NotEvilAtAll

[!] A letter is nailed to the Honeyhill noticeboard! Supper! The village has been a bit boring as of late, but rest assured, it shall not remain silent for long! Let us gather together and discuss recent events over a good meal! For this purpose, I shall be hosting a large supper in my burrow for all halflings and curious bigguns to attend! Note: Heather is un-invited from the supper Knox bless ye all! -Mimosa Applefoot ((5 PM EST, tomorrow on Wednesday the 17th of August, 2022))

if we keep quoting each other eventually it'll hit popular topics PRO TIP: Plant 2 different types of crops in rows (as shown in screenshot) for faster crop growth!

Historically, the privatization of commonly held fields improved production because private farmers could try new crops, different crop rotations, different farming methods, etc. to improve the field's output. Since these improvements don't exist on LOTC, private farm ownership has no advantages, and since public farms tend to get used more, public farms generally produce more food than private farms on the server. That's implying, of course, that people don't just treat privately held farms as public farms anyways, which is frequently the case. Very few people care if you harvest a farm that isn't yours. Private farms do have the advantage of making more people play farmer characters instead of just random city-dwellers who go out to harvest their own food on occasion.

Farming Guide Hey there! Do you have a plot of land somewhere on the server? No clue what to do with it? This guide will teach you how to be a farmer and obtain both passive & active income from your farming! PRO TIP: Right click mature crops with a hoe to harvest and auto-replant them! This doubles wheat yields! Contents: ~Field setup~ ~Does lighting matter?~ ~Crops to consider~ ~Selling your crops~ ~Animals are important~ ~Controlling your cattle~ ~Field Setup~ ~Each block of water hydrates a 9x9 square (4 blocks in every direction) around it~ Fields, how do you set them up? By far the most important thing to consider is hydration. Without hydrating your farmland, your crops will grow very slowly! However, if you spam water everywhere, you might miss out on space that could otherwise be planted on with a more efficient water setup! ~Cheeky water-block hiding under the farmland, hydrating the farm without wasting any space to do so!~ On a flat surface, the most efficient water layout is to put 1 block of water in the center of each 9x9 square on the field, leaving 8 blocks of farmland between each water block (not counting the water blocks themselves). However, if you are farming on a slope, you can hide water blocks underneath existing farmland to hydrate everything without any exposed dirt left un-planted! ~Does lighting matter?~ No! Unless you are farming underground (which isn't allowed on LOTC), block lighting has no impact on crop growth. Crops grow based on the SKY light level, not the block light level. The block light level only matters if the sky light level (which remains at 15 even at night if the block is exposed to open sky) is too low for crop growth. As long as the crop can be planted, it will be able to grow there during daytime AND nighttime. Don't believe me? Look below: ~Crops to consider~ Wheat: Wheat is used to craft bread, cake, cookies, and hay bales. Hay bales are useful for healing horses and as a decoration block, and bread is a common travel food. On LOTC, each harvested wheat crop yields 2 wheat, 2/3rds of a loaf of bread. Wheat is easy to process into a sellable form, easy to store by crafting it into hay bales, is vital for horse breeding and horse combat (in hay-bale form), and is needed to breed cows and sheep (high-value animals). This is why wheat is the most common LOTC crop, and thus it's highly worth planting on your LOTC farm. Potatoes: Potatoes can be smelted in a furnace to make baked potatoes, providing 6 saturation and 5 food points just like bread, or fed to pigs to breed more of them. On LOTC, each harvested potato crop yields 2 potatoes, each potato capable of being smelted into a baked potato. Thus, potatoes are 3 times as efficient at producing food as