Lapis Lazuli, is probably not the best choice for currency as it is very valuable for enchanting. I believe a currency should be mostly useless, except for a few select things, as gold is.

But does it really take that much lapis lazuli to enchant stuff? Not really. And its only other use really is as a dye. I can say that I HAD plenty of lapis lazuli, until I built a beacon, went into a cave to light it up, died, and lost EVERYTHING of value - all my coal, all my iron, all my emeralds...

You don't need to enchant that often relative to how much Lapis you find, IMHO, plus villagers will sell you lapis shards. All you need to do is save some lapis ore while you mine.

I personally find a barter/trade system to be most effective.

Going to hate me, but on vanillaverse, people trade for diamonds for expensive things, or trade labor for diamonds or other materials that that person might need. Like I needed andesite, so I helped clear out an area for someone, and they gave me a large chest full of andesite. Worked out well for both of us since he didn't want it at all, and was just going to trash it.

In this way, people can jump right in, get iron or other things, and be able trade for things they might want. Otherwise, you have to jump in and not be able to get at better things from town shops until you are lucky enough to find gold (or whatever is chosen for a tradable currency). Just a thought.

But, I am inclined to agree with tifreak, that the barter system would work the best. Newbies would benefit from it to, and there would be no need to go mining as much, as once you get 3 stacks of iron and a full set of diamond, there is no need to go back, as you have all you need for a pretty long time. IF we did have an unfarmable currency, there would be more people mining all the time, making it harder for newbies to find unexplored cave systems.

The thing is that if we have an economy system pegged to a particular resource (like lapis ore), people don't really need to use it unless they want Towny plots or to make a store that uses the common currency. Barter/trade-based transactions can and definitely should still be used, which is one of the reasons why I plan to configure SignShops to allow players to make both trade shops and more traditional item<->Denarii shops.

I'm inclined to agree with KermM. Mostly because Towny can't run on a barter system. Again, I'll bring up the daily/weekly salary: Users can put that money towards town upkeep or for valuables at stores. Consequently, players can use the money from their stores for town upkeep. Thus having a prosperous store will allow the user to have a fancy town to draw other players in.

I'd like to open this can of worms again.

With the Nether most likely being enabled in 1.9, I visited the Nether in the 1.8 world (which I think is now open?) and realized Pigmen are aplenty. I think it'd be perfectly reasonable to keep Gold as the currency unit; I'd disable Pigmen mobs from spawning in the overworld.

Is this something that anyone can see abuse with? Can similar farms exist in the Nether? Is everyone happy with a entirely player-based Economy where one can trade two items rather than purchase with a currency?

Secondly, I'd like to bring back the suggestion about an allowance because I can't remember if it's been agreed upon. If we prevent currency based transactions but keep Towny, how do we propose this works? I still suggest an allowance. Enough to start a small town or something. Multiple users can band together and create a bigger town. And multiple towns a nation. If this is accepted, should there be something that a user can find in the wilderness for extra cash towards their town? (As I know that some players prefer to have a town to themselves but need more plots for security and layout.)

Yes, and in the nether it is a lot easier to build a gold farm compared to the overworld.

Most certainly-- there is plenty of room for currency inflation because of the nether, which can create far more superior gold farms with far less resource. However, this is not going to be an issue to worry about if we don't allow gold ingots/nuggets as currency, and in the very least make gold ore currency.



The whole idea of a player-based, trading economy is something I have always been a fan of, since the players can decide for themselves what something is worth, and pretty much anything can be traded for anything. The disadvantages of this is that anything based around an official numerically assigned currency such as Towny, will not function in the same way if at all.
Without an official currency, we wouldn't need to do a lot of arguing over what resource it will be, the depletion of that resource, inflation, etc. (see the other economy topic for how complicated it gets in deciding such a thing) If someone wants to trade for a few diamonds with someone, payments need not be strictly in something such as gold ore or a made up universal currency.

A good currency is ghast tears. They are rare, so they won't inflate.

