Building Basement Factions

This page presents an analysis of our project for map 22.5. It’s about the technical and organisational aspects, the pros and cons and our lessons learned so far. We explicitly don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings or egos (this includes both players and staff). If any of this makes you angry or unhappy: we’re sorry, it’s not what we intended. It’s also not meant to be a ”sneaky continuation” of the other threads concerning the spiky project under the disguide of objectivity.

There’s a reddit thread for discussion.

Why we made this

Here’s a short history of fluffy, we’ll need that as the foundation for later. fluffy has been playing since HCF map 9 and we’ve been giving out free food since map 10. We’ve offered several services inside our bases, ranging from public grinders and storage vaults to rooms and mini-factionspaces (check this out for a more complete list). We never went raidable the entire time; presumably due to our strict building standards and organisational policies. We’re also really bad at PVP and almost never take part in this aspect of HCF. Our time on each map is usually divided in two phases: first gather up resources and either stockpile huge amounts or build farms inside. The second phase is usually “let’s build something new/awesome/silly withing the boundaries and possibilities of this server”.

We’ve had this idea of housing a complete faction within our walls for quite some time now; it’s basically the next step in what we’ve been doing to far. Map 16 and 19 (“base building contest” and hotel) came pretty close: we had living facilities for factionless single players and services like grinders, saferooms and trading. So the vision for the next version was: “Let’s have a large subfaction that can win palace.”

Problems

There are two major problems/differences to solve for the subfaction when housing another faction:

1. The home coordinate has to be within faction land. Players should be able to use /f home without risking instant death (irrespective of the faction being raidable or not).
2. The subfaction can only use a subset of the possibilities offered by the faction plugin (basically everything affecting permissions on your own faction land and minor things like no f-home in your faction’s space).

We came up with three (actually five, but two of them are not allowed) possible solutions for the first problem:

1. Set the homepoint somewhere outside. Build an entrance that’s operated by either a fluffy member or someone from the subfaction. We could use a variation of our former basetour entrance for added safety.
2. Same as above, but write an automated bot that operates the entrance.
3. Have a key system similar to our vaults or the rentable gridners from map 16.
4. [Update #1]: There’s is a bug in the current factions plugin that makes it possible to have the home spot inside another faction. It has been fixed in Factions 4.0.
5. Find a special spot at bedrock level that has as protected “cavity” spanning both the subfaction and the one wide public space.

Let’s review these ideas:

1. This only works if other friendly players are online which we deemed to be a showstopper for this solution.
2. Not a real option as bots are not allowed on HCF. Plus we’d have to create one which surely is way more work that we’d like to invest into such an endeavor. Basically mentioned only for completeness.
3. This type of entrance works by putting a certain renamed item into a special container. Players can do one of two things here: either carry the key around or build one when needed. Option one (have key in inventory) is very risky because if the key is lost to an outside players the faction is basically raidable (more on that later). Option two (craft key when needed) needs lots of infrastructure to work. Let’s assume a dead player comes back online and teleports to the home spot. He now needs at least 5 XP, material for the key and a way to get these and craft the key without dying. This can be achieved by having a safe public grinder and using mob loot items like bones or rotten meat as key. There’s still some minor problems (anvil supply), but this can be fixed.
4. Not allowed.
5. If there is such a magical place, we’re golden! This is the solution we tried; let’s have a closer look at how this works:

Because the bedrock texture prevents (at least me) from properly seeing structures, the following screenshots use colored wool and glass instead. Green is subfaction land, blue is public land and orange is fluffy land.

The first spot we found looked like this:

There are obviously holes in it, so we closed them up using endportal stones which can’t be broken (in vanilla minecraft):

The subfaction put the home spot in the 1x1 spot owned by them and everyone was happy. After a few days, someone (I think it was derwent9) saw the flaw that we missed: endportal stones can be removed using a crowbar, which people usually bring to a raid to grab mob spawners. So we found a second place that looked like this:

There is a 1x1x2 spot that’s usable, but there is no easy way to go there to do the initial /f sethome. The two obvious ways of getting there is pearling or pushing in a minecart and right-clicking it. We opted for the latter and succeeded; here’s a screenshot of dividuum doing that. To get out again, we placed a minecart on rails next to it in the fluffy-claim plus a chest full of minecarts as backup:

After doing /f home, the player simply right-clicks the minecarts, exits it (this costs half a heart because there’s bedrock above) and he’s inside the base. This is how it looks on the current map:

We spend a few hours digging up the lower levels around the fluffy to find this spot (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11). These bedrock formations are pretty rare and/or hard to find. Having a factions’s home spot on such a location is not allowed anymore on the current map and will be impossible to make when Factions 4.0 comes around. So we’re basically left with playing doormen or creating an elaborate entrance system.

