition on it. The most that comes to mind at the moment is giving the player a way to pause the ice wall by going inside something like a minimum-sized AE spatial storage cell, to support my own play style (which involves having a personal server that the game actually runs in), but where you wouldn't be allowed to do anything except leave.

 

[Kirameki]

I'm more interested in the effects of traveling past the 10M mark where tile entities start misbehaving. Especially in modded Minecraft TEs are a big deal, so I'm curious what that might cause. Would there be a limit how far the wall would push? Since there is a hard world limit, there should be an endgame of *some* sort for the seriously hardcore players. You'd also need to consider resources from other dimensions (twilight forest, nether, the end, promised land, etc.), wall advancement on servers running 24/7 (It should still advance but what to do with players left behind if they can't log in for a while, new players, etc.), and spawn points if beds get frozen. It's an interesting concept, though, if you can figure out how to make it work well.

 

[Narc]

I'm more interested in the effects of traveling past the 10M mark where tile entities start misbehaving.

Why travel past it? Picture this: as you approach the southern 9,000,000 coordinate, a wall appears in front of you. What's this? Another ice wall? Is this the end of this map? Nope! It's a wall of portal blocks, and when you step into it you get teleported to the northern 9,000,000 position (aka literally on the other side of the map) with some randomized east-west position. And Winter (in the form of the wall of ice) is still coming.

Since there is a hard world limit, there should be an endgame of *some* sort for the seriously hardcore players.[...]

I was kind of curious how long that would take to reach, so I plugged in a theoretical average wall advancement rate of one block every ten seconds and came to about three years of continuous gameplay to go from 0-ish to 10,000,000-ish. Mind, I want to see it configurable, so you could technically get there in as little as 138 hours (or even less, if you're willing to advance the wall faster than 20 blocks/second), but I'm not sure the game would still be playable if the wall advances too fast.

Either way, the only hard limit is whatever limit whoever writes this will decide to put on it. Even if the world isn't infinite, the wrapping trick means you can just arrive back where you started from and you probably won't even notice if you don't look at your coordinates.

You'd also need to consider resources from other dimensions (twilight forest, nether, the end, promised land, etc.),

Yes, that's bugging me a fair bit, especially about nether resources (which are required for a lot of the more mainstream mods likely to be packaged with the new ice age). Technically, there's no reason the Nether couldn't have a nice wall of lava similar to the ice wall in the overworld (and, presumably, moving at 1/8th the speed). I'd much rather just have a way to give the player nether resources, though, and disallow dimensional hopping altogether.

Twilight Forest, Promised Land, etc., don't need to be considered -- they subvert the ice wall altogether, so don't play with them. Same for Mystcraft. None of them should have any resources you can't live without, though, or which can't be made to spawn in the overworld.

wall advancement on servers running 24/7 (It should still advance but what to do with players left behind if they can't log in for a while, new players, etc.), and spawn points if beds get frozen.

The original ice age subverted the spawn mechanic altogether (as mentioned in the OP). If you logged in and you were not within the active world border, you got teleported to the middle of the active region. In this case, I'd imagine this being fairly easy to do: frozen beds are surrounded by ice on all sides, so they're obstructed, and the spawn point can move along with the ice wall, keeping both new and respawning players safe.

It's an interesting concept, though, if you can figure out how to make it work well.

Yes, that's partly what I'm trying to do with this thread -- an evaluation of what the challenges are, and how one can make things work despite them; what mechanics are ruined (and can we live without them?) what mechanics would ruin the intent (and can we disable them?).


I'd like to once again state that I'm not guaranteeing I'll be writing this; for right now, take it as a thought experiment and consider what could cause issues with gameplay (as @Kirameki did, above).

My friend who wrote the original plugin came with this thought: put your stuff into an ME system and, when it's time to move, put the ME system (i.e. controller, etc.) into an independent ME chest together with a generator -- you can then carry all your stuff in maybe four inventory slots: storage cell, ME chest, generator, and fuel. And you might even be able to dispense with the fuel. It would take some effort to pack and unpack, but it seems mostly feasible.

 

[Narc]

All righty, so let's try getting some numbers in here to help us think.

The first and most fundamental variable we can play with is the rate of advancement of the ice wall, i.e. how fast it moves. My initial thought for this, purely a guesstimate that felt right, was about 1 block every 10 seconds. Interestingly, this seems to work reasonably well -- it translates to a chunk being swallowed by the ice in about two and a half minutes, or 22.5 chunks per hour. It's a reasonably comfortable rate of advancement: ponderous, but noticeable, and it won't take too terribly long before you're forced to move house.