Ghast tears would tend to produce more of a bimodal distribution of players that can obtain an amount of ghast tears-- meaning that there are 2 major 'modes' or categories that players will tend to fall under.
For players who realize they are farmable, and will go out of their way to make a farm in the nether, they will have an incredibly easy time obtaining them in massive quantities with a good nether farm. On the other end of the spectrum, you will have players who wouldn't want to go so out of their way to do this task, and thus will kill the ghasts one by one as they see them on occasion. This will lead to very minimal amount of ghast tears in the same given time period, so you will either be relatively speaking, very very rich or very poor by choosing to build or not build a ghast farm. Additionally, if you kill them one by one, it's an awful time obtaining the ghast tears-- not only would you have to find a ghast, but you'd have to take a lot of extra time to make sure they fly somewhere where the drop is obtainable, actually be skilled with a bow to kill it, and then actually have a ghast tear by chance dropping upon its death. While I wouldn't mind building a ghast farm, I don't think this is a solution that will benefit most players.

If we go for any official currency, the currency ideally would not be inflatable (infinite production via farming), and it would be an unconditionally equal opportunity for all players, so you wouldn't need to build something incredibly fancy to make yourself good money, hence that rather bimodal distribution of extremely rich and not so rich players. Something in the least like gold ore is something that is both non-inflatable (because it can't be farmed), and it's an equal opportunity for all players, in which the amount of it you obtain is pretty much directly proportional to the time you spend getting it, regardless.

It seems there isn't really a method that can't be farmed. I still want to push my idea of a daily allotment for currency. Such as 1000d per 24 hours. Log in once a day to collect, if you miss a 24 hour period you miss out on that payment. I think it's easier to implement than my whole "The amount of time you're on the server each day up to a certain time determines the amount of money you get." Of course, you can earn more by mining for goods and selling them.

I also want to revisit the reimbursement for building common area structures such as paths. If Player D builds a path from Town Joe to Spawn he'd get, as an example, 2000D. If Player H and B build a path between their two towns, they'd each get 1500D. Number as an example, of course, as the final figure would represent distance of the path, materials used, time, etc etc. Towns that have path ways between other towns, and spawn, could be rewarded with additional funds in the the towns bank account. Built a decorative wall for the town? Cool, that's 4000D to the town itself. Or something, ya know. If something benefits the town, then the town get's the money. If someone builds something in wilderness, then they get reimbursed. If that "something" benefits their town, such as a pathway to somewhere vital, the town(s) also get money to their bank.

But I fear this would heavily incentivize the player base. They'd end up asking "Would I get reimbursed for this?" What if my answer is no. Then they probably won't build it. What if I say yes? They'd follow up with "How much?"

We would also have to come up with a fair way of payment so everyone gets paid fairly. If someone builds a basic path out of stone, they should be compensated less than if someone sourced other materials and design. Secondly, if the same materials are used in two paths one can't be randomly compensated with 2700D and the other with 4300D, or whatever. Cause I can see myself just randomly throwing out values.

More importantly, maybe we look into server packages that offer a fleshed economy and community system so we don't have to clobber something together from scratch.

To reiterate, lapis ore is a perfect candidate, in my opinion. I have played on a server (Evocatus) that let you get a /kit every 24 hours with rare items. I don't think giving out the currency is a good idea. On the Evocatus server you could donate to the server to get an upgraded /kit, but I'm not sure if we want to offer that.

I am definitely against real world money for upgraded kits. We don't have a large enough user base to really implement this as our MC server isn't (very) taxing on the server. The day we require a separate server for MC, then maybe.
What sort of stuff did the kits have? Building materials? Supplies? Were they sellable at Spawn in exchange for money? Can this be randomized maybe?

Things like glowstone, soul sand, netherrack, gold, iron, and diamonds, as I recall. They also provided ~100 Denarii of in-game currency per day, as I recall. Like our current server (until recently), Evocat.us did not allow nether access, so nether items were a treasured commodity. They were not sellable at spawn. I'm not sure about randomization; I suspect the answer is no with the kits that Essentials offers.

Ah, I did not see your reply to Unicorn on that. I'd be willing to let lapis be the currency if other users have no objection.

We could always backtrack and disable the nether in 1.9; are we able to have a different world border size in that region?