wheat, assuming you have enough fuel to smelt them. If you plan to sell food in bulk, don't have tons of space to farm, and have access to cheap or free fuel, potatoes are worth farming, perhaps even better than farming wheat if you're only producing foodstuffs. If fuel is expensive or otherwise unobtainable, don't bother. Carrots: Used to make golden carrots and breed rabbits and pigs. Carrots themselves are a horrible food item, but golden carrots are the best food item in the game, hands down. Golden carrots provide 6 hunger points and 14.4 saturation, the most saturation out of any item in LOTC (steak only provides 12.8 saturation). Golden carrots heal you faster than any other food item in LOTC as a result, on top of being necessary for horse breeding. Carrots are worth farming if you have access to lots of gold or plan to breed horses. Otherwise, don't bother, you'll just fill up your storage with useless carrots you'll never be able to sell. Only a small carrot farm is necessary to produce golden carrots, as you'll likely be limited by gold instead of carrots, so don't go overboard with carrot farming. Beetroot: Used to craft beetroot soup and red dye or to breed pigs. Unless you need a lot of red dye, there is no reason to farm beetroot. Beetroot soup is nice for feasts at least, but for that purpose even a tiny farm will provide plenty of beetroot. Probably the worst crop in LOTC. Pumpkins: Used to craft jack o' lanterns and pumpkin pie. If you have a lot of eggs and sugar, growing pumpkins is worth it for the pie, which makes for an excellent base food item to make RP-item food with. Useful in October for seasonal decoration. It might be worth stocking up on some for when Halloween season comes around. Melon: Eating this restores 2 hunger and 1.2 saturation. The main use for melon is as glistering melon for potion-making, which isn't a thing on LOTC. Decent decoration block for jungle settings. As a whole, melon is down there with beetroot as a terrible LOTC crop. Only worth farming for variety in feasts, honestly. Sugarcane: S tier crop. Sugar can be used for cakes and pies, but the main reason you want to grow sugarcane is for the paper. 3 paper can be crafted into a book on LOTC. Books are very easy to trade or sell to librarians who always need more bookshelves to expand their libraries. If you plan to do writing on the side for extra minas, sugarcane is a must-have crop, but even if you never write any books or journals, sugarcane is worth growing along any bodies of water near your farm for easy paper. ~Selling your crops~ ~Bread selling on the auction house~ Bread, baked potatoes, and other such travel foods are easy to sell on the auction house. It's common for players to run out of food when traveling and by more from said auction house. If you're producing a lot of wheat and potatoes, auctioning them off is a good way to make some minas. Keep in mind that auction house prices for food are often cheaper than shop prices. Thus, you'll make more minas selling your farm goods in a shop than you will selling them on the auction house. ~A typical bread shop~ Shops that sell bread or potatoes for 0.1 minas each are also a common way farmers unload their goods. Some nation capitals don't have auction houses anymore, and thus players are forced to buy food from these shops, giving the farmers who stock them a good amount of minas in return. If shops are cheap to buy in your nation's capital, it's absolutely worth getting one. PRO TIP: You can sell wheat both as hay bales or as bread. Take a look at the typical prices for each and see what will make you more money. Each hay bale takes 9 wheat and each bread takes 3 wheat, but sometimes hay bales sell for more than 3x as much as bread does. You can also barter your goods directly for things you need. This is especially the case with leather, hay bales, or wool. The next time a traveling merchant enters your city, consider offering them some of your farmed resources in exchange for the weird trinkets they carry. ~Animals are important~ ~Sheep, cows, and a chicken coop~ While crops are cool and all, most of a farmer's money comes from animals instead! You can breed