Removal of Slimefun: Thoughts and ideas for 'replacement'

[Mietm]

I looked at what slimefun did/does and considered how this was going to affect my island, then thought about how these problems could be addressed.

How I used Slimefun:

• Faster material generation with increased output (carbonado edged furnaces)
• Easier material generation (turning cobble into sand, turning cobble into gravel, etc)
• Tape measure to make sure my counting was correct

How I saw others use Slimefun:

• method to achieve /fly
• infinite storage
• moving stuff from location A to location B
• profit with easy generation of materials
• creating spawners for grinders of mob types
• ?? (feel free to add in replies)

Current methods to achieve these results:

• set up /contracts
• buy from shop
• change generator type
• minions
• level up /skills for better results/rates
• buy keys to get certain types of spawners
• buy rank to get creative mode for building

Problems with current solutions:

• The /contracts solution currently offered relies on people to be present and playing. This can be problematic if the only time to be online is when not many other people are.
• The /contracts relies on you having enough money to make people be interested in fulfilling your contracts - problem for new players
• The /contracts relies on you understanding how the system works without a lot of explanation - problem for younger/non-English speaking players
• Buying items from the /shop relies on enough income to get items, and the ability to sign on every day to check the inventory.
• The chances to get some common materials from the different generators is very low.
• Minions require a lot of setup time and storage
• Minions cost real money, or an insane amount of in-game money
• /skills can take a very long time to level up to a useful point
• buying keys requires real life money
• not all spawners are available and cannot be crafted anymore
• requires a lot of real life money and is only for one hour per 24 hours

Potential Solutions:

• Repeatable quests that reward item exchange instead of cash - turn in a stack of cobble for 16 dirt, turn in 32 dirt and 64 wheat seeds to get 16 grass blocks, etc. This may require some math to make sure it is respecting the current sell and buy prices of the /shop
• Shovel Generator Type: Player @noirDes proposed a "shovel generator" idea that produced the items you would normally dig up with a shovel. This would include sand, gravel, dirt, grass blocks and maybe even podzol, mycelium, red sand and mud.
• Increase the types of available spawners and/or find a new (read: expensive) manner of crafting these desired spawners
• ?? (feel free to add in replies)

Conclusion:
I can certainly play without slimefun, but it was making my plans for my build easier to accomplish. I like playing on my own island without a team, but that does naturally present challenges that an island group might not have. I do hope this thread offers some ideas and/or inspiration to continue improving the Skyblock experience.

 

[cloakfox]

I love the shovel generator idea!

 

[SKRWildfire]

Have some vanilla features back like be able to have automatic storage. Maybe also have a vanilla normal nether

 

[xDark_M]

nice post, very well written out!

 

[cloakfox]

Added a new "soil generator" to skyblock, you can unlock it by claiming reward of day 7 with /daily

 

[noirDes]

I'm glad you liked the idea of the 'soil generator'. I've unlocked it, and I think it'll be a great help to newer players.

One of the basic concepts of Skyblock is 'Using knowledge to turn a little into a lot.'

Skyblock challenges have classically asked the player to use not just basic knowledge of minecraft physics and spawning, but also dupe glitches and the like to turn the basic supplies given at the start into something more. Servers with SkyBlock often forget that - turning it into 'sell resources to get money, buy resources with money' because it's easier.

What I liked about SlimeFun was that it fed into that basic Skyblock premise. A lot of SlimeFun used cobblestone as a basic building block - turning it into gravel, then ore dust, then a variety of other devices. Or other basic materials - leaves into dirt, etc. It also provided an XP sink in the form of unlocking everything. You started with the basics, and you could develop it into a lot. Then, as the player got more and more skilled in it, the sink of time and resources became deeper. I spent SO MANY stacks of coal blocks making synthetic diamonds, even going so far as to use my wood farming to create charcoal to make more coal. It had engaging gameplay that involved a lot of possibility.

