Minecraft experiment devolves into devastating resource war
pcgamer.com
pcgamer.com
- No screenshots with players visible.
- Play only continues when all 30 people are online at once. Anybody who has tried to make something like this happen will immediately notice how difficult it is for this to occur with any kind of regularity whatsoever, yet the claim is that this was happening for weeks.
I can't get the same 5 people together to continue a game of Civilization V. 30 people is ridiculous.
>“The loss of a resource such as clay was a small warning most players missed,” WordWorks notes. Within a week, trees were in short supply. Wood is essential for tool building in Minecraft, and so tensions began to mount.
Now, I know they're joking. How would anyone even know if all clay was gone (I never even use it)? Trees, by the way, are a renewable resource.
Funny, but very likely this never happened.
A 350x350 world seems pretty small, but that's over 120,000 blocks per layer, or over 15 million total blocks within the barrier (including empty/air blocks). Using stats from some of my other worlds, I'd expect a world of that size to have about 6 million stone blocks, maybe 750 thousand dirt, and 75,000 grass.
And two players out of 30 supposedly managed to mine/destroy basically all 75,000 grass blocks in the level without others realizing it and fortifying relatively large safe zones? Those who banded together around tiny protected grass patches didn't manage to surround them with more dirt, thereby allowing them to grow?
There was supposedly a lot of strip mining, so where are the giant cobble structures? "Oh, it all fell in the lava" -- how does every single player manage to drop thousands of blocks of cobble in the lava, exactly?
Thinking about other resources leads to similarly absurd conclusions. I'd estimate 1,500+ diamond ore in that area, or about 50 per player. That's enough to make 16-17 diamond picks per player, which is enough to mine about 25,000 blocks. Yet it's claimed diamond was used "only for obsidian" -- so where are the giant obsidian structures that took multiple players multiple diamond picks to create?
Similarly for iron, gravel, and all the other resources -- what did 30 players do with it all in only a couple of months?
Whoever wrote this little piece of fiction simply didn't realize how much stuff there is in a MineCraft world that size. Anybody actually playing in a situation like this, even with a couple of griefers, would find they were able to manage just fine. It doesn't take all that much to build a self-sustaining secret base, and once one is running, it's not that hard to build another and another and another. The amount of resources available in a 350x350 space are way more than 30 players could use, or destroy, in 2 months of playing.
Speaking personally, until very recently my regular raiding guild only had about 26 or so raiders who could show up every night (and another 3 or 4 who could show up for 1 or 2 of the nights). And yet we still managed to clear 8/8H.
I'm not proud of those days, but it did help me realize the key to managing any large group of people: make it feel like work, make everyone believe that it is a job and not a leisure activity so that you feel obligated to stay despite a complete lack of anything resembling fun.
So, yeah, I can imagine this actually happening. If you could do it with EverQuest, you can probably manage to achieve it with Minecraft.
First, grass doesn't matter. Wheat matters, and you don't need grass to grow wheat. For those that don't know, you need to eat or you'll die and wheat can be used to make bread. But there's plenty of stuff to eat, including renewable zombie flesh.
Second, while there are a few blocks that aren't renewable, there are plenty that are. Wood and cobblestone are completely renewable. And a lot of blocks aren't renewable but never used up. You should have just as much dirt in the world when you end as when you begin, unless it gets blown up by creepers or thrown into lava.
And you hardly need to build on a mountain and then cut away the mountain. Just build up and outward.
Eventually you should end up with people using only wood tools and be completely out of interesting materials. It would just be boring at that point.
At first the food mechanic was a little annoying but it has added a nice touch to the game. You tend to be a little more careful than before and you have to devote a little more time to food resources. But this is slightly configurable based on the difficulty setting as well.
You'll be pleasantly surprised to know this is more of a viable option than it used to be. It's quite hard to fill up your food bar once empty, but quite easy to jump off a cliff to reset it.
>I never really had any good idea as to what I should actually do in the game, besides build a random house on some random hilltop and admire the view.
I think everyone has this question. I tried to solve it by setting personal goals for myself:
1. build a complex redstone circuit; here's one of mine: http://youtu.be/qnd9l2_qrF0
2. craft a map (which can only be filled in by exploring the surrounding area) and fill it in completely
If you decide to try to "beat" the game, be warned that it's rather boring and anticlimactic. Probably the coolest part is it forces you to explore the "Nether".
Overall, the game has progressed nicely.
For me, this works well, as I just play when I really feel like it and no more time that my brain can handle[1], and when there are dangerous situations, you can really feel the stress for survival and preservation of all the "things" built.
[1]: Sometimes with games, after one hour or two, one is just playing the game, but not enjoying it.
I know, grass used to be a precious resource. I spent hours cultivating it myself back in beta! But these days it's mostly decorative. You can even mine it and put it wherever you want.
Why would someone hoax this? What would they gain from it?
Does anybody know what version of Minecraft the experiment took place in? That could explain certain mechanics that will make sense, it looks like it was before enchanting/potion making.
People seem to underestimate the power of grass, grass + bonemeal means seeds for wheat, if the factions kept raiding the other players it seems very possible they looted the players from all wheat and seeds they might have had, the original forum post also details that factions keept stealing saplings from other players, thus allowing the possibility of wood for becoming very rare.
You can read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
If you're implying minecraft in general, then yes. Otherwise in this particular case, resources seemed to be all finite.
* Water
* Lava Flows (Sources are finite)
* Wood/charcoal: if you have enough saplings and dirt.
* Cobblestone: if you have lava and water in the correct arraignment
* Wheat: if you have enough seeds and dirt
* Fish: if you have water
* Neutral-Monster items: for those monsters you can breed if you maintain the habitat
* Aggro-monster items
I believe that's it
The only competition would have been for highly scarce materials, however the other key point is that it's trivial to make another nether portal once you have access to the nether.
Or work with a friend, have that person take out the portal's nether entrance, then just restart the normal portal = boom, 14 more bricks.
But this would be very hard, since the "griefers" had both lots of resources, weapons and the advantage of the high ground.
Also, I wonder how large this box is. Given the size of the griefer base in the image, the whole 'world' seems pretty small.
Minecraft owes more to Infiniminer, but it has been its own game ever since development on Survival Mode started.