Rebalancing Redstone Doors

[Xarkly 17299]

 

 

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Howdy.

 

I’ve become a bit more involved with villainy/raiding activities for the first real time in my LotC career in the past couple of months, and, in the process of this, I’ve come to experience some of the server’s lesser-known mechanics - specifically, what I wanna do on this thread is prompt a discussion among Mod Team and players about redstone doors. This is just gonna be a quick little post I’m writing while making lunch, so I’ll blitz through the key points below.

 

What is a redstone door?

Also known as a hidden or Dwarven door, a redstone door is a mechanic not everyone on the server knows about. It allows you to make, as the name suggests, secret doors involving redstone/pistons built into walls. They’re operated via a secret switch (which appears invisible on an assigned block), so you can only really locate these with prerequisite knowledge (someone told you about the door), intuition (i.e., a dead-end hallway might suggest there’s a hidden door here), or by accident.

 

When you interact with a hidden switch for a door, you get the following chat prompt:

 

All redstone doors have a ‘key’ - this can be any item that exists in Minecraft. The player setting up the door (I won’t go into the mechanics of how you actually build a redstone door for this thread; this is just explaining how everyone else can interact with them) places this item in a frame on the other side of the switch-block, and the door will only operate if you use the correct Minecraft item on the hidden switch block. If you do, you get this prompt:

 

This will trigger the redstone, causing the pistons to open a secret passageway momentarily. Pretty cool, right?

 

There’s no denying this is a cool mechanic that adds an extra layer for thievery, heisting, and defence - as a result, you most commonly see these kinds of doors for nation vaults or CA lairs.

 

For the purposes of this thread, there’s a few key things we need to note about how these doors work, though, and those are as follows:

 

1. These doors can technically be brute-forced. In theory, you can your buddies can fill your inventories up with every accessible item on LotC and try them on a hidden door until you figure out which one is the key. While this can take up a large amount of time, you are technically guaranteed to be able to open a redstone door if you put enough time into it.

 

2. In balancing out the above, the owner of a redstone door can change the key item at any time without any cost/drawback.

 

3. A location/build has no limit on the amount of redstone doors that can be installed.

 

4. According Mod Team precedent (as of 5th May), redstone doors cannot be lockpicked, either with the /lockpick command or the Lockpick item.

 

The Balance of Access

Before getting into the meat and potatoes of the thread, I think it’s important to understand a key facet of how conflict/villainy rules work on LotC.

 

I’m going to list some rules below; see if there’s anything in common about them.

 

- Raid ladders can be used to ascend 20+ blocks in a sheer line, allowing you to climb most town walls and buildings.

- Lockpick items exist to boost your odds at breaking down Iron Doors.

- Iron Door spam is disallowed; in most raids/heists, Mods will open all remaining doors if you manage to open 2 or 3.

- Bolt-Cutters allow you to bypass Iron Bar windows.

- ‘Keys’ can be taken from an incapacitated persona for temporary access through nearby locks.

 

What these sampling constitutes is a rare show of consistency in LotC rules - no location on the server should be impenetrable. Whether that’s for heists, raids, or whatever else kind of villainy, there’s a clear commitment to the roleplay dynamism that - if someone commits to it - they can break in somewhere. Obviously, busting through a few Iron Doors to a gatehouse is a smaller undertaking than heisting a nation’s storage room, but that’s a proportional scaling. Barring raid ladders (and redstone doors themselves), lockpicking is balanced via RNG - while Lockpick items improve your chances, RNG might not end up on your side and you might jam a critical door.

 

So, where do redstone doors fit in this meta?

 

At first glance, they seem to gel just fine. Like I said, it is possible to brute force redstone doors without any RNG element, unlike Iron Doors, if you’re willing to put in enough time to figure out what the key item is. Ergo, the tradeoff for RNG (i.e., the balancing factor) is time. So, with that in mind, it seems pretty fair in the system.

 

At least, it would be pretty fair, if that was the end of the story.