I (and some other players) are really looking forward in seeing the nether enabled in 1.9. One of the biggest reasons IMHO is that it'll disable access to The End too, and with the revised ender dragon fight in 1.9 (which you can also respawn now) it's something to look forward too.
Also if we disable the nether, we loose IHMO the best and fastest way to travel around a minecraft world: Traveling in the Nether is 8 times faster than in the overworld.

The bordersize in the nether is 8 times smaller than the size of the border in the overworld. So that if you make a portal in the overworld near the border, you spawn in the nether also near the border. (Coordinates in the nether are the X and Z of the overworld divided by 8 ).

The border size reduction for the Nether makes perfect sense, I had known about the 1:8 ratio but didn't stop to think it'd affect the world border too.

I've decided to pull some discussion from the 1.9 plugins topic over to here since it feels a lot more economy-oriented in details.



Telling people to not make mob farms is the same as telling them to not be innovative, and to use their brain to find efficient ways to accomplish the same task. And even the definition of a mob farm in and of itself is very vague and there is absolutely no boundary to what defines it. You can simply create a really large dark room, and then go kill everything that spawns inside of it. You can add a single water stream to push them all to one place to help you in getting them to one place to kill them instead of running around aimlessly trying to kill them. You could add a crusher system if you wish to make your life easier. Really, where do you even draw the line as to what a mob farm is? By simply using even a water bucket to push mobs to a focal point, you are by the basic definitions, making killing them easier, which can be considered a mob farm. Even if you made the most powerful overworld mob farm you could possibly make, simply collecting tons of zombie flesh and bones and gunpowder isn't going to get you bank amounts of hard cash. Especially if we were in an economic system where trading amongst each other is the way of life. It's not like you could sell all of your goods and make the equivalent of 100 days of work in one day. I strongly feel like this is not something that we should regulate. The same can be said about non-mob farms which grow items instead of give you mobs to get their items from or experience orbs. I mean, I could make a row of 100 sugar cane, let them grow, and run down the isle once every 20 minutes to harvest. Or I could invent a redstone contraption that harvests them for me every 20 minutes. Or I can make a carrot farm which only is powered by villagers-- yes, villagers can be used to farm materials too. No need for redstone contraptions. It's slow, yes, but it's still an automated farm. Where do we draw the line? It ultimately sounds like to me that by banning automated farming (which really is regulated by forcing a user to be active on the server-- they need to be doing something else meanwhile, and not online for the sole purpose of AFKing), we are essentially banning the usage of redstone contraptions in farms, which I think is crazy.

Just because my neighbor Average Billy Joe can't do redstone to help speed up his farming a little, shouldn't mean I am forbidden from doing so. It's not like because I can produce carrots at a much higher rate because I know how to redstone, that I'm going to overthrow the economy, which should of course stay in balance-- I agree with that. The problem again becomes, where do you draw this line that is so hard to place on a non-binary set of options? It's not like if it's not A, then it's B, or if it's not B, then it's A. It's more like, here's a scale from 1 to 1,000,000. Let's draw the line at 98,287 and call it a day. The reality is that everyone has different skill sets, and it is these different skill sets which drives an economy, whether if we make an official currency or do it by trades-- doesn't matter. Market differentiation is a driving force of the economy, and you can't force everyone to produce at an identical same rate just because some people are slower. (now of course, you could just tax the richer if you had a way to enforce it-- bigger towns that want to keep their town protection status, would need to pay up more than small startup towns. That's the way business works.) In a healthy economy, there will be some competition. And even if player A produces 10 carrots/hour, and player B produces 1000/hour, I don't think it's going to create any friction between anyone. Bear in mind that our goal as a server is to focus more on the creativity of our builds and such, and making a world together as one. Especially with PvP not being a thing, the economy does not hold as much weight/importance, and especially on a map with emphasis on helping each other build up this world, it holds even less importance. I honestly thing doing something like prohibiting mob farms will just disappoint more of us than make anyone particularly happy even if it did benefit people, and I honestly don't see many of us really caring about if someone just made the largest sugar cane farm on the server, especially because of our goals as a server.

