Urbanisation in Minecraft | Hacker News Reader

Urbanisation in Minecraft

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132 pointsrcfox55 comments

All I could think of while reading was the old "limited life experience + over-generalization = advice" even though there's no actual advice here.

But I mean, "The more intelligent of you reading this article have also probably noticed something similar to my various observations." WTF?

I don't see what this has to do with real-life urbanization, either. The architect built a city no one wanted, so they made suburbs. So what?

> I don't see what this has to do with real-life urbanization, either.

The problem on the server in this article isn't "urbanization", it's a failure to create appropriate infrastructure for the task at hand.

The repeated question and answer pair of "where are the trees?" "Try the edge of town" suggest limited Minecraft-life experience, and probably limited life experience in general. Had they simply set up a policy of "every time you harvest a tree, replant two saplings" there soon would have been a large enough tree farm to satisfy all 50 players, as trees in Minecraft grow quite fast. Had players built deep mining tunnels and used any of the common mining techniques [0], they'd have had all the cobblestone (and various other ores) they wanted, without stepping on each others' toes. Instead, they were so short on resources that they felt it necessary, when fleeing their initial city, to salvage torches -- which are quite easy to create in bulk.

For comparison, my mostly adult gaming clan runs an invite-only Minecraft server. We've built up a ton of infrastructure -- a five-acre ranch [1], a greenhouse, mushroom farms, tree farms, strip mines, and monster farms, so we have easy access to virtually every type of resource. Everything is interconnected via rail lines or portals, so material transport is not an issue. If someone decides they'll need a lot of a particular type of material, we set up a system to allow us to harvest that material in large quantities. This allows us to build ambitious projects fairly quickly. This is typical of well-run Minecraft servers.

[0] http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Tutorials/Mining_Technique... [1] http://ripminecraft.blogspot.com/2011/04/tomcat-ranch.html

Why is it fun at that point?

(Honest question. Please don't take it any other way.)

I think of Minecraft (SMP) as having three distinct aspects (or phases):

1) Surviving the zombie hordes long enough to set up an initial base of operations

2) Beginning to explore and build out infrastructure

3) Building cool, large-scale stuff

I personally find all three of these aspects of the game fun. Even after you've gotten to phase 3, you can still go back and do the same things you did earlier; exploring caves or the nether is still dangerous even after you're fully equipped, and you can always explore farther away and build new infrastructure. So even if you're not particularly interested in large-scale construction projects, you can still have fun exploring or going off on your own and fighting zombies.

I am not speaking for lotharbot's interpretation of fun, but I've learned that there are many of them. Some love goals and putting themselves and their intelligence, diligence, planning, and various abilities to the test to see how much they can achieve.

Others find this more burdensome than fun, and there are many, many other ways of interpreting what is fun.

If anyone else is wondering about the relevance of this article to real life, read the parent while mentally replacing "Minecraft server" with "community".

The kid's in high school; cut him a break. He'll never be smarter than he thinks he is right now.

That's not quite true. A few bits of intelligence like history or vocabulary can continue increasing for decades; measures of working memory and fluid intelligence tend to continue to increase until the early late teens and early twenties, which is why the long-term studies and comparisons usually start at age 20-25: http://www.gwern.net/DNB%20FAQ#aging

"He'll never be smarter than he thinks he is right now."

Nice tale of emergent behaviors in Minecraft. Still, I couldn't read this part without wincing:

"The more intelligent of you reading this article have also probably noticed something similar to my various observations."

Say "more observant", say "the astute reader will have probably noticed", or better yet say "more Minecraft-obsessed" but never say "more intelligent". If as a writer you're going to assume stupidity or laziness, you MUST assume it for yourself only. And adding the word "various" in that spot just makes it worse. Strunk and White to the rescue...

The author is in high school. That may explain a certain immaturity in the writing and reasoning here.

I don't understand why so many people are upset about this in the comments. Was he addressing you personally?

Observation is an activity of the intelligent.

I enjoyed the article, but I don't think this person's experience is necessarily representative of all servers, or even most. I've seen plenty of servers where flora abounds.

In my server on the last world almost everyone kept anywhere from a few trees to a massive garden (of trees) next to their house, if only for harvesting.

In my current server where we are building a hagia sophia -esque structure, the outside is being made into an abundant garden of every type of plant.

In every iteration of the world on my server people have been crazy about nature, going so far as to take all of the plants into the nether to create "life" there.

Actually, now that I think about it, I wonder if minecraft servers differ much between those played solely by people who live in large cities vs those who live in less populated areas. Most of the people on my server are from New Hampshire, and I wonder if it would look different from a server where most of the people are from (say) Boston. Comparing such servers would be a pretty interesting study I think.

