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Freebuild Town Review #1


NotEvilAtAll
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I am going to start a thing where I go around on /museum and review old freebuild towns

 

Here's my criteria:

Build Quality: Whether or not the build looks good/bad

Modesty: Does the freebuild town give itself a reasonable area or instead claim way more territory than it has population to put in?

Relevance: Does/did anybody care about the town at all? (this one isn't really a "more relevant = good, less relevant = bad" kinda thing, just another thing I'ma put in the reviews).

Creativity: Does the town stand out from others or is it a dime a dozen settlement?

 

Onto the first freebuild town (On Arcas wildlands): Alfring

2022-05-10_22.20.08.png

Coords: on Arcas: -3123, 60, 1497

Population: 2 (planned to house up to 4, it seems). Build is not finished on the museum server, perhaps it was finished by the end of Arcas since

Build Quality: I rate this 8/10. Really depends on what the finished palisade would look like, but the longhouses seen on the museum save look decent.

Modesty: 

2022-05-10_22.20.01.png

9/10 for modesty, just a small village with a small palisade planned around it. With a population of two, a single vacant longhouse, and another longhouse planned to be built, Alfring certainly wasn't building a huge city that'd lie vacant forever.

Relevance: 3/10. Cannot find any mention of Alfring on the forums, Cannot find any mention of the characters who lived here on the forums. That being said, at least it's not a single person freebuild settlement.

Creativity: 7/10, pretty typical viking style. It has a cool altar but other than that it looks a lot like a Norlandic settlement. Points still given for not being a bunch of oak plank SMP houses that a stereotypical freebuild village might be made out of.

 

Onto the next freebuild settlement: The Monastery Hidden in Clouds + Tongku and Friends

lumping these two together due to their similar themes

2022-05-10_22.37.45.png

Monastery Hidden in Clouds

Population: 1

2022-05-10_22.37.58.png

Tongku and friends

Population: 3?

Coords: on Arcas: -2952, 85, 1376

Build Quality: 7/10. Held back a bit by the massive walls around Tongku's estate being kinda bad. The houses themselves are great though. The Monastery in the Clouds is the weaker of the two homes, but not terrible. Tongku's home is high quality but held back by the walls around it.

2022-05-10_22.37.36.png

Monastery Hidden in Clouds

2022-05-10_22.38.04.png

Tongku & Friends estate

Modesty: 2/10, it's bad. Both builds take up a lot of area despite only housing a few people each. At least the Monastery in the Clouds does this with bamboo instead of gigantic walls all around, so that's more excusable at least. I have zero clue with the Tongku pagoda builders felt the need to wall off so much territory only to put a stables and some farms in it. Seems like a waste of materials.

Relevance: Eh, 4/10. I can verify that Tongku was a real Hou-zi character via a quick forum search. There's two other claimed beds in the pagoda who don't show up on the forums. I do not know who lived in the Monastery Hidden in Clouds, only that they were a Hou-Zi as well. At least it's not a one man giga settlement lol, seems like a handful of people were living in the general area.

Creativity: 8/10. The pagodas are nice and not much like that existed on Arcas apart from other hou-zi stuff and maybe one eastern themed settlement somewhere. The Monastery Hidden in Clouds has a neat vibe to it with the bamboo forest planted around it along with its publicly available animal pens and free bamboo.

 

(EDIT: The Monastery Hidden in Clouds is called the Xiaoling Monastery, but Xiaoling also yields no forum search results. I guess whoever made the monastery didn't use the forums much)

 

okay onto the good stuff: RANDOM, UNNAMED VILLAGE (I seriously cannot find the name of this village)

2022-05-10_22.52.38.png

coords: on Arcas: -2582, 76, 1082

Population: I'm two lazy to count, but I have verified that at least a few people lived here from time to time via some forum searching (@DragonofTatersseems to have managed the animals). It certainly has all the signs of a modestly populated village. There's a lot of houses and none of them seem to be vacant (although I don't think this sort of free form village layout lends itself to evictions for inactivity). Seems to have been mostly elven although there's a few halfling burrows so maybe a halfling or two lived here for some time as well (or elves building like halflings, that was a weird trend at the time in Arcas if I recall correctly).

Build Quality: Yeah this is an easy 10/10 just look at it. It looks better than 90% of Almaris.

2022-05-10_22.53.32.png

Look at this terraforming. This is incredible. It's amazing that people spent the time to build this in freebuild of all places.

2022-05-10_22.52.57.png

Up on the mountaintops near the village there's this random tree house. Probably just some cruddy noob home, right?