Using this home spot seems to be a little glitchy in the current factin plugin which caused a few deaths. One player fell into the void, the others spawned inside the bedrock blocks next to the desired spot and suffocated. We advised the subfaction’s players to always look north because it was sometimes manageable to right-click the minecart even while suffocating.

On to problem number two (permission system)!

A normal faction can use the permission system to enforce fine-grained permission control. I’ve seen other factions that had a special room for each individual member plus officer rooms for safekeeping of valuables. Other may only have the latter. Even it a faction does nothing in regards to (sub-)claim permissions, non-faction members are unable to access anything on faction land. This could not be done for the basement faction, access can only be granted or denied to one class: public.

This means that the subfaction can not enforce hierarchy or multi-level access policies. If a container can be accessed by one member, it’s accessible to all members (because it has public permissions). This also means that it can be accessed by every HCF player. This creates a few problems:

• Betraying/Stealing is very easy. Just grab what you want, exit, stash it somewhere or hand it off to a third party, /f home, repeat. A few days after spiky was created, a large potion of players left and took almost all valuables with them. A normal faction could have prevented this by using the permission system. There are two ways for the subfaction to safeguard valuable items: logout with them in the inventory or use vaults built by the hosting faction.
• Having non-faction players inside the base is a potential desaster irregardless of the faction being raidable or not. That’s why we had to enforce the rule that players may only enter the faction using /f home. To enforce this, every exit was built such that it was strictly one-way only. This also means that the subfaction needs to have enough money for the constant home teleportation. Related problem: constantly being near another factions means being near enemys so /f home while standing next to the base after a mining trip might not work.
• You can’t evict a subfaction (for whatever reason). You may fill the whole area with blocks or lava and wait a few days until everyone logged on and died, but that might be ruled as malicious behavior. It certainly isn’t what we would want to do. the basic problem is: the hosting faction can never be sure to have removed everyone from their premises; the old subfaction space can never be opened to the faction nor given out to a new faction. Once you pick a basement faction, you have to keep it for the rest of the map.
• Block glitching to reach into chests is a potential problem because all containers are publicly access
• Most infrastructure has to be provided by the hosting faction to prevent destruction. The hosting faction needs to be willing to invest the time needed to do so.

Let’s have a look at most of the features in the current subfaction space:

Lots of saferooms

Ony-way exit to the nether

Lockable Wall of chests

The chests that can be locked by clicking the button. This could only be unlocked by a fluffy member and we would only unlock it by request from either an officer or the leader.

Standard fluffy brewing machine

Double skeleton grinder with enchantement table and loot item sorting

Cave spider spawner

Secure One-way mining exit

This needs a video to show properly, we might do that later. The exit has several saferooms and a trading room to get ores inside.

Palace pot room

The brewing machine could be redirected into the palace pot room which we closed right until palace to prevent the subfaction’s players from raiding the 35 doublechests.

One-way surface exit

The surface exit also had a panic button, featured good surround visibility, a one-way exit, and lots of saferooms next to it:

Public building space

The middle is a large subclaim that has public build permission to allow the subfaction to create farms and custom devices.

The subfaction space currently has 16 subclaims with custom permissions.

No cake

There is one thing that fluffy failed to do properly: leadership. The subfaction’s initial leader was a fluffy member that didn’t do much besides inviting players. After a few days, we handed the leadership position to someone more capable than us which seemed to improve the overall situation.

Despite being well prepared in regards to fighting resources and having the advantage of not risking loss of resources, spiky failed to cap palace. We still don’t know why it didn’t work. We’ve seen a fair amount of drama in the subfaction, but that’s probably normal (we don’t know because we don’t play in large heterogenous factions).

After palace the subfaction became mostly inactive after that. The weekly changelog declaring the home spot illigal increased that to a standstill.

We still call the experiment a partial success because it most of our concepts worked and we had lots of fun. We propably won’t do anything like this again because we didn’t get the desired outcome (indirectly cap palace).

P.S: To facilitate cross-faction communication, we create a custom channel (/mc create le_name) and invited all players from both factions. The current chat system has a big problem for this use case: nobody owns custom chats making subscription management impossible. Former members cannot be removed from custom chats. The only solution we came up with was to create a new channel and move everyone over. Guess what: that does neither scale nor work well because players are unwilling to switch custom chat every so often.