by ArguablySane » Thu Aug 20, 2015 20:42
I think the griefing problem (both intentional and unintentional) is caused by the simple fact that it's easier to destroy something than to create it. Almost any conceivable structure in "vanilla" minetest can be destroyed with a pick and a bucket of lava, and it takes a fraction of the time to destroy it than it does to create it.
I'd like to see mods which, rather than adding magic nodes which make entire sections of the world indestructible, instead add ways of building structures which are extremely difficult to destroy. I'd also like to see tools made less effective, especially when used against artificial structures. It shouldn't take less than a second to smash a hole in someone's metre-thick brick wall using only a sharp sledgehammer. If a person wants to start destroying someone's home that they've spent a month building, they should need to spend at least a few days gathering resources and preparing for their attack. The ideas that I've had are as follows:
Armour plating - These would be some kind of block or panel which could be attached to the outside of a structure to make it extremely difficult to break into. They would be directional though, so if someone managed to get to the other side they could remove the armour in a few seconds with a wrench. Think of it like panels of hardened steel bolted onto scaffolding with no gaps in between. Obviously there would be ways to paint this to make it look less ugly, for those people who want bright pink bunkers.
Armoured doors and electronics - Normal doors are far too easy to break. These would work the same as the plating, only they could be opened by providing an electronic signal. To prevent someone just laying their own wire, the signal would only be accepted from the side and the wires could be hidden behind armour plating. There could also be various other electronic devices to detect and identify authorised players, or read some kind of in-game security cards.
Auto-defences - Even if it takes an hour to smash through a wall someone could still steal your stuff while you were offline, and you can't exactly build a roof over your tree farm. That's where auto-defences come in. Set up a few armoured turrets, hook them up to your base's power supply and computer network, give them some ammo, and enjoy watching would-be griefers get cut to pieces as they try to reach your base over flat ground with no cover.
This should all be balanced so that it takes significantly more effort to mount a successful assault on a well defended base than it took to build the base in the first place. Griefing shouldn't just be something funny to do in the first minute after you join a server. If you want to grief someone, you should have to work for it.
Of course, this doesn't solve the problem of noobs turning the spawn into an uninhabitable wasteland, but I think that could be solved by simply letting people spawn randomly over a ~3x3 km area. That way the devastation would at least be spread out, and occasionally you'd have the fun of watching someone spawn in front of an auto-turret outside someone's base.
The above post and any ideas expressed therein are released to the public domain under a Creative Commons CC0 license.