Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Moving on from Tubal

I have essentially done all I wish to do with Tubal. The village is designed as such:
  • The first house I built was the village leader's house. Since the name of the founder is Tubal, the title given to the leader of a village is tubal. It, like the others, is compose of wooden planks in a relatively rectangular shape. The roofing is multiple layers high and made of logs. Inside is a double chest, workbench, furnace, bed, and a couple torches.
  • Next to that is the craftsman's house. It is designed mostly the same, although the chest of the craftsman is filled with cobblestone, logs, planks and other things.
  • Across from that is the residence of the two cave explorer/miners. It is two stories high and features two double chests on the first floor, with stairs to the bedroom upstairs.
  • The fourth building is the storehouse. It has multiple double chests, a furnace, and a workbench. It holds wheat, pork chops, and a couple other things.
  • A small fenced farm is right next to the storehouse.
  • Surrounding the entire village is a defense wall, shaped in something of a rectangular shape. It extends to the mountains to the north. I haven't finished it, and likely will not.
  • To the west of the village is a plain which used as their tree farm.
Here are some pictures for your delight. The first faces north. The upper left is the explorers', the upper right is the craftsman's, the lower right is the storehouse, and the lower right is the leader's house.

Slightly different angle, from over the storehouse:

Lethargic farm:

Some distance away:

View from overhead, showing all of the walling:

As far as technology goes, they are still in the stone age. They have workbenches and furnaces, however they don't use the furnaces for anything more than heating their houses. Their tools are primarily stone, although only a couple of the houses have wooden swords (the other has a wooden sword). For armor they use leather. They also have domesticated wolves, which required I hacked in a bunch of bones. Now there's probably four or five dogs around Tubal and on the nearby island.

The Tubalites are avid tree farmers. West of the wall was once a huge mass of trees that took me forever to completely cut down, and a few stray saplings have just recently grew into trees. But alas, now it is time to move on from Tubal.

After traveling north, west, and east, I decided that the desert land to the east would be the best to start the second village. Referring to my table of Biblical nations I found Asshur, the forerunner of the Assyrians, settled in the approximate area. So we have a new village. These people will expound on what their Tubalite ancestors and cousins began in terms of technology and architecture!

Monday, September 5, 2011

I Made a Server Charter

Once, while browsing Reddit, I saw that one user made a constitution of sorts for their now-gone server. Now, I'm the sort that likes writing up that kind of stuff and I had a creative burst, so I began writing a rather detailed Server Charter. I'm rather proud of the outcome of it, although it's not done. The Charter is made up of seven articles, which aren't completely in a logical order:

Article 1 is a preamble, which basically says that the Charter is meant to provide a clear yet detailed explanation of how the server is structured and run.

Article 2 says the purpose of the server, which is to let people have fun as long as they're not breaking any laws or griefing (unless there are times when griefing is allowed).

Article 3 states that upon the start of the server, a few buildings are to be built: a spawn building that has the rules posted and secures players from mobs and whatnot, a jail, a Spleef arena, a battle arena, and any relevant websites like a forum, YouTube account, Facebook page, and so on.

Article 4 gives people the right to express themselves in any way they wish without being harassed, as long as they're not trying to harass or offend others. It also has the right to fair trial, and to keep and protect whatever blocks, items, and buildings you have.

Article 5 sets the Charter as higher than any rule the mods/admins later make, explain how to change the Charter, and provides for creating a version of the Charter which is worded more simply and excludes information irrelevant to the common player.

Article 6 sets up a ranked system of players: Admins, Mods, Members, Guests, and Banned. More can be added than these.

Article 7 is the longest one, running 2.5 pages. It sets up a state system of cities, villages, and states. A village is a settlement of at least three people living in two or more houses that is connected and semi-dependent on a city. It must have a public building such as a market or meeting place and a farm large enough to sustain several people and is led by a Village Leader. It can't have a mine unless there are no other cities on the server that are nearby. It can upgrade to a city, or a city can be established itself. Cities are five or more people led by a Mayor and protected by a Sheriff. It can have a mine while connected villagers have free access to but not communal farm. A state is three or more cities and their villages allied under one government. One of the cities becomes the capitol and there has to be a statehouse. The state is led by a Governor (or Emperor, or President, or whatever they want to call it) and a Senate (or Congress, Parliament, Get Together of Dudes, etc.), who meet up in the statehouse for formal events.

I intentionally placed a system of dependency between cities and villages. Villages are meant to be where would be leaders, players, and groups learn the ropes of the game and governing, whereas cities are where the more experienced people can go to play. As a way of symbolizing and furthering this, as well as simulating real life, cities aren't supposed to have large communal farms but instead either make individual farms or rely on the village farm. Likewise, villagers must use the mine the city has to gather resources. This has a practical purpose of: it prevents the landscape from being scarred by mines everywhere. Statehouses probably wouldn't serve much function except to look pretty, but there does need to be some way of making sure states aren't haphazardly formed and dissolved. Part of my plan was for states to have their own dedicated sections on the server forum.