The second variable, which also affects players' comfort level directly, is how far from the ice wall you can go. I've already decided that east-west movement will be completely unhindered, and that the ice wall will be approaching from the north. To the south, I'd like to place a magical barrier, advancing at the same rate as the ice wall, preventing anyone from trying to go too far ahead. Another guesstimate for the distance of this barrier was about 40 chunks -- which is to say, when you initially spawn, the ice wall is 320 blocks north and the barrier is 320 blocks south. This feels right to me, but if anyone thinks it's too small (or too large!), please tell me why.

Something else to consider is what the overworld looks like. Under default rules, it seems all too likely that sooner or later there will be a great big ocean in your way, and nothing to do but row and wait for the ice wall to advance enough that you can make landfall on the other side... this does not sound like fun. On the other hand, I've been playing around a bit in an ATG world in Monster, and that terrain looks perfect for Ice Age. The mountains challenge you to consider whether going over them or around them is faster; the seas, when encountered, are rarely so large you can't quickly see a way around, and the overall ratio of landmass to ocean is much better than the ~30% regular Minecraft worldgen gives you.


So, given my guesstimates for ice wall advancement rate and permissible build area, we've got a game where you need to move your base slightly more often than every two hours. My impression is that it's a decent compromise between the need for some stability for, e.g. digging for materials and processing them, versus the need to keep moving because Winter Is Coming. Two hours might be enough time to set up an infusion room and do some Thaumcrafting. It might be enough time to build a small ore processing system. But you will still feel rushed, and you'll still know that, when the ice wall comes, you'll have to pick it all up and keep moving.


So now to revisit the Nether question, along with the question of ice walls on permanently running servers (I play Minecraft on a dedicated personal server, so this question is rather near and dear to me), and even the question of beds (!).

Imagine that when you enter the world (in single-player, or logging onto a server), instead of just spawning in the overworld, you're taken to a bedrock-walled room containing a bed... and a snow golem. Then you receive a chat message: "<Snow Golem> Hello, [player name], I'm Ymir, and I've been tasked by the gods of the North with helping you in the challenge you've accepted." The snow golem gets the name "Ymir" shown over his head, and he will interact with you, probably through the ingame chat system. 'Cause why not.

As far as the spawn room is concerned, I'd ideally like to have that still be in the overworld somewhere, probably near the northern edge of the map. The server/world spawn will remain there, and Ymir will teleport you to and from the active part of the world whenever you ask. Some further details I'd like to see is the spawn room being completely immune to player activities (no building in the spawn room, no breaking the bed, no killing the helpful snow golem), and (most importantly) the ice wall not advancing if all the players in the world are currently there.

In fact, let's take it a step further: if you make a chunk loader and place it in the world, the ice wall will continue advancing. If queried, Ymir will say that "there is an energy anchoring the world into the present timestream; I cannot stop the wall of ice", or words to that effect. The only way to pause the ice wall is to go into the spawn room and make sure nobody and nothing is out in the world, force-loading chunks. If you do leave a chunk loader in place and go away for long enough, it will stop having an effect once it gets far enough behind the ice wall (and its chunk gets deleted).

How does this solve the Nether? Well, I did just mention a challenge by "the gods of the North" (and if you wish to take that as a Game of Thrones reference, you're welcome to do so). Naturally, this challenge could include providing some unattainable resources (like nether quartz and glowstone) in exchange for ones that can be acquired (like... I dunno, metals? Grass blocks?). This, again, can be one of Ymir's functions, though I wouldn't be completely opposed to just dispensing free quartz, netherrack, etc., over time as the ice wall advances. The idea here is to remove dimension hopping altogether (which would come with some serious challenges in terms of ice wall synchronization), while making it unnecessary.

As for beds, I'd like to just remove them altogether. If you want to skip the night, beds will be provided in the spawn room (which I would like to have automatically include a bed for each player inside it), but they don't otherwise make much sense in the given context. Indeed, beds interact rather poorly with another feature I'd like to have:


Specifically, I'd very much like it if the ice wall advanced at different rates during day- and night-time. It should still average out to the same rate as previously discussed, but maybe you could have it advance 1 block every 20 seconds for half of the time, and every 5 seconds for the other half. It would make it all the more striking when you exit a mining cave after a night spent inside if you saw the wall had not only come into view, but was already halfway to reaching you! As I said, this particular change would be somewhat subverted if you could just skip the night whenever you felt like it. Perhaps an enforced cooldown on how often you can visit the spawn room would help? Or just a cooldown on bed usage.


I think that's enough of my blathering for now; please, let me know what you think. Especially let me know if you see any major issues with what I described, or things I haven't considered but which would materially affect gameplay.

 

[Strikingwolf]

I've been watching this and I think you have the right idea. I don't know Java/MC modding so I couldn't do it (Objective-C FTW). But I think some of the mod devs might be willing to give it a try

 

[Narc]

@Strikingwolf Well, even lacking anyone else willing to write it, I'm certainly capable of doing so. Assuming I can find the motivation to take it on, that is.