up to 4 animals every restart, so make sure to get the best value out of this limited ability as you can! Some animals provide passive income whereas others only produce valuable goods once killed. PRO TIP: You can breed animals during high serverload by feeding them first and then putting the animals you've fed on leads. The leads re-activates their mob ai and lets them breed! Produces value when killed: Cows: THE MOST VALUABLE ANIMAL! Cows can be killed for leather and raw beef that can be processed into surge PvP gear and steak, a common PvP food, respectively. If you don't know what to do with your 4 animal breeds, just breed cows! You can never go wrong with cows! Since cows don't produce any value until they die, there's no reason to stockpile too many cows at once. A good rule of thumb is to breed up to 8 cows and then kill any adults off past 8. This way you can always breed 4 more cows and receive a steady stream of valuable steak and leather. Pigs: Meh. They provide more food when killed then cows, but since cows drop leather and pigs don't, they are easily outclassed by cows. Rabbits: Rabbits can be bred during high serverload when other animals have their mob ai turned off, so if you only ever log online during peak, weekend hours, it might be worth it to have some rabbits (the pro tip above nullifies this advantage, sadly). You can make rabbit stew from their meat, a pretty decent stew item which sadly does not stack. Otherwise, they're just cows but significantly worse. Produces value when alive: Sheep: Sheep are great for making minas. Wool sells pretty well, since builders need lots of it for decoration and often don't have sheep of their own. Sheep need the following to produce wool: -Serverload isn't on high (mob ai is on) -Grass block for them to eat Sheep's minas-producing capabilities are destroyed by high serverload more than any other animal. Furthermore, grass blocks won't grow during high AND medium serverload, making sheep more of an off-peak sort of animal. To maximize the value of your sheep, give them lots of grass in a big pen so that they don't run out when random tick speed is turned off in medium-high serverload. Chickens: Chickens are the best animal for passive value. Chickens will lay eggs forever even if you completely ignore them, unlike sheep which requires you to shear them on occasion. If you put your chickens on top of a hopper, they will slowly fill the hopper up with eggs. It is worth having chickens in a chicken coop in order to produce eggs without you having to do anything at all. ~Controlling your cattle~ ~Cows well secured behind iron doors and a piston wall~ Breeding animals has its risks and isn't just free, easy minas. There are people who kill other people's animals to fence their stolen innards on the auction house. These people are difficult to stop as they typically strike when you aren't online. KNOW YOUR RIGHTS! Server rules dictate that thieves MUST leave an RP sign behind when killing your animals so that you know the criminal act was committed. Furthermore, they cannot, under any circumstances, kill or let-out animals such that fewer than 2 animals remain in a pen. If you notice a bunch of your animals disappearing without an RP sign left behind OR if all the animals in a pen suddenly vanish, MODREQ IMMEDIATELY! Cows are the most common target of these cattle rustlers, as they drop high value leather when killed. Your cows should be the most secure of all of your animals. Sheep, on the other hand, need lots of grass to produce wool, and don't drop anything too valuable when killed, so it's probably fine to have sheep out in an open pasture (unless the castle rustlers are feeling cruel and kill your sheep just for the heck of it). Your farmer character might want to cooperate with the local guard force to keep your animals safe from thieves. You could even hire mercenaries just to protect your animals, if you have the coin for it. Keep your most valuable animals in a barn if you can, protected by locks, walls, or even traps if you want to try out some redstone. A safe cow is a happy cow (until you kill it yourself, that is)! -jumperhand3, longtime LOTC farmer