 

Easy, Free & Everywhere

This is where some of the key facts I mentioned earlier come into play - namely, the fact that you can place several redstone doors in any given location and the fact that the key item can be easily changed. While the lack of RNG gives you a guarantee to be able to force-open redstone doors with enough time, let’s consider how that plays out in the following scenario.

 

- You’re the rightful lord of House Poopsburg. Your conniving half-brother, though, has usurped your claim and driven you from the realm. Eager for revenge, you conspire to steal Fartsteel, the ancestral Thanhium blade of your House.

 

- You spend a few days staking out your brother’s keep. Iron Doors and gates, you’re willing to take your chances with, but there’s a problem - the treasure room where Fartsteel is held is guarded by a hidden redstone door …

 

- No matter; the true heir of House Poopburg is nothing if not resourceful. Your stakeout efforts continue, until you spot one of your half-brother’s retainers heading towards the treasure room, and he’s holding an emerald! Later that night, you steal inside the castle once more, and slot an emerald into the hidden door to open it! Huzzah!

 

- You quickly look around the treasure room, but … wait, this isn’t a treasure room; all the chests are marked with “wood” or “stone” -- this is just a normal supply room. Well, no matter, Fartsteel has to be somewhere in the castle. You do a little more searching, and find another hidden door deeper inside the supply room; surely, this must be it!

 

- Alas, with no clues as to the key, you have only one option: you’ll have to bring an assortment of items with you on your next break-in, and hope for the best.

 

- So, you do just that. Eager to claim Fartsteel, you grab two close friends and embark upon a heist! Somehow, fortune smiles on you, and you’re able to get back to the second hidden door, and you get even luckier - you happen to be carrying a Pufferfish, and the door opens! … But there’s an Iron Door right behind it. Well, no worries, you can just lockpick it and - … oh. Door’s jammed. You’re forced to retreat.

 

- Always next time, right? Except your half-brother has seen that the doors in his keep have been lockpicked, and he decides to change all the locks on the hidden doors immediately. You now have to figure out the locks again for both doors … not an impossible task. You manage to brute-force the first door on your next attempt, but not the second, because you can only carry so many items in your inventory on top of your weapons, lockpicks, etc. When your half-brother sees the lockpicked door signs, he simply changes the hidden key every time.

 

You get the idea.

 

Your odds of succeeding in a scenario where there’s both hidden doors and Iron Doors become tiny when there’s multiple hidden doors. Since the locks can be changed so easily, there’s no real value to doing investigation RP (i.e., maybe spying on or capturing people from the keep) to figure out what the key is in roleplay, because unless you succeed in a break-in in one fell swoop (bypassing X Iron Doors and Y hidden doors), the owner of the location will know someone knows the key by virtue of the signs left by lockpicking a door, and can change it freely and as many times as they want.

 

If there’s multiple hidden doors (which is perfectly possible) then the chance of BOTH (a) brute-forcing all hidden doors, AND (b) succeeding on every necessary door lockpick makes trying to infiltrate a location nearly or virtually impossible in some cases.

 

Mod Inconsistency

The above is compounded by the fact that different Mods have taken wildly different interpretations on how redstone doors work in the rules, which, in some cases, have made them astronomically broken.

 

I won’t list individual Mods who gave the verdicts, but I’ll list the verdicts themselves to indicate the extent of this issue and exemplify further how redstone doors are imbalanced as are. I’ll also flag that these verdicts seem to be standalone and inconsistent, so you could get a completely different response depending on what Mod you’re dealing with.

 

- Some Mods have ruled that you’re not allowed to brute-force redstone doors.

- Some Mods have ruled you’re not allowed to search walls for redstone doors.

 

In both instances, an individual Mod verdict like the above would effectively make redstone doors impassable by any means whatsoever. Raiding? No way. Heisting? Now how. Obviously, I think it’s probably clear to most people reading this that these verdicts are pretty absurd - it absolutely ruins the heist system. But the fact these verdcits have been given in the past is pretty indicative of the dysfunction of the system.

 

Rebalancing Redstone Doors 

Based on the above, I’m of the view that the current use of redstone doors isn’t really in the spirit of the rules.

