A couple of us, through skype, ingame, and irc, have dictated that it might be best to set up a village of sorts outside spawn, where we can put forth common resources, get food being farmed, livestock brought together, build houses, and in general use as a base of operations for the opening weeks of the game.

The best place would be to find some cows/sheeps/pigs/chickens as close together as possible (not having leads from the get go can be a big hassle, when trying to bring animals with you with their wanted food type) and we can go from there. Getting wheat is easily done. It'd be good to have a common building where chests can hold things like cobble/diorite/andesite/granite for everyone to use. Everyone has their own houses to store chests of goodies (iron/lapis/gold/diamonds/etc).

Figured within a few days, pending I can find all the resources, I'd like to set up an automated chicken farm to generate food. Would also be good if we could set up an iron farm (simple 16x16, 2 story setup would work beautifully) and maybe a house specific to enchanting.

Anyone wanting to work towards an idea like this? Should we designate specific tasks to people, or just try to collaborate while in game on things that needs doing?

We're not too far away from being live with 1.9, so I thought this might be a good thing to get started with!

I'd be willing to join up on this. I should probably actually use skype for once, too.

I feel that we can collaborate decently enough server-side without pre-planned roles.

I am tempted to join in on this - one of my favourite things to do in Minecraft is hunting & gathering...

I have been fond of the idea of setting up a community-based spawn 'village' outside spawn as well, which can focus more on community-oriented things that are goods and services for everyone to utilize for the most part, along with some player shops. As far as the eye can see, there are 5 different biome choices for some sort of thing we can setup just beyond spawn:

• Jungle (to the northeast)
  
• Mega Taiga (to the east)
  
• Extreme Hills (to the southeast)
  
• Ice Plains (to the south)
  
• Savanna (to the north)
  

To the general west is ocean, which wouldn't be ideal even if there were something on the other side of it. I think there should be something which connects directly off of the spawn paths, and immediately transitions into the community spawn village or otherwise a short path which will soon lead into the village. We should pick one of these biomes that we want to stick with as an overall background theme. If I had to pick my top 2 choices of biome to build the village in, I'd say the ice plains is my preference, followed by the mega taiga. We could try to make more happen in more of the jungle, but of course, I've been working on jungle territory for 3 months now for the server spawn, so I'm inclined to be more diverse and switch the biome up rather than continue more jungle themed stuff. My ideas for the ice plains if we were to go with that, is that we could make some cool cabin-like/styled builds and make it feel like a nice, cozy village with a couple of nice fire pits, and warmly lit paths.



I understand it might take about 10 minutes to grab a few animals by leading them over, but I think it'd be better to prioritize the location we want because it looks nice and features on the terrain we would like to have, rather than because it had more animals immediately where we want them and saving us a few minutes of work. The village will be something that lasts for the entire life of the server, and will continually built upon, so in the [2-year?] long run of the map we run through, we're probably going to want it to be something we are happy about where it is and how it looks. We'll probably never look back to the 10 minutes of slight inconvenience of gathering a few animals to start to get them to breed, is why I'd say to not base the location on wherever there's more animals.

I love that idea.


Boats?


I think that whoever is online and would like to help can help. If someone wants to take responsibility for something, I guess they can.[/quote]


Yay!


I do believe there should be some sort of voice-chat for the server, whether a Skype group, Google Hangout, Teamspeak, etc. I can work with any of those (preferably Hangouts). (Also a Skype group could get a bit chaotic if there are too many people.)

I'm definitely willing to help, though for the most part I will only be available on weekends and sometimes early in the mornings (EDT).

P.S. Community iron farm sounds like a REALLY good idea early-game. That will jump-start pretty much everything.
P.P.S. I can build some AFK fishing farms.

I advise against that.

I plan to set up a pretty nice (and effective) hermit town/skyscraper in the middle of the ocean that should have some good farms as planned; if it works out, I'll probably want to have some extensive shops near spawn for its output to help pay my town's rent. TL;Dr, I probably wouldn't be doing very much for a common near-spawn town, but I think it's a great idea.

That's cool, but you still might want a place to store extra, unneeded items until you find that perfect location :p Plus, got to get food stored up to travel around the map. That's pretty much all this place will be, a staging point for us to find where we want to build.

When will the launch be? I saw somewhere that it could be this weekend; is that true? And if so, what time? Thanks.

This weekend for sure, no set day or time though.

We are going to spend some time tonight, trying to get the final touches done to spawn, and spend some time making sure our plugins are all stable, and once we have that all confirmed, we'll post up an announcement with a set time

Also, would be cool at some point to make that one of the first stops along the rails from whichever direction from spawn this little village ends up being, set up a start of a template for other towns to have rails connected to them.