Howdy, wijnand
You skin has been uploaded just before the backup occured to it should be in effect now.
No Drowning Mod and Ambience for Servers (sound mod)
We'll need more input from the other players about the no_drowning and bat/crow sounds.
The Ambience mod doesn't appear to be coded to able to determine if the player is indoors or not (and I don't have the savvy to code that). The sound effects are triggered by what type of blocks the player is near. Overly simplified examples: near trees = bird sounds, near stone underground = bat sounds. Maybe someday modders' code savvy will be up to it, or maybe Minetest will be able to provide better queues for such mods to pick-up on.
If there are a lot of players that don't like the sound mod, it can be removed without ill-effect to our server.
Mobs
Yeah, mobs do take more resources to run. One of our long-term concerns is that mobs spawn *everywhere* and if the mob mod were ever replaced by a better one, there would be a tremendous amount of "unknown", former mob entities in the map. If there were a way to easily and safely clear out these and any other removed-mod block/item/entity then we would be more inclined to try such mods.
A great mod idea would be to have a mod or tool for MT admins who are *not* sqlite gurus to be able to easily search and safely edit the map's database for all unknown items and clear them all at once without having to hunt them down one-by-one in-game.
Bread and Meat
0.4.8 now includes farming so you can grow and harvest wheat to produce bread.
The admins could setup an admin shop to sell cooked_rat but it didn't seem necessary since
thefamliygrog66's "Livingroom Furniture" mod is installed and that mod provides for 100% health restoration. But if we hear from a lot of players that cooked_rat should be on the menu then we can still setup a shop for it. You will have to provide your own ketsup and mustard. :0)
Flowers
Flowers are the default mapgen now in 0.4.8. I'm not sure if they only appear in newly generated areas or if, gradually over time, they spawn in previously generated areas.
I don't know how to control their spawning properties (color, where allowed, where not allowed). Even if I did, it would require a lot of editing every time the MT version is updated on the server (and MT server updates are planned to be more frequent than in the past).
To create flowers that do not produce dyes would require creating a new flower mod. For home, landscaping purposes, clusters of flowers (flower beds) or floral arrangements in vases for in-home displays would be nice to have. As they are now, the default flowers are better suited for small flower pots.
VanessaE's "Plantlife" modprovides such flower pots but it's still not quite *it* for the "Home and Garden" look. Hehehe... just one more thing to add to the infinite "to-do" list.
Besides making the landscape prettier, flowers are intended to produce dyes, to then produce colored wool (white wool from string harvested from cotton plants - just pretend wool comes from cotton
- ). The colored wool gives players a few more colored-block options to build with.
There are other colorful, building-block mods that could be added but we are trying (but not always succeeding) to maintain good, mod variety without being excessive or redundant.
Self-Planting Saplings
I think there was a mod, a long time ago, that would cause dropped saplings to grow. I don't know if it still exists and if it does, if it would be compatible. But, yeah, that would be something that would at least help to regenerated pillaged forests. As you've probably observered, few players are conservative enough to collect all fallen saplings after harvesting trees for wood.
Another tree-related source of lag are large tree farms. The more trees that are growing at the same time the more lag it will generate, though only temporarily. Similar happens when a player is running through an ungenerated area and MT's mapgen is working to create all the trees, land, caves, water, dungeons, jungles, deserts and other stuff. But trees are very important in Minetest and tree farms are practical for serious players, so it's a trade off between necessity and performance. Hopefully Minetest will eventually improve that issue.
Careless miners and players chucking stuff into lava creates more item-drop lag than jungle-saplings.
There is a mod that automatically scoops-up nearby dropped-items and puts them in the players inventory if there is room If not they remain on the ground. I'll ask VanessaE more about that mod, what is it and what are it's pros and cons. Maybe that is something we should have on our server. Hmmm...
It was also observed in the 0.4.6 version of Minetest that Minetest would generate perfectly vertical stacks of items embedded in the ground. Normally dropped items fall into a mixed cluster but these were columns of evenly stacked of the same items. At least with 0.4.8, the server can run clearobjects without crashing (though it is still a slow process - the world's map.sqlite is nearly 5gb, uncompressed, at this time).
Each month the server will be shut down for a few hours to run clearobjects to reduce dropped-item lag. It will have to be done manually so there won't be a consistent schedule like the nightly backups. I know maintenance is an inconvenience for players. It isn't exactly a whole lot of fun for the admin performing the maintenance either.
Design Build Contest
Now there's an interesting idea.
Perhaps if players posted screenshots of their contest submissions in this thread for others to judge and enjoy. I think Minetest.net forums can do polls for voting purposes... but I'm not seeing the option on-screen at the moment.
Lava blocks won't be used as prizes. Even though the flammable property has been removed from most things in the server, lava blocks are still dangerous to players and the mess they create is a headache for admins. That's why lava buckets were one of the first things to be done-away with since way back in the days of the original server world.
Nyan Cats as prizes or rewards have been suggested before. It's their rarity that makes them so special. I think we'll leave them that way. You are now among only a very, very small group of players that have legitimately aquired a Nyan Cat. Congrats! \0/ \0/ \0/
Thanks for the input and screenshots. This is how our server evolves and adapts over time.