 

All other forms of locks allow a balanced way of bypassing them - Iron Doors can’t be spammed, and can be lockpicked, with better odds afforded by acquiring the Lockpick item. Iron Bars can be bypassed with Bolt-Cutters. Walls can be scaled with Raid Ladders. Glass can be smashed. Fences can be broken. Guards can be killed.

 

But Redstone Doors? While a given Redstone Door can be brute-forced or figured out, this doesn’t mean a whole lot if there’s multiple of them and their key can be changed on the fly, with no RP, and no consequence.  

 

So, what am I proposing to fix this? I actually have a few solutions in mind for balancing out Redstone Doors, and I’ll run through these below.

 

A. A single location - such as a castle or building - may only use one Redstone Door (this is a simple matter of build regulation).

 

B. The key to a Redstone Door may only be changed once every two-weeks (I say two-weeks specifically because this is what a Heist cooldown is; this solution would require either Redstone Doors to be coded with a cooldown (unlikely to happen) or for Modreqs to be required to change keys).

 

C. Redstone Doors may be lockpicked via roleplay, using the same roll metrics as a Wooden Door (i.e. you would modreq to request to lockpick a Redstone Door - the rolls are for a Wooden Door because you’re trading the security of an Iron Door for the secrecy of a Redstone one).

 

D. For the purposes of “door spamming”, a Redstone Door counts as an Iron Door e.g. if there are three Iron Doors behind a Redstone Door, players will only be required to bypass the Redstone Door and the first Iron Door.

 

So, that’s that, really. I think these changes would work to bring the use of Redstone Doors in like with all other forms of locks and preserve a balance of security and access. As is, the combination of multiple Redstone Doors with the ability to change the key at will practically makes things such as Heists impossible.

 

Thanks for reading, and leave your thoughts below.

 

[Karina 1901]

No, yeah. Absolutely agree. It's something that goes on both sides. I spent a lot of time earlier on trying to make actual headway into both spook and non-spook bases with this issue. It's just - silly, from an IRP perspective. I think most people use them just because you're at a disadvantage if you don't. Not that it's necessarily about winning, but if everyone and their mother is going to have impenetrable storerooms; what's the point?

I would say just remove keyblocks entirely. Redstone doors without them have a far more limited selection of triggering methods that can't so completely be hidden. I do think there's also a greater discussion that has to be had on things like storage rooms. So much cool stuff just gets locked away in some nations vault to never see the light of day, because it's buried 200 meters underground with no real method of accessing it. People just don't like theft, and I get that - but it's part of PvP.

[Unwillingly 18133]

I think we're at a point in minecraft where a redstone door plugin isn't even necessary to create a hidden entrance. there are a surprising amount of ways to create a secret passage with a little bit of creativity by just using vanilla minecraft gimmicks and I wouldn't mind seeing this plugin removed all together, or significantly nerfed as per xarkly's suggestions

[LithiumSedai 5750]

Call me anti-RP, but I don't particularly understand the point of making every location accessible - every fortress so indefensible, every group so susceptible to attack and thievery. This may be a critique of a matter far more serious than redstone doors, but I believe that an egregious imbalance already exists where there is no entry barrier to committing villainy of any sort: any gathering of aspiring troublemakers can just create a dozen unkillable, throwaway personas and enjoy complete advantage of initiative in choosing where, when, or how they strike at their targets, with no obligation to justify their association and their goals in-character, no obligation to prove their foreknowledge of the ideal circumstances of their heist or assault (Can they prove their RP knowledge of guard unavailability at certain hours, or knowledge of their desired targeted items' locations?) , and no obligation to render themselves available for investigation and retaliation afterwards, contrary to the good-faith policies of RP give-and-take LotC espouses. Potential defenders enjoy no such boons: they must rally in certain ways, in certain locations, under certain time limits, and constantly justify their own involvement.

My (I do note) subjective experience as someone who's done "villainy" is that I've never quite been interested in or able to justify to myself a particular need to breach a secret location or to steal anyone's item for any reason other than thinly-veiled OOC desire for humiliation; thus, I've never done it. Risking going completely off-topic, but I am curious about other people's experiences and explanations as to why unrestrained heists and absolute entry availability, given the aforementioned lack of RP restrictions, are essential for an RP story.