We already have this in Almaris around the CT. Bit tricky to build around, although the flat bits of it in the valleys are pretty cool.

[!] As the snow of winter begins its slow melt, the fields of Honeyhill once again are exposed, and the residue from last year's harvest pokes through the snow. Halflings from across the village arise from their slumber, put on their jackets, bridle up their ponies, and head to the fields for ploughing season. Without good ploughing, there will be no good planting come The First Seed after all! [!] A halfling farmer ploughs his field. ((Event 5 PM EST, tomorrow on the 11th of August, 2022))

Wrong subforum?

don't drink the kool-aid kids

Birch wood is meh. Wool blocks, on the other hand, are amazing and must be brought back into the build palette beyond their current niche of tents and carpeting.

[!] A notice is posted to the Honeyhill Noticeboard MAGICAL BREAD! I, Mimosa Applefoot, the all-powerful, have cracked open the secrets to making bread magical! While previous bakers merely baked bread, now we have the ability to TRANSMUTE bread, from normal bread into magical bread, with twice as much bready goodness! Simply hit the button while baking for the magic to happen! -Mimosa Applefoot

[!] All around Honeyhill, a great panic sets in. Halflings run about in the streets shouting "SELL! SELL!" and wheelbarrows upon wheelbarrows of wheat grain, hay, and bread pile up on the docks. To whom they will go, not a soul knows, yet the pile grows ever larger. "Weh were FOOLS, FOOLS oi tell yeh!" Shouts a halfling barter-merchant, staring at a large pile of grains growing ever larger. "Weh were FOOLS ter t'ink tha' t'is could go on forevah..." A halfling cries in the corner of the docks while a female halfling tries to comfort them. It seems as though many have been hurt, though not physically. [!] An emergency publication circulates, produced from an unknown source WHEAT CRASHES! Wheat has fallen in its barter value, going from its peak at 20 pumpkins per wheat to a value nay even one tenth of that for hay, much less wheat. It seems as though, with the decline of buying pressure brought on from the end of the Hay Herald publication, some biggun barter whales have dumped their hay onto the halfling trading scene, dumping prices into the ground! It is as though a rug has been pulled out from under us, leaving us to flop about on the ground as we do now! Emergency economic relief from the last few Pumpkin traders (who avoided the hype of the Great Wheat Bubble) is expected to ease tensions in the next few weeks, but until then, stay wary!

On Almaris it's mostly been charters doing that, with war/diplomacy/rebellion only ever forming new nations when it forces people out of their land to have them make a charter instead. Currently on Almaris the number of successful rebellions/diplomatic plays to gain independence from an overlord nation is zero and the only new nations popping up have been on charters or formed out of couping an old nation and re-branding it with a different name. This was also the case on Arcas with the only newly independent nation forming out of an old overlord, Haense, already having held nation status for many years regardless. New nations just aren't made out of the lands of old nations these days, certainly not under the current rulesets. You have to go to unsettled lands to make a new nation on modern LOTC. Thus, all else staying the same, only allowing communities to set up as nation vassals ensures that said nations stay the same from map to map. This isn't Axios anymore with big rebellions to carve new nations out of Oren (even in Axios many new nations were made on charters too). I shall now also highlight another problem with only allowing people to settle in existing nations; such a policy is terrible if true conquest is to be allowed. On my time on LOTC I've found that very restrictive rules on settling new locations goes hand in hand with very restrictive rules on conquering old locations. If your nation getting conquered gives you no easy methods to start up something new again someplace else, you tend to be more in favor of conquest rules that saves your nation from ever getting conquered in the first place. This is a trap that Almaris fell into for its first few months, with very restrictive war rules and much too restrictive charter policy, the polar opposite of Atlas which saw new settlements get easily set up in freebuild and old settlements/nations regularly conquered in map-wide coalition wars. Correct, nation status is an OOC mechanic, and correct, nations themselves are RP entities. What exactly is the point to the OOC mechanic built in to justify the RP entity? Is the RP entity of a self-declared nation not enough alone to justify it's roleplay and continued existance? The non-staff supported groups, the psuedo-nations and vassals and settlements and whatever are also RP entities much in the same way that a nation is, often with a great degree of longevity and history themselves, and whose likewise rise and fall is as much an RP generator as whatever goes on with nations. Nations are not special. They just happen to have at one point had enough activity on a spreadsheet for staff to give them an OOC nation status and the ability to buy multiple tiles, settle many vassals, and other such things unique to the status of being a staff-declared nation. Yes, dynamics surrounding vassalage to staff-declared nations has lead to RP on the server, yet I fail to see how roleplay is hurt by doing away with the special status declared by staff or even just maintaining things as they currently are (as opposed to your opinion that the staff-declared OOC nation status ought to be entrenched ever further with a complete monopoly on all land). These vassal groups and pseudo-nations can still call themselves vassals in RP without the staff being there to declare such, and all such dynamics related to vassalage would likewise still exist with the added benefits of more land-settling options for those communities that wish to engage in them. Of course, if the pseudo-monopoly on land that nations currently have is lessened or removed entirely, it hurts the power of existing nations. That doesn't hurt roleplay though. If nations don't have as much OOC power over people, that doesn't hurt anyone's RP. If a nation relies solely on its nation status and associated benefits over non-nation groups to stay afloat then I do wonder why such a nation need exist at all. Nations can just go back to being RP-declared and RP-enforced groups and nothing more, and I'd be a happy camper. RP exists outside of nations and it is very dumb to say that giving nations a 100% monopoly on all land settling is the only RP-friendly choice for the server. Deciding not to be a nation vassal is a choice that characters can make in RP that would not be supported on the server with your proposed changes. As I have pointed out many times now, nations themselves are far from free of OOC, their psuedo-monopoly on easy land currently is an OOC privilege and not because they necessarily do the RP to hold onto all of this land, and oftentimes the way vassals are settled in nations is OOC anyways, or made more OOC with pastes or other such methods that make the vassals pop out of thin air after some discord decisions were made (likely involving staff too, hah).

