[Trerro]

Do people want to keep the current server seed, or get one with a better spawn?

If we reset a few times, we can likely get a much better one. The catch of course, is that this would require a world reset.

The main issue with this one is that there aren't any good building areas even remotely close to the spawn.

I'm going to hold this to a simple vote - keep it or dump it? Please vote soon, as the longer we wait if we are dumping it, the more that gets lost when we do.

[Valsidor]

There are pros and cons. If we all start together we can make our own little village instead of all this scrambling about. But we lose what we're currently working on.

[GPH]

Do you have the power to change the spawn point?

To be honest I'm fine with sticking with the current world for now seeing as presumably the plan is to reset and start a new one once the IC mod is up and working again?

Nor am I that fussed with resetting though if thats what everyone else wants.

[Skeeter]

If we restart the world, I would like to suggest re-seeding it until we start in a flat zone with a decently easy biome, not thick forest on one side and desert for miles on the other side of a ginormous mountain that happens to be the starting spawn.

[Sonya the fox]

Okay, here's my thoughts on the matter of reloading the world (at all):
Pros:
Refreshes the world's resources
New lands to explore
No more craters (for now)


Cons:
Unless something is manually done about it, everyone loses everything they've collected when a restart happens (I've lost many a work to a server that went the way of the dinosaur entirely)
Creations have to be rebuilt (and unless the above point is rectified, resources regathered to rebuild)


Now, about making a restart on this particular world we have loaded now (as of 9/25/2011 4:48PM EST) I have nothing invested, and in the direction I went there's been almost nothing but an endless forest (good and bad), but nothing overly interesting except someone's underwater tunnel using glass panes that I saw when looking for civilization.  Since this hasn't been up for very long, I'd say not a ton of time has been invested, not a lot to lose on this reset, but I would like to ask that I be able to reclaim some resources from the world before, and when we get IC2 up I'd like atleast a portion of my stuff from our IC server too (machines I'll deconstruct into parts according to old recipes since many of them changed in IC2).  I'm just highly against "Okay, let's reset the world, sorry you have to start from scratch 'again'"  I'm not asking for the whole world, just a chunk of my stuff.

EDIT: as for the world's buildability (this one), I'd say some deforesting would give you the flat land you need, but there aren't really any cliffs or mountains for anyone in need of those

[Skeeter]

Sonya makes a lot of good points.

I lost about 20+ days worth of made/cooked food, and an entire village with an unlimited supply of food in it (6 or 8 farms, I never really counted them all) which I worked hard to find when the last world got corrupted by a so-called "unavoidable bug."  I hold no grudges, but I *would* like to live in an NPC village again, and I will dismiss any claims that because the villages have set rules to spawn, that they will be found easily.  As I said, I worked *very* hard to get to that village from the spawn, and it was a full minecraft day's journey from one safe place to another, semi-safe place.  A lot of preparations went into the trip, etc. etc.   All I ask is that if the world gets remade, I be given the resources to find another village, since I would still have the last one today if not for the bug.

People should post, somewhere, what they'd lose if/when the server got remade this time.  I am just going to post what I lost on the last world, in part.  I'm not going to post everything, just the things I feel I would like to have again.

1 NPC Village
40 Steak (or Beef, I can cook it again.)
15 Pork Chops (cooked or otherwise)
2 full stacks of Bread (or 6 stacks of Wheat)
2 full stacks of charcoal
1 Iron Pickaxe
1 Iron Sword
2 full stacks of cobblestone (Negligible if I can have the pickaxe)
1 full stack of wood (logs; any kind will do)
30 or so Saplings (any kind will do)

I wasn't kidding when I said I lost a lot when the world got remade, and this isn't a list of demands, nor some kind of ultimatum.  It's the recommendation that we Op a responsible party and have them /give the items people lose to this sort of thing back to them.  Besides, this game is still in Beta, and that means we could lose everything at any time, not just when there are updates.  We need a system for recovery of resources so that we don't spend as much time on rebuilding as we do on having fun.

Just a thought.

Edit: In my initial post, I neglected to mention the Saplings.

[Trerro]

My main effort in the IC world was building a fairly large castle out of several thousand cobblestone. I don't really keep track of my exact inventory (I just file everything into labeled chests and use as needed), but I did have hundreds of ore (mostly the common stuff, but some of the rares as well). This was more or less duplicated in the world doomed by xp orb crashes (although far less ore in that one as I didn't do much underground exploring). That's generally how I start out - get a good-sized home up, then get heavily into exploration and building. I'm not even going to think about the original server, where I had a metric asston of just about everything, even multiple stacks of natural obsidian.