That being said, I have never created an LotC redstone door myself, and aside from this debate, I ultimately have no stake in how its mechanics are to be handled by the rules in the future.

 

[Xarkly 17299]

1 minute ago, LithiumSedai said:

Call me anti-RP, but I don't particularly understand the point of making every location accessible - every fortress so indefensible, every group so susceptible to attack and thievery. This may be a critique of a matter far more serious than redstone doors, but I believe that an egregious imbalance already exists where there is no entry barrier to committing villainy of any sort: any gathering of aspiring troublemakers can just create a dozen unkillable, throwaway personas and enjoy complete advantage of initiative in choosing where, when, or how they strike at their targets, with no obligation to justify their association and their goals in-character, no obligation to prove their foreknowledge of the ideal circumstances of their heist or assault (Can they prove their RP knowledge of guard unavailability at certain hours, or knowledge of their desired targeted items' locations?) , and no obligation to render themselves available for investigation and retaliation afterwards, contrary to the good-faith policies of RP give-and-take LotC espouses.

My (I do note) subjective experience as someone who's done "villainy" is that I've never quite been interested in or able to justify to myself a particular need to breach a secret location or to steal anyone's item for any reason other than thinly-veiled OOC desire for humiliation; thus, I've never done it. Risking going completely off-topic, but I am curious about other people's experiences and explanations as to why unrestrained heists and absolute entry availability, given the aforementioned lack of RP restrictions, are essential for an RP story.

That being said, I have never created an LotC redstone door myself, and aside from this debate, I ultimately have no stake in how its mechanics are to be handled by the rules in the future.

 

 

Valid take - it's a fundamentally different view on accessibility so I don't think there's much point arguing about it.

 

What I will say, though, is that all other locking mechanisms don't seem to subscribe to that view - by virtue of the fact that all locks have checks and balances, I think there's a rare consistency in what the rules are trying to achieve, and Redstone Doors are an outlier in that regard. 

[BobBox 3798]

Even worse than the doors that have craftbook key locks are hopper locks that can be made in vanilla minecraft. With the ability to name and add descriptions to items, you could make a door that requires throwing an exact item into a hopper (potentially even hidden under a block) to open. Due to how minecraft does NBT tags, you cannot recreate these items and the door cannot be brute forced. Oftentimes these keys are permanently soul bound in someone's inventory until they're thrown into the hopper (and promptly re-soulbound as soon as the door is closed). I believe these style of doors should be banned all together.

[creamynoteblock 3256]

make everything raidable again

[Spoopy_Duck 3220]

The two solutions I am more in favor of are either simply
1. Lockpick
2. You can make hidden sign doors, but they cannot use a key (any right click on the block will open it) 

The reasoning for the second is it still allows you to have your hidden entrance but eliminates the "metagaming" that is always thrown when someone gets the key right. You can still put your 3 iron doors behind the pistons to make it hard to break in so the redstone itself really should just be for aesthetics rather than a barrier imo.

[NotEvilAtAll 10906]

1 hour ago, Unwillingly said:

I think we're at a point in minecraft where a redstone door plugin isn't even necessary to create a hidden entrance. there are a surprising amount of ways to create a secret passage with a little bit of creativity by just using vanilla minecraft gimmicks and I wouldn't mind seeing this plugin removed all together, or significantly nerfed as per xarkly's suggestions

Yeah, vanilla redstone security can be quite thorough. Other redstone triggers actually work better because all good thieves already know to check the walls for secret doors and may overlook a simple “decorative” button or redstone ore under a carpet.

 

Just using a redstone door is lame though. People need to use redstone traps more often (again, thieves usually don’t expect it!) and the rules should be worded in such a way as to encourage more intricate forms of security instead of lame, unoriginal key-doors.

[amongus 816]

spoopy and creamy have the right ideas.

 

raid everyone!!!!

[teeylin 1688]

Thank you everyone for the suggestions- I am looking to implement a few of these into a build rules proposal soon. :)