Why would we remove the primary method for political shakeups on the server? Nations, as a general rule, don't give out their land for free to form independent nations elsewhere unless they are completely imploding like Oren was in Axios. This sounds like an ideal way to guarantee that, unless one of the nations that's been going strong on LOTC for years and years suddenly implodes into a bajillion pieces, the nation roster will remain unchanged from the start to the end of the map. Historically a significant portion of new nations have popped up in freebuild or as charters somewhere so without anything like that the server just doesn't have as much changing on it. All land management systems are OOC on LOTC. The only IRP way of doing land management is to make all construction work done with emotes and modreqs because that's closest to how construction works IRL. Region systems are an OOC system and not an accurate representation of RP b/c foreigners could realistically do the same construction/destruction stuff as residents (in the real world, a land owner has to physically stop you from building/destroying stuff instead of using non-existent region protections to stop you). Freebuild is an OOC system and not an accurate representation of all the construction work needed to make that log cabin. Pastes are an OOC convenience b/c settlements don't just pop out of nowhere realistically. LC is an OOC convenience for similar reasons. Every land system on the server is an OOC convenience by nature. Nations and nation status too are OOC conveniences LMAO. If you have to petition staff to get some extra good-boy benefits congratulations you have an OOC system b/c staff don't exist IRP. Nations don't have grounding in the land they own either and maintain absolute OOC monopolies on land they don't ever patrol with military forces and sometimes barely even settle with any citizens. Emote chopping down trees and hauling them over to make a log cabin as much as you want, if /rg info says the tile is owned by a nation and the PRO says "no", you can't do diddly squat even if nobody ever shows up to stop you IRP. As for the OOC conveniences on how to dole out land on LOTC, I much prefer systems that let the map change over time and give regular ol' players like me a better chance to do stuff. You're free to think whatever you like but keep in mind that nations and regioned systems of land management are just as OOC as the alternatives.

[!] A halfling corpse would be found north of the swamps far off in Attenlund, its head weirdly round and nose strangely long. [!] A note rests under the Filibert Applefoot's bed: Final Will I have lived a long live, yet with my age it is clear that I will expire soon. Thus, I write this will to detail what will come of my belongings: ~To Mimosa Applefoot, I give my burrow and all the family's herbs. ~To my beloved grandson, I give my pipe, all of my pipeweed, and all of my booze. ~To the Thain, I give all of the resources I stored in the village vault. ~To the Sheriff, I give my bounder's badge and my walking shovel. ~I give my journals, notes, papers, and quills to any halfling willing to write newspapers for the village. I wish to be buried next to Iris Peregrin, and on my grave shall be planted a single tulip. -Filibert Applefoot

Hello there. We here admins of LOTC have heard your pleas and thus 9.0 will be a massive void with no ground to stand on. Landscapes will finally be removed from LOTC