Respawning our stuff is a double-edged sword. I'm not particularly keen on needing to harvest thousands of stones again (quarrying is definitely one of the most boring things you can do in MC), nor losing all of my stuff, but if we have everything back instantly, it puts us in completely a different league vs. new players that think they're joining a fresh world, as well as taking all of the excitement out of the new world. Dying is trivial when you've already got an enormous stash, and there's little desire to explore the new world when we have everything we need.

Maybe we should start everyone blank, but return old stuff after X days - possibly even in a tiered manner, where basic building supplies and tools return fairly early, but stuff like diamonds and lapis have a long waiting period. This gives everyone a chance to pick a starting area in a fresh world, and gets the initial frantic setup period in, but doesn't require us to spend days repeating that boring middle period where the danger is gone, and we're just harvesting, teching up, and rebuilding our homes to almost the same spec before moving on to large projects.

On an unrelated note, while we'll all want our own homes, there's really only so much that gets done with that, and then attention turns to the huge community building projects. We should probably figure out what some of those are going to be, so we can be on the lookout for good places to set that stuff up, even if that just means finding a sufficiently-sized biome of the right type, and getting everyone to agree to not build anything in that area unless it's stuff like minor shelters where they don't care if it gets steamrolled later. Actually building Risa would be fun, and there's all sorts of other options as well, towns, enormous buildings, as well as stuff like games within the game, like a racecourse where the first to finish (or last to fall to their death) wins. We can (and should) of course do several of these projects, but there's only so many we can work on at a time, so we'll have to discuss what's going up first. That should probably be its own thread though.

[Skeeter]

My main effort in the IC world was building a fairly large castle out of several thousand cobblestone. I don't really keep track of my exact inventory (I just file everything into labeled chests and use as needed), but I did have hundreds of ore (mostly the common stuff, but some of the rares as well). This was more or less duplicated in the world doomed by xp orb crashes (although far less ore in that one as I didn't do much underground exploring). That's generally how I start out - get a good-sized home up, then get heavily into exploration and building. I'm not even going to think about the original server, where I had a metric asston of just about everything, even multiple stacks of natural obsidian.

Respawning our stuff is a double-edged sword. I'm not particularly keen on needing to harvest thousands of stones again (quarrying is definitely one of the most boring things you can do in MC), nor losing all of my stuff, but if we have everything back instantly, it puts us in completely a different league vs. new players that think they're joining a fresh world, as well as taking all of the excitement out of the new world. Dying is trivial when you've already got an enormous stash, and there's little desire to explore the new world when we have everything we need.

I disagree with this completely.  I didn't ask for "Everything I've ever lost," and you totally underestimated the amount of work Sonya has put into each iteration of our clan's IC servers.  This appears, to me, to be an unfair way of looking at things.  The deal is, we're going to lose everything, over and over again.  If I have to always get what I already had the hard way a bunch of times, I'm positive I won't want to play by those rules.  New players should know they are coming into an already established world; furthermore, it's not a pvp server where that would make a difference in a bad way.  Actually, I think having people already there with structures that new players are welcome to hole up in for the night in case of zombies would be to new players' benefits!  If someone's house gets creepered, or they fall in lava, I'm usually the first to permanently reassign my own materials to getting them back on their feet.  You know as well as I do that no community can exist without cooperation on some level.  All I'm asking is that you respect the amount of work others put into the game by recompensing them when they are forced to lose absolutely all of that work.  I'm sure a lot more people agree than you realize.

[Sonya the fox]

I have to agree with Skeeter, the first IC we had, I had finally hit my 128 solar array mark, and that wasn't through the passive use of the matter generator I was feeding (I used maybe 20 matter to fill a couple of holes, out of 20+ stacks I had built up).  I won't talk about the amount of wheat I had (although I did work for my 9001 wheat for that reason) as that is something I can easily replace when I need it, which in 1.8 isn't as often.

Okay, let me try it a different way, I'm already losing my own train of thought.  The below is a list of the machines I had, in use, on the first Chaos Cluster server:
128 solar panels.  In IC, that's 1280 Refined Iron Ingots (half that for unmacerated ore), 384 redstone, 384 coal (charcoal does not work), 384 glass, 608 copper ingots (half that for unmacerated ores), 394 tin ingots (half that for unmacerated ores), and 1216 wood (logs, not planks) (converted to rubber in an extractor).  The cables to wire it all together, probably another 100 or so cables and 20 switch cables (60 redstone + 20 cables), but that pales in comparison to what it took to acquire the panels.
2 MFSUs.  In IC, that's 16 diamonds, 72 coal (charcoal does not work), 28 iron ingots, 18 tin ingots, 18 copper ingots, and 128 redstone.
2 MFE's.  In IC, that's 4 redstone, 12 cables, 12 tin ingots, and 8 iron ingotes.
2 Matter Generators.  In IC, that's 54 wood, 18 lapis lazuli, 10 glowstone dust, 28 redstone, 64 iron ingots, 30 tin ingots, 45 copper ingots, 72 coal, 12 stone, 6 dirt.
Miner (with 64 diamond tipped pipe).  In IC, that's 8 cobblestone, 8 redstone, 6 tin ingots, 74 iron, 9 copper ingots, 18 wood, 16 diamonds, 2 gold dust, and 1 glowstone dust.
Then of course there's the other smaller things: 2 macerators, compressor, extractor, recycler, crystal charger, and electric furnace.  No, I didn't have a tesla coil, I was going to end up killing myself with it if I ever hooked one up.  For anyone who's made traps and died to them, you know what I'm talking about. (total of 73 iron, 20 redstone, 3 glowstone, some stone, 6 tin, 21 copper, and 48 wood among the misc machines in this paragraph)