I don't think this person's experience is necessarily representative of all servers, or even most. I've seen plenty of servers where flora abounds.

Yeah, I was just amused at his description of the initial city, since it accurately describes a few spawn-zone cities I've seen.

I kind of suspect it's just a result of high population. Or maybe there's just a type of SMP player who gravitates towards city-oriented servers. Either way, on the private servers where I've played, people do tend to scatter over a pretty wide range (rarely less than a couple hundred meters between two people's dwellings), and most of the land remains unaltered.

Having been reading on early civilization settlements, I feel an interesting parallel to how deforestation caused some of their collapses. A core that overfeeds on resources while overgrowing onto them will generally collapse into its periphery. If Minecraft had a rain system, the rapid loss of woodland would not only cause ppl to move to be closer to the wood resource, but because the bare soil would cause flooding and topsoil loss (leading to lower agriculture yield).

And if Minecraft had a collapse for mining under things, it might be like industrial England when salt and coal mining altered the geology enough to sink towns (even when the mines weren't immediately under them).

Just some associations to more complex societal and resource systems that sprung to mind.

Minecraft recently added rain, but I think it's mostly aesthetic at the moment. Your thoughts on flooding and erosion might make for an interesting mod.

Also, some things do collapse when you might under them. Namely, sand and gravel. It might be interesting to play with making other types of terrain collapse if there's enough weight and not enough support around. I have no idea how difficult that would be though since I've never looked very far into modding Minecraft.

There has been talk of making Bravo's rain wash away anything left exposed, and eroding grass and stone. No code's been written, but it's an interesting idea.

"However, most importantly, it is that people are an unstoppable force. "

well, there are several proven ways to stop the enthusiastic outpouring of people's creativity. For example city council, zoning and ordinances. Introduce such stuff into the game, with building permit needing 6 months to clear the design review stage only and you'll see how "unstoppable" the force is :)

The article touches a bit on the depletion of finite resources, in a context with very artificial mechanics (e.g., the administrator decides to spawn monsters among player-built structures). "Urbanization" is a misnomer here. First, all phenomena described involved at most a few dozen people, a group size that can only evidence interactions in a small village community and not in a real urban setting. Second, urbanization is a pretty specific term that refers to people leaving the countryside to move to the cities.

But cobblestone, wood, and even charcoal and water are infinite resources in the game. The problem isn't the supply of resources, it's the short-sightedness of the players in the game that figure it's easier for them to mine cobblestone from beneath or clear-cut a natural forest in the game with no intention of replenishing the supplies because they don't imagine they'll be playing long enough for it to matter.

If they're infinite, the article doesn't do a very good job of even making this basic point. In any case, this bears little relation to what is ordinarily meant by urbanization.

They're infinite in the sense that more will always exist, but you'll have to keep walking further and further to get at them.

Actually, in Minecraft, you don't need to walk farther to get those particular resources. Wood, charcoal, water, and cobblestone are all infinitely renewable resources.

Wood and charcoal are straightforward -- harvesting a tree gives you wood and saplings, saplings grow into trees, and wood can be cooked in a furnace to make charcoal (you can even use saplings, more wood, or more charcoal as fuel.)

If you make a 2x2 depression in the ground and put water in opposite corners, the remaining corners will immediately fill. You can then pull water out of any corner, and it will immediately refill.

Cobblestone can be generated by making water and lava flows touch.

> Cobblestone can be generated by making water and lava flows touch.

In real life, we can always make more iron (or insert other resource we might be lacking) by smooshing smaller atoms together. That doesn't mean it's viable source for any scale of use.

A fair point.

Still, I have a hard time seeing any Minecraft scenario under which "there's not enough cobblestone" is a valid complaint. Even without using cobblestone generators, it's incredibly abundant.

The other resources I listed (wood, water, charcoal) are all renewable in a practical sense.

Actually, a lot of people have created "cobblestone generators" in Minecraft. They are pretty easy to make, and are infinite and fully automatic (a cobblestone appears, you destroy it, loot it, and another one appears instantly).

The process can be automated using pistons and a redstone repeater, as shown here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wLuEO6xOM4&feature=playe...

This can produce cobblestone as fast as you can mine it, at a cost of three lava, three iron (for pistons), and a bit of redstone dust (plus items derived from wood, water, and cobblestone, which are all renewable resources)

There are other designs which use even less non-renewable resources as well.

Ah, I haven't had a chance to play with pistons yet. I guess my knowledge is a bit out of date.

In Minecraft, cobblestone generators are highly viable and much better than mining, in fact. High-density tree farms are a lot more sustainable, too. Examples of both are on the wiki.

