@bigscary

Hello, just wanna say, I love the plugin!

Also, maybe you could make obsidian able to be blown up (i assume you mean an obsidian fortress) That would also take away the ability to make an invincible base :D

@MrMightyGnome

All it takes to cheat the wither is to read the wither page on the Minecraft wiki (the resources are easy for a wither-level player to get). And if the player is summoning the wither, chances are he's well acquainted with the wiki by now. Anyway for this plugin, I'm assuming players know all the shortcuts in the core game, and designing with that in mind to make sure they get new experiences and new challenges. Because the wither is easy to cheat and (more) easy to reach than the dragon, I chose to make the dragon the ultimate battle.

By the way, if you have ideas for how I can prevent players from building a fortress to hide in while firing arrows at the dragon, that will be extremely helpful. :) Maybe something involving teleporting them out of it, or sending monsters in somehow, or fireballs somehow penetrating walls.

@MrMightyGnome

The dragon has greater potential to be more difficult because you don't control where he spawns AND you can't box him in because he flies through blocks. The wither is easy to cheat. That's why I choose to make the wither come first, then the dragon.

@Jungfaha

Yes, there are man options in the config file, but I wouldn't say that everything is 100% customizable. Some features you might want to "tweak" are actually either on or off, without a knob to adjust them. But there are no parts which can't be entirely disabled if you don't like them.

@Jungfaha

Okay he doesn't exactly shit zombies, I was just being crude. Currently, I'm play testing him with four types of fireballs (all of which deal explosive damage) - immolation to set fires, zombie summon, enderman summon, and blaze summon. Also, nearby endermen sometimes become aggressive to defend the dragon. So the battle becomes a combination of situational awareness (don't step in the fire), dodging or reflecting fireballs, battling minions, and trying to hit a flying dragon with your bow. Players can defeat the dragon with numbers (meaning outnumber him), but they would have to share the loot and experience. Also, while the dragon doesn't get actually stronger based on who he's fighting, he will fight more aggressively when confronted by a more effective opponent (or group), speeding up the pace of the battle.

@beanssprout

Yes, but if there's no one around to explain it to them, they'll quit.

I guess I could replace the plants with a snow block, so they would have some clue as to what happened?

No on the rain thing, because you could be offline when it starts raining. This would mean you'd have to spend a LOT of time standing around watching your crops, or plant all of them with a roof overtop.

Having crops die of old age is too hard to do technically speaking. For every planted block, I'd have to keep a database of when it was planted, and constantly check the database for crops which should die, and update the world. It's a giant pile of effort, and it would also kill off any villager crops, possibly before players could get there to steal them. :\

Again with the animals, players would just see that their animals mysteriously disappeared. They wouldn't understand it was due to the snow and not something else, like old age or a Mojang bug (animals disappearing has always been a confusing issue for players). I agree it's realistic, but I don't want admins everywhere to have to repeatedly explain to players how the server works, or require players to read signs or instructions on the web.

Even though it would make the game easier, I do like the idea of adding more wolves in snowy areas. After all, players don't get to play with wolf pets very often because they're so hard to find. However spawning them in the dark as I do with other bonus monsters might result in animals mysteriously disappearing from their pens (killed by wolves which spawned in there, and then despawned themselves), so it's overall probably more trouble than it's worth.

I'm very glad you like the plugin! :)

@Zombiemold

Oh very cool, I can see where that would make the battle more challenging. Having them explode at random seems like a punishment for winning, though. :) I'll be interested to see what you decide to do once you try the new dragon - keeping both, or disabling one or the other. Let me know.

Yeah, after adding ender dragon drops the other day, I went to watch the first guys try him and was like WUT? All he does is fly around? What a wimp. :)

@bigscary

On our server we created a plugin that makes endermen aggressive in the end, as well as cause them to sometimes explode when killed there.

This increased the difficulty by a whole heck of a lot, and seems to work very well (The exploding prevents camping and/or farming).

Players still hardly get hit by the ender dragon at all though, so abilities would be very cool.

I think the ender dragon should be harder, because once it's killed, it's not coming back (without interference from "higher powers"). As for withers, any lucky player can make them on the spot like an iron golem. So in my opinion, enderdragons should be harder, as they can't be mass produced and, in my opinion, are more "unique" than withers.

Anyway, if you want to put in better enderdragons, perhaps you could look into the EnderDragonPlus plugin for ideas. It's already got the enderdragon spitting out fireballs with a dozen other small tweaks to the dragon. (But I've never really tested it.)

http://dev.bukkit.org/server-mods/enderdragonsplus/

As for making the End harder in general, perhaps you can make enderman automatically go aggro if you get too close to them. (I believe there was an outdated plugin somewhere that did this.)