Now, that was just the machinery set up and running, in regular use (with the exception of the matter and the recycler, everything got used during a mining trip).  Now lets go into tools, shall we?  In order to power the Miner out in the middle of nowhere, I had to ferry power by paw using energy crystals, made 13 of them because of the extremely long boat ride (600+blocks).  Add 13 diamonds and 104 redstone to our shopping list.
ODE Device for prospecting: 9 cables, 2 redstone, 2 gold dust, 1 glowstone dust, 1 iron ingot.
The signs were being left behind, all 50 of them, where I marked just how well depleted areas were, so nothing added there.
Also used a pair of MFE's to get the power from the crystals to the Miner.  Add 12 tin, 8 iron, 12 cables, and 4 redstone to the list.
EC Manipulator (used to regulate power output of the MFE's here as much as back under the solar array): 9 redstone, 2 glowstone dust, 10 cables, 2 iron, 9 lapis lazuli.

Tools for mining by paw instead of sitting on a Miner watching SciFi shows on Netflix:
Diamond Drill and Chainsaw: 12 iron, 6 tin, 16 cables, 6 redstone, 3 diamonds.
2 BatPacks (better than a ton of batteries): 12 redstone, 28 cables, 38 tin.
10 RE Batteries (Additional power for use with the Mobile Charger, or just power carry): 10 redstone, 20 cables, 30 tin.
Mobile Charger: 10 cables, 2 redstone, 1 iron.


Total shopping list thus far:
Redstone   781
Iron   1551
Tin   552
Copper   797
Wood   1438
Lapis Lazuli   27
Glowstone   17
Diamonds   48
Gold   4
Coal   528
Glass   384
(all cable needs converted to copper/wood(rubber) needs, slight variance may occur in precise calculation)
So, not exactly a light list, is it.  the glass and glowstone are the easiest things on the list, one just needs furnace time while the other is a quick trip in the Nether to mine only a few blocks of Glowstone.  I'd also like to point out this was only the list of things in active use, not the stuff I had stockpiled or was trying to use but didn't have enough iron to use, since iron was the thing I was always out of.

The above is my arguement to "You should just start anew with the world", and it's only the beginning.  I have two more things to add on to this: my chest contents (rough, rounded down), and the machines and chest contents on the last IC world we were in just prior to 1.8.

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EDIT 1: Partial recovery from original chaos cluster server: sadly the latest I was able to get, at this time, was 6-2-2011, just prior to the installation of IndustrailCraft.  I can however make certain claims about my stuff based on what's in the chests at that time: diamond pick (worthless in the industrial age but not in our pre-industrial 1.8 world), a few buckets, 1.5 stacks of gunpowder, 3 stacks of bones (personally harvested at a spawner, no traps or devices, just me, my sword, and lots of skeletons.), 1 stack of feathers, 1 stack of string, 1 stack of leather, 6 stacks of coal (I did the arithmetic using the amount of resources I claimed to have used in the first portion of this post vs the vast amount of coal in this chest (14 stacks + 11 pieces)), 2 stacks lapis lazuli (2 stacks + 12 present), 1 stack of wool, a single slimeball?, 56 raw pork, 44 porkchops, 27 raw fish (tell me that was an easy and fast gain).  I can't get any more info from this file.

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EDIT 2: Okay, I got into my latest stash from just before the 1.8 update.  6 stacks of tin ingots, 5 stacks copper ingots, 4.5 stacks copper dust,  5 stacks tin dust, 9.5 stacks coal dust, 2.5 stacks rubber, half stack each of glowstone dust and gold dust, 2 stacks flint, 2.5 stacks redstone, 3.25 stacks copper ore, 1.75 stacks tin ore, 2 batpacks, 13 iron ore, 1 stack bones, 1.25 stacks uranium, 4 stacks cables, 38 solar panels, 6 MFE's, 1 MFSU, 1 generator, 1 iron furnace, 1 matter generator.