If you really need to speed up the tree farms, even though they're a lot better than harvesting wild trees, get bonemeal by creating a trap around an enemy spawner. Or just create a giant dark pit where water feeds the monsters into a trap in the center (either a pitfall or a lava blade). Again, it's all on the wiki. Infinitely sustainable. I've made all of these, except for the enemy trap, which I'm still working on... by using the cobblestone generator.

Actually, I believe a recent update stopped the water regeneration, so now it acts like lava.

As of about 3 minutes ago, it still works.

Somewhat. Trees and other plants can be replanted via saplings and bonemeal, cobble can be made with a simple cobblestone generator, and water is extremely easy to make an infinite spring for. The more rare elements are things like glowstone, iron, gold, diamond, obsidian, and lava. If you aren't near a desert, beaches sometimes will be strip mined for sand, but that's it.

I think the spreading apart generally has less to do with resources and more to do with personal space. You don't want your awesome house in your modern style to be next to your neighbor's medieval castle. It just looks weird. People do tend to have their own mines (at least in my experience), but that's less of a reason to spread apart.

All resources are infinite in Minecraft in that context. Rather what is meant is that even if you kept within a single small area of the map you could generate infinite supplies of those resources. When you cut down a tree the leaves drop saplings which can grow new trees, for example. There's a list of renewable Minecraft resources here: http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Renewable_Resources

What is this restricted access junk?

It seems to be based off an anti-spam heuristic run by Cloudflare: https://www.cloudflare.com/ . The most insulting part of it is that they offer to link to evidence of what your IP address has supposedly done, but don't actually provide any concrete details(e.g. links to the alleged spam).

If anyone from Cloudflare is listening, your CAPTCHA submission is broken in IE7.

I am an engineer at CloudFlare. I've got the page in question open in front of me in IE7, but I'm not having any issues with the CAPTCHA submission. Can you provide any additional details about the problem you're experiencing?

I hit the site from a relatively fresh installation of linux, via a very new chrome browser, and got the same page. The captcha has some strange characters in it that I don't think I'll easily be able to type.

Any mirrors for the content? Is it even mirror-worthy?

Hate to do this, but they asked for it:

Article: http://pastebin.com/9U1Ap1y0

Attached Image: http://i.imgur.com/HumfP.png

I recently flew Emirates from Europe back to Australia and read an article in their in-flight magazine about the failure of Brasilia. This story broadly reminded me of that article. Can't find an exact copy online, but this pieces makes a few of the same points as the in-flight story: http://www.macalester.edu/courses/geog61/jmoersch/reality.ht...

I wonder, are there economists out there setting up and studying game worlds? Seems like a great way to run your simulation, and avoid the costs of phone surveys / data collection.

EVE Online has a chief economist. http://io9.com/5057849/real-economist-studies-virtual-econom...

It tends to work the other way around - a game world is set up, then economists study it. It's difficult to set up a world just for study, because people will not actually join and play unless it's an enjoyable game, and at that point you're a game developer rather than an economist.

The most interesting economic work I know is for Eve Online. The company that operates Eve has hired an in-house economist to study the game's economy and publish periodic reports, which are available online - a quick search will turn them up. The reports generally focus on the economic effects of adding new content to the game - "here's how players reacted to the last patch."

> It's difficult to set up a world just for study, because people will not actually join and play unless it's an enjoyable game, and at that point you're a game developer rather than an economist.

It would be cool to see the two team up! Depending on the experiment, maybe you'd only need level designs. I assume this has only gotten easier with things like Minecraft.

CCP has two in-house economists.

Source: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2011/07/monocles.ars

Yes there are. AFAIK both WoW and Eve Online are regularly studied on various fields, including sociology and economics.

Blizzard has a PhD in econ working for them to manage the in-game economy, iirc from my time on the WoW forums.

The first papers I read on the subject were based around LambdaMOO. I've seen economic treatments of Ultima Online, AlphaWorld, and Second Life as well.

Here's an interesting book that discusses some of the spatial economics of game worlds:

http://www.mappingcyberspace.com

Unfortunately, due to bitrot and available time, I don't have an extensive bibliography to give you beyond this right now.

Plan better.

how do u find servers in minecraft? it just asks me for an ip

Google.

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=minecraft+servers

http://mcserverlist.net is the most popular site for listing

There are also several sections of the official Minecraft forums dedicated to finding or hosting servers.

http://www.minecraftforum.net/forum/49-starting-up-looking-f...

In case anybody feels like getting together with for a HN minecraft session, I'm hosting a server here: 78.46.43.181

Currently its just me and my friends (when I persuade them to throw away their time and get Minecraft). I will leave it running anyway in case somebody feels like joining. The machine I'm running this on is fairly high spec and is otherwise idle (only hosting one very very low traffic website on it), so it "shouldn't" lag, st least, not from lack of resources. Hosted in Europe, so ping may be a bit high from the US.

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