And there will be other things which you cannot regulate which follow the same idea-- I mine and find diamonds at a rate of 60 diamonds/hour partly because I have an awesome efficiency 5 pickaxe. Average Joe finds diamonds at rate of 5 diamonds/hour because he's a little newer. But I mean, you're not going to take away my awesome pickaxe in an effort to help Average Joe out because he's not as good at mining diamonds or even getting an enchanting table for that matter, are you? I mean, if you're going to regulate the mob farms by the reasoning that some players are incapable of putting a little more brain power and hard work into their design and being diligent in their work, then the same logic goes for anything else, and I don't see a fair way to regulate any of this. Plus, if we're aiming for a server with more maturity and an emphasis on creativity, I really think it would be a shame to say that using your brain to come up with some cool redstone is ultimately prohibited.

Now back to the stuff in this topic explicitly--

There are a handful of materials that can't be farmed such as lapis. In my perspective though, I have quite a ton of extra lapis that I honestly don't know what to do with, so lapis I don't see being a problem in 1.9 economic situations. To make level 30 enchantments on an enchantment table, which is the absolute maximum, you only need 3 shards of lapis. Finding one vein of lapis ore can give you like 10, level 30 enchantments from 30 pieces of lapis, without needing any fortune 3 enchantments on a pickaxe-- lapis will drop multiple shards per ore as is. I don't see this being a major problem in splitting it between enchanting and economic use. Plus, by enchanting goods, you effectively allow yourself to sell stuff for X currency to someone, effectively satisfying return on investment by choosing to use lapis to enchant instead. I could for instance, choose to turn lapis shards in for 25d a piece, or I can use it to enchant items and possibly get something like a sharpness 4 diamond sword that I could sell to someone for 2000d.

However in the end, this is my compromised point of view, that is-- if we choose to follow through with doing an official economy. My preference is that we simply let the market flows how it will flow. Let the people decide what 1 diamond is worth in amount of iron ingots, or in quartz, or whatever the trade is. This is the way I see it: I'm going go collect a mandatory currency item such as lapis, so that I can in exchange, have X denarii, so that in turn, I can buy something from someone, giving them denarii, which they can use to buy what they need. This is ultimately the long way and redundant way of simply giving what someone needs, in exchange for what I need. The only use for this I can think of, is if we ultimately decide to use SignShop/Towny, which are discussions in and of themselves.


I like the general idea of providing some form of incentive to come online on some basis other than to build stuff and see other people. I'm not sure how I want to settle on this idea, but some other suggestions might be to simply have small weekly activities you or Kerm wouldn't need to put much effort into, such as putting one random chest around spawn every week in an undisclosed location, with or without a hint to encourage people to not only come online to claim the treasure which will be worth their time, but also to encourage people to revisit spawn often. It doesn't take more than 5 minutes to come up with a location (depending how detailed/complex you are willing to make it beyond that), stash a quick chest, and put a stack of diamonds or something in it. It's kind of like a mini Easter egg hunt, but it takes place weekly. At this point, beyond discussing the gained economic incentives, I would like to point this toward the server activities suggestions forum.

In regards to reimbursement for making paths and such, I am in favor of simply allowing it. I'll explain what I mean by this. I don't feel like users should actively seek out their terms of being reimbursed, but rather can accept your terms of reimbursement if they want to be reimbursed on top of the simple satisfaction of making an awesome thing. As you said,

If we do something like this, the terms need to be established prior to the work done. Here's a good place to start-- materials reimbursement, plus additional payment for the quality of it. Of course, quality is a little more relative to the person you ask about "how good does this look", but of course, I don't think someone should make this rough, boring, stone path that took them an hour to whip up that's 500 blocks long, and expect to get tons of payment simply for how long it is. We don't want to incentivize making half-hearted work that ultimately looks honestly uglier than if it had been left alone, and have them expect to be paid for it because it follows the cookie-cutter reimbursement standards of path length = more money. Even if they get paid little for making a straight line of pure stone, we're ultimately rewarding something someone just tossed together. It would be better to not reimburse anyone anything, than to have players expect to be paid for making anything. We want to emphasize quality work, so I feel we should reward that appropriately to help encourage doing such things.