Nobody who argues in favor for freebuild argues that it's about the builds looking better than the alternatives. That never has and never should be the point of freebuild. You can fly around an old map and find freebuild builds that look worse than builds on Almaris, of course, but that's to be expected. A build made by hand in survival mode without unlimited resources will not look as good as builds pasted in from creative build servers, no **** sherlock. Freebuild is about the process. It is about settlements starting up without a mastermind organizing it all and prime regions attracting settlement naturally over time. You cannot have a perfect settlement spot be in freebuild without a Belvitz-like settlement popping up there, such is the nature of freebuild. Freebuild escapes the meta-OOC Civ 6 game of tile and nation management, discord messaging, etc and just lets you change and impact the world around you much easier. That is why people advocate for it. Games with fully fleshed out and designed pre-built worlds will always look better than pure sandbox games, yet people still play and enjoy sandbox games all the time. Freebuild is a sandbox, and that is why there are people who like it. I have been and always will be pro-Freebuild simply due to how I play LOTC. I love building. I love exploring things that other people have built. I love watching the world change around me over time in ways I can't predict, with new things to discover around every corner. Freebuild just hits that spot for me. Yes, freebuild doesn't always look perfect. Yes, freebuild makes it harder to cram players into cities and spam discord pings at them to log online for tavern events. People who want freebuild don't play LOTC just for those things, however. I want LOTC to be a sandbox because that is how I personally wish to play LOTC.

Some sort of deployable area denial to encourage attackers to seek more than one point of entry (something like boiling oil or whatever). The ability to defuse planted bombs to give the defenders the opportunity to nullify damage with a good sally out. Make sure you can't use a shield while climbing a ladder b/c then the defensive advantage of easily shooting at people as they climb up the ladder is too easy to avoid. Maybe if you shoot at a ladder it doesn't build up as fast or eventually gets destroyed entirely. Climbing up a ladder into a melee fight on vanilla Minecraft is much easier than it is IRL, so maybe you should get a surge stun effect for a moment when you dismount from a ladder to represent that, idk. Since players don't collide with one another on LOTC it's not like in Bannerlord where defenders can pick off attackers climbing up a ladder one by one before they gain a foothold; once the attackers get a few people on the walls it becomes a messy blob fight and loads of people can pile in from even a small ladder without worrying about getting pushed off by collisions. Just pitching some ideas here. If attackers can use auto-build ladders to get over any wall design and blow holes through any non-PvP fort wall with explosives, then it is fair to give defenders tools to shut down chokepoints and get easy damage on their enemies as they run around trying to gain entry. Prior to this addition the "defensive advantage" was all passive, unmanned defense that you didn't have to do squat or diddly to obtain for you got it just by having walls your enemy couldn't get over. This gave defenders the ability to pick their battles and only sally out on full health or when they could get key picks on the attackers. With this ability gone, there is no more major advantage to defending instead of taking a field battle, for once a blob fight starts on the walls or in the city square when the attackers inevitably bust in its effectively the same as a blob fight in the fields but in a tighter area. What I want to see change is this old defensive advantage be morphed into a more active defense, where the "defensive advantage" isn't just: "Well, they can't come here to kill us, so we can stare at them all day long until they get bored and only come out when we think we can kill 'em" but is instead more like: "The attackers can come make a breach whenever they want but we have counterplay available to make them suffer losses if they aren't careful" With this change atm the defenders don't have the counterplay available to make the process of breaching a city/fort dangerous and interesting so that's why I think some should be added in.

Yeah this change annihilates the defensive PvP advantage in raids and thus something should be added in to give defensive battles a bit of an advantage again. I still think it’s a cool addition but some counterplay for the defenders needs to be put in or there’s no point to defending.

then there needs to be some modification of it that a moderator can put in to manually raise and lower it a certain amount of blocks without it doing it itself to work for CRP raids or else it'll be weird.

in a CRP raid would you have to emote raising up the ladder or will it just do it on its own? maybe that'd be something to consider idk

I wonder how the raid ladders will work with CRP default. If raiders show up and defenders call CRP, how does that work exactly? Does the ladder build up at X blocks per round of emotes or what?