Hey, what do you guys think about the idea of requiring a nether star to enter the end? This would force players to explore the nether in search of wither skeletons to get their skulls to summon the wither, then defeat him before trying the dragon, so they have to experience more of the game. The star would be consumed when the player enters the end. Because he wouldn't be able to get back in without another star, his equipment will not be dropped when he dies in the end, instead it will be with him when he respawns as if he were waking up from a dream. This will also prevent players from "rushing" the dragon - running back in repeatedly to wear him down. Once they're out of the fight, they're out for good unless they have more stars saved up. It will also prevent players who've beaten the dragon from easily "farming" him for more experience and villager eggs, since they will have to get more wither skeleton skulls from the nether before going back.

Thoughts?

So guys, it's come to my attention that the nether dragon is a GIANT PUSHOVER. Seriously, he just flies around waiting for you to kill him, and the endermen don't even attack you unless you agitate them. So next version, the dragon will become a certified badass. He will likely spit fireballs and shit zombies, or something along those lines. Stay tuned. :)

@MrMightyGnome

Hmm.. about the griefing thing, I don't think it's something that should be fixed. Basically, the bad guy spends his resources to get the cobble, then the other player has to spend roughly equivalent resources to get rid of it. That's the same for obsidian, and nobody argues that obsidian should be changed as a result. Just make sure you have a good anti grief plugin, so that if this does happen, at least it will only happen OUTSIDE the victim's protected area.

The lava going cold in the rain thing makes realism sense (although I'm not sure rain could really cool molten lava), but I suspect players actually like the occasional random surface lava pool. Besides, turning them into obsidian would make them less dangerous, not moreso. :)

@Kiak

I don't think it's true that a server will crash (or even lag). I took very careful steps to ensure torches are searched out and removed very gradually over time, not all at once. In fact, the reason for the unpredictability of when torches will go out during a rainstorm is that I prioritized performance over realism.

I think you're understating the difficulty of building a village without eggs. Your typical zombie can't be cured, so your options are:

1. Search out a village with live NPCs, which could take a long time. Now wait for a zombie invasion, or otherwise find a zombie and convince him to attack a villager, which could take a while. Now get yourself a potion of weakness and a golden apple, neither of which are exactly common items. Now spend a very long time carefully kiting the zombie to the location you want - let's be realistic, getting the zombie far away from the town where you made him OR say up into a sky base or deep underground could be very slow and frustrating, even if you use a nether portal as a shortcut. To get a village exactly where you want it without making big compromises for convenience, you'd save a massive amount of time by using eggs.

2. Put an actual villager in a minecart and push him around. This takes foreeeeeever, or a lot of materials if you use a track. And at least some track is required if you want to get him uphill.

And there's the possibility he'll despawn while you're moving him around, if it takes a long time. :) So yeah with lots of patience, you can take on this very boring task. Or you could do something exciting, like try to slay a badass dragon.

@MrMightyGnome

Unfortunately, I think the only way to make the skeletons thing work would be to search the wide area around players to find skeletons, do the math to aim the shot, and then loose it. It could work, but I think it will be very expensive and in MOST cases (except wide open spaces), the arrow will just hit some tree or other obstacle. :\

@CommodoreAlpha

Okay sure, I'll give soul sand some thought. I'll try to come up with something to make it more uhh... scary. Tracking movement will be a lag generator though, so I'll have to come up with something else other than triggering something by walking on it.

I do like the idea of getting hurt when you punch a cactus, but it's too easy to work around (get out any other item/tool you have in your inventory) and it doesn't make sense in a game where you can punch a tree down with your fist. Since you're a total badass tree punching mofo, I don't think getting poked by a cactus will logically injure you. :)

I once considered a small chance for some ores to ignite due to a spark while mining, but it's dangerous enough mining without there being a damage tax on success. I think your suggestion falls in the same bucket - hurting players just because they're winning. The mining helmet thing would be good, except that players almost always wear a helmet anyway, and I don't think players would figure out on their own that wearing a helmet is the way to avoid the damage (I think showing an explanatory message every time it happens would be tacky).

I'm not trying to make a general "build anything you want" plugin, I'm trying to build a carefully balanced, well tested recipe which can be adjusted a bit for taste. For example, the netherrack feature I mentioned was designed specifically to make tunneling around in the nether a less attractive strategy because doing that circumvents the other challenges designed into the nether by this plugin.

If you want a server with a million nobs for you to play with, there are many plugins which are built with that experience in mind. Or, you can build your own plugin (or modify my source code to your purpose). :)

@beanssprout

I like the idea, but I worry that it will be very difficult for players to figure out why their crops aren't growing. And I don't want anyone to have to go to a website or wiki, or engage in conversations with other players to figure out something as success-critical as building a food crop. Supposing I were to add this feature, do you have any ideas for making it easier for players to figure out what's happening when their crops don't grow?