2022-05-10_22.53.06.png

Surprise! It actually looks really good wtf! There's another hidden base under some theatre in the area too. A whole bunch of crazy stuff. A lot of good builders must've been tinkering around with freebuild in this village.

Modesty: 6/10. Sorta spreads out a bit and has some semi-attached semi-separate homes on the edges (no walls = no hard borders, hard to tell if some farms some 50 blocks away are a part of the village or just coincidentally nearby). I don't blame this village for that, however. It's going for a more rural vibe and I respect that.

Relevance: indeterminate. I do not know the name of this village. I know it had a fair few people in it whose existence I can verify on the forums. I cannot search the forums with the name of this village to find any RP threads related to it, so I can only work with context clues. I do not know if this village was regularly inhabited with leadership and event planning or just some loose build area for a friend group to mess around in whenever they felt like building. Probably was RPed in at least a little bit, since I doubt people would go through all the trouble to do this building and not use it.

Creativity: 9/10, some overlap with halfling/elven building and the houses themselves aren't too extraordinary, yet the general free-form vibe is refreshing to look at. It looks and feels like a true freebuild town, not some charter settlement exported into freebuild. It's clear that no one mind thought up of and planned the whole place. Lots of hands pitched in yet the village doesn't look like a case of too many cooks ruining the kitchen.

 

 

This concludes the first freebuild town review message me on discord NotEvilAtAll#2321 if you wanna see any other freebuild towns rated.

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Wait this is actually really fun to read!!

 

Great job with the reviews - excited to see more freebuild towns!

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Miss the wildlands, they were cute.

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Damn, honestly the builds shown here are better than some the builds that I have seen on the server.

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glad i saw this  post because  i went to check out the arcas FB world because of it and  found  some pretty interesting things.

 

y'all should  go  check out -2365 142 2238 and -2504 141 2085 as well as the surrounding areas, reminds  me of the current Almaris w asteland to the west of Krugmar but like 100x better imo

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Do not forget the settlements that started in free build and paid their way to being a region'd nation/settlement with mina and activity. 

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FREEBUILD SUCKS STOOOOP

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2 hours ago, Your Favorite Impure said:

Now show all the horrible freebuilds throughout the maps

maxresdefault.jpg

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Yoo, I made the Monastery Hidden in the Clouds as a new player!! It was my 2nd or 3rd day on the server, I think

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1 hour ago, WestCarolina said:

maxresdefault.jpg

 

And all the Arcas Freebuilds I removed because they were landscars.

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7 hours ago, Your Favorite Impure said:

Now show all the horrible freebuilds throughout the maps

https://imgur.com/a/OY2h9UO

 

That's flying around on just one of the past maps for about five minutes. For every settlement that you pick out there is going to be a sea of land-scars, half done / griefed builds, and builds that shouldn't exist / terraform into the environment very poorly. I agree with what Cloak mentioned partly, but I do think that there are more routes towards achieving that than in the past. Not only, with enough players and resources, can you set out to do it on your own, but with how many tiles are purchased currently by nations there is a lot of space for groups to establish themselves. It's a very healthy conversation to have and this is just my opinion on the matter which leans towards no freebuild. This is mainly just from a past moderation perspective because actually maintaining these areas and cleaning up inactive builds / land-scars is legit a full time job.

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9 minutes ago, monkeypoacher said:

-snip-

There is a lot more involved in removing land-scars than just selecting it and removing it with world edit in five seconds. You have to repair terrain that the build cut into which often times, when done well, requires handwork too. You have to put back in environmental parts like trees, bushes, etc. And in large cases you might even pull a backup which in of itself requires a lot of preparation to get the area loaded and pasted correctly.

 

Personal attacks on people who are still apart of the community are uncool dude. If you want to attack me or others for having a different opinion go after my feedback and the substance of it please. We both want what's best for the community; we just have different opinions on how to get there. I think a good criticism you could draw from what I said on the thread would be how it doesn't line up super well with our mission statement as a community. Linked is the specific section that I think really should be considered.

 

If you read that I think some people would say we aren't following that where some people would say we are. What are your thoughts?

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4 hours ago, monkeypoacher said:

 

 

elf roleplayers will tab out of their 8 hour fae ring discord roleplay just to reply "but what about the landscars" on freebuild threads. I wouldn't make the derogatory comment but it's always elves

 

it has to be some kind of pathology that you guys log on to a minecraft roleplay server presumably everyday and are revolted by generic minecraft builds. the first screenshot is a pumpkin farm. do some of these builds look bad? yeah. how much time would it take to remove them? less than 5 seconds

a bit stale of a derogatory comment but I'll give a 6.5/10 for effort

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