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The point I am attempting to make with these lists is the amount of resource gathering effort I've gone to and the amount of building I've done, the time spent at machines monitoring them keeping them powered feeding the resources through to be processed...I really don't want to have to go through the whole process of gathering and processing AGAIN with the same stuff I've gathered twice before.  I'll put the things together myself and build myself, I just want the stuff to do it with and not have to hunt all over Notch's green half acre (past any explored areas once we finally get IC² for 1.8, if 1.9 doesn't come first) just to find any of the resources needed to make Mr Coffee, let alone a solar array, a nuclear reactor with all the bells and whistles, an up to date MFSU (resource hungry doesn't begin to cover MFSU or Nuclear Reactor in IC²).

NOTE: this post was being written prior to the post below, despite the edit date.

[Trerro]

I'm not saying we shouldn't restore the stuff, just that we should give people time to explore the new world a bit, and to pick a spot to call home before those of us who played a previous incarnation are already fully teched out.

How about a 48 hour rule, where nothing is /give'd until that time passes, and then everything is restored as needed? That should be sufficient to explore the region around the spawn and camp a spot, without it becoming a huge-ass wait.

For IC stuff, there would be zero difference between this and getting everything back right away, since it's highly unlikely IC2 1.8 server edition will be out by then, and even if it is, we have to give it a week or so to make sure there's no crippling bugs like when they had the "personal chests crash servers" issue.

[Sonya the fox]

I'm not saying we shouldn't restore the stuff, just that we should give people time to explore the new world a bit, and to pick a spot to call home before those of us who played a previous incarnation are already fully teched out.

How about a 48 hour rule, where nothing is /give'd until that time passes, and then everything is restored as needed? That should be sufficient to explore the region around the spawn and camp a spot, without it becoming a huge-ass wait.

For IC stuff, there would be zero difference between this and getting everything back right away, since it's highly unlikely IC2 1.8 server edition will be out by then, and even if it is, we have to give it a week or so to make sure there's no crippling bugs like when they had the "personal chests crash servers" issue.

I agree with this, a fair deal, and to further encourage the 48 hours, think about this: You get allll of your stuff right away (just the non IC stuff even), now what do you do?  You now have three chests sitting by spawn, but the place you're settling at is in the middle of nowhere, long ways away from where you are.  Have fun making those tripssssss.

[Skeeter]

I tell you what.  I'll agree to a 48 hour period after the "birth" of a new server where we have nothing that we used to have.  However, once most people are set up and have chests in their houses and stuff, I would really like an op to give me the stuff on my list (Minus the village, of course.  I can find that if I have the other stuff).  All I really need is enough to A: Set up a temporary base to explore from and B: actually make expeditions.  Kinda hard to do on our current map.  I'm going to suggest Trerro a seed over xfire so he can review the known facts about it, and see if it's alright with him if we use it.

It has 2 known-located villages, both an easy walk from spawn, and plenty of flat terrain for us to find animals on.

[GPH]

Just a quick point about your last post there skeeter.

All I really need is enough to A: Set up a temporary base to explore from and B: actually make expeditions.

Temporary shelter is...maybe 20 soil and a few blocks of wood? Plus some cobblestone if you want to get fancy. Which equates to about 10 minutes work when you start a map.

The new food rules actually make it much easier to expedition as well. The other day I was out all night killing zombies, skeletons (whoo 20 arrows! I was so chuffed ) and creepers, found an npc village and some surface lava - that was on our current map. You just need to play the old hit/run away game. So kill a cow or two and you're set for the day really.

Basically what I'm trying to get at is that there doesn't seem much point in demanding items to help you survive the first two days of a new server. It'll just be a lot of hassle for not much gain.


Anyways I have no idea what stuff I had/have on any of our servers so I'll just be starting from scratch


Edit - oh btw sonya, that was my underwater tunnel I was just trying to figure out how the glass panes worked seeing as I hadn't used them before. It was kinda weird that you could drop into the tunnel by sliding through them from the water. o.0

[Skeeter]

I get your point, but when I tried to find anything to kill for food on our current map, I could not.  That's all I really meant by that.  I ended up starving most of the way to death, taking a slight tumble and dropping a day's work down a cliff from the ledge I fell too hard on.  Careless, I know, but if I'd found any food I would not have been in such a hurry to keep moving to look for some.

I don't mean to sound like an angry, gripey person about the whole thing.  I'm sorry.

[GPH]

Just to clarify because I'm not entirely clear - so the current plan is now to reset the current world and then reset again when IC gets released?

If everyone else wants to reset I'm not going to complain but surely thats just going to involve people losing even more stuff which seems to be what has caused annoyance before?

And if the plan is to reset now but not when IC comes out then I'm confused can you add IC into the server without resetting it? But that would suck too because all the areas we'd already explored would lack copper and tin, yes? Or are we abandoning IC entirely?

Someone care to clarify for me? My stance at the moment remains, if you want to reset this world now *shrugs* go ahead but I don't really understand the logic behind wanting to reset it if we're planning another reset in the not too distant future?