Instead of just 'earn money, spend money', I'd like it if we could figure out a way to lean into the basic Skyblock premise of 'turn a little into a lot', create a premise that had a little more variety instead of a bottleneck of money.

Exact ideas for advancing that? I'm not sure yet. I'll certain think on it - but I hope sharing at least my premise might help get a discussion started on ideas.

 

[noirDes]

Alright, after a bit of thinking, I have a few things:

First off: To reduce lag, we needed to change how hoppers work. Fewer ticks, more stuff moved at once. This is OK for moving things through chests, but it does create two issues.

First: It only ever grabs the first stack from a chest, and only half a stack at a time. If a chest is receiving multiple items (say, from a minion), then it creates a bottleneck. It'll take 3 cobblestone from the first slot, while ignoring the 64 copper ore in the second slot. Changing it from parsing purely through first slot with something in it and instead looking for either the first slot with at least 32 in it or the last slot before an empty slot would allow for cleaner movement of materials through a hopper network.

Second, automatically feeding materials into a composter is ... vastly slower. A composter can only ever accept 1 item at a time... so it cannot benefit from moving 32 at a time. I'm not sure what the best solution to this is - whether we can code an adjustment to how composters work so that they can process 32 items at once, or if we could provide some skyblock interface (like shops) that lets you convert seeds and saplings... but more on that later.



Hoppers aside, I think the key element I'm looking for here is 'conversion'. The random shop is OK, but a reliable method of conversion would be even better. If you could unlock conversion as you go along, even better. So just ... freeforming here - two steps. A research table and an alchemy table.

The research table takes 4 stacks of cobble and 1 stack of wood. From that, it unlocks the alchemy recipe for 8 cobble to 1 coal and 7 gravel.

Research: 4 stacks of gravel
Unlock: 1 gravel to 1 sand (uses xp)

Research: 4 stacks of coal
Unlock: 1 coal to 1 black dye (uses xp)

Research: 9 stacks of coal blocks
Unlock: 9 stacks of coal blocks to 1 diamond (uses xp)

Research: 4 stacks of wheat seeds
Unlock: 8 seeds to 1 bonemeal

I dunno what the right proportions should be, I haven't sat down and done math or gone through the entire web of interconnectedness ... but having a way to directly convert basic materials to more complex materials would provide a more significant path to progression than sending everything through money.

If we were designing skyblock from scratch, instead of having an already existing system we're trying to build upon (and one we're replacing) I'd also have the ability to unlock ores in the generator incrementally through a similar process instead of having them all available in the first generator straight off the bat.

Basically, I'm talking about creating a tech tree for material substitution, that allows the basic materials of cobblestone, water, trees, and crops to convert to all the more rare materials you usually need to search the world for, or find rare biomes for.

If this is a concept you like, I can expand on it and detail more of a tech tree idea. I have ideas for specific biome converters, for 'custom materials' through relabeling and heads... but basically the premise should be that obtaining materials through conversion should be less costly than selling to a shop and then buying the desired object. But it depends on how much you want to actually take the time to turn this into code. I know that the idea I'm putting forth is more difficult and time-consuming to program than what we've had before, so I understand if you look at the idea and go "Damn, that's complicated... I don't think we could do that." I am a programmer, so I understand complexity... but I have no history with programming for minecraft mods, so I don't know how complicated various ideas are.

I am hoping that there might be some sort of easy-to-produce framework that we can start with a simple framework of research and convert, and once that's working, just add to it by adding to the arrays/database that it runs off of. The /quests system is a great example of how research could work, but providing recipes instead of money. And the /shop is an example of how recipes could be used, but taking resources and giving resources instead of having money occur on either side.

 

[SKRWildfire]

To be fair i rather see just the hoppers be back to vanilla. Seen enough servers that has it and barely to no lag at all. And with the lower playerbase currently its fine to do it. Plus it does help already there is a limit on hoppers per chunk

 

[noirDes]

Cloak, I'm putting together a database. So that I don't have to rely on memory, could you give me a list of what is available in the initial Skyblock chest on Foxcraft?