[mod] Anchorstone teleportation [1.0][anchorstone]

[FaceDeer]

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Primaeval rocks form the road’s steep border,
        And much have they faced there, first and last,
    Of the transitory in Earth’s long order;
        But what they record in colour and cast
            Is—that we two passed. 
		 
    - At Castle Boterel, by Thomas Hardy

Anchorstone

Native Anchorstone is a strange and magical "ore" that forms from rock that has rested so long in one place that it has in some very real way become comfortable there. Its properties are otherwise similar to normal stone in this state.

It is only when it is wrenched from that location by artificial means that the strength of this bond becomes apparent. Anchorstone that has been cut from its preferred place and moved somewhere else is called Displaced Anchorstone and the connection to its original location produces a powerful mystical "tension." You may witness the occasional buildup and release of sparks along this vector of tension as tiny particles touching the Anchorstone are spontaneously caught up and pulled by it.

This bond may be exploited in a more controlled form with the use of an Anchorstone Trigger, an arcane device that can hook into it and allow itself to be dragged along the line of tension to the Anchorstone's original source location.

If you're exploring some deep and distant cavern and you find a deposit of Native Anchorstone, retrieve a piece and you'll have a "gateway" back to that location from wherever you install it. Note that such paths are strictly one-way, however. You'll need to find Native Anchorstone at both ends if you want to establish a two-way connection.

It's also possible to craft a weaker version of the Anchorstone Trigger, the Anchorstone Reader, that can't be used for travel but that will reveal the destination that a Displaced Anchorstone will send a Trigger to.

Optional features

Anchorstone triggers can be set by server admins to suffer wear from use, making travel costly. This is disabled by default.

Displaced Anchorstone can be "reset" into Native Anchorstone form via a recipe that costs Mese shards and four buckets of lava. This allows players to establish Anchorstone connections to any arbitrary location they want by creating Native Anchorstone, placing it, and then digging it to form Displaced Anchorstone with that new location as its source. This is enabled by default.

Anchorstone ore is enabled by default, causing small clusters of Native Anchorstone to be scattered throughout the deeps. This can be disabled.

API

anchorstone.place_displaced_anchorstone_node(pos, destination_pos) will place a Displaced Anchorstone node on the map at pos with a destination set to destination_pos. Note that Displaced Anchorstone that is created with an ordinary minetest.set_node call will revert to Native Anchorstone since it won't have a destination set in its metadata.

anchorstone.create_displaced_anchorstone_item(destination_pos) returns an ItemStack containing a Displaced Anchorstone node with its destination set to destination_pos. Creating a Displaced Anchorstone ItemStack without using this function will cause the Displaced Anchorstone to revert to Native Anchorstone when placed, since it will have no destination set in its metadata.

Dependencies

depends = default, bucket

Links

Anchorstone is licenced under the MIT license.

* GitHub repository
* Download

[Ignaramico]

Not gonna lie, the concept is cool. basically finding natural teleport points/potions. i just tested it in creative so i dont know how frequently they spawn but if they spawn in clusters, i feel the trigger recipe could use another thing that mese crystals fragments (i feel like them are too rare) maybe using one dug anchor stone to craft fragments of it and use those or something.

and i liked the description, it kinda felt like lore.

Edit: nevermind the spawn of it, i felt it pretty balanced, even more for how random they "y" spawning is. still feel the price to use them is pretty steep.

[Desour]

I love the idea.

Suggestions:
Add shooting stars, as sort of fragments of fixed stars, and allow using them the same way as the anchorstone, (but limited in power (= doesn't go to the stat but only in its direction), as they are only a small piece of a giant fixed star that is lightyears far away). The destination could depend on daytime.
Then add a way to use multiple anchorstones and shooting stars at once. The destination is determined via simple vector addition (and maybe scale by the inverse of the sum of the distances) (or maybe calculating some curve with forces quadratic to the distances to the destinations?). This allows difficult, but arbitrary teleportation.

[Ignaramico]

I love the idea.

Suggestions:
Add shooting stars, as sort of fragments of fixed stars, and allow using them the same way as the anchorstone, (but limited in power (= doesn't go to the stat but only in its direction), as they are only a small piece of a giant fixed star that is lightyears far away). The destination could depend on daytime.
Then add a way to use multiple anchorstones and shooting stars at once. The destination is determined via simple vector addition (and maybe scale by the inverse of the sum of the distances) (or maybe calculating some curve with forces quadratic to the distances to the destinations?). This allows difficult, but arbitrary teleportation.

that reminded me of that meseport (or something like that) mod where you add a node then then some mese nodes to the side you want to be teleported in a vector way.

[FaceDeer]

Meseport is actually what inspired me to produce a couple of teleport mods of my own, including this one. I've never been fond of the "teleport booth" style teleporters, IMO they remove the sense of geography from a world and turn it into just a list of addresses.

i feel the trigger recipe could use another thing that mese crystals fragments (i feel like them are too rare) maybe using one dug anchor stone to craft fragments of it and use those or something.

Balancing recipes and other "gameplay" parameters like that has always been one of my bigger challenges when making Minetest mods because in all honesty I don't really get to *play* Minetest all that much. For me the fun comes from the programming side of things.

There is a configurable setting, "anchorstone_trigger_uses", that lets you set how quickly an anchorstone trigger "wears out" (or whether it wears out at all). So if you think the trigger is expensive you can set this to "0" and at least you only ever need to craft one trigger item, it'll just keep on working from then on. It should be defaulting to infinite uses, actually - let me know if that's not the case.

I'm just in the midst of creating another teleportation-related mod, hopefully it'll be done in a day or two. I'll revisit anchorstone's crafting recipes then and see if I can add some kind of configurable cost for the trigger to let server admins choose how easy they want it to be for players to craft one.

[Ignaramico]

gonna try that, i changed the recipe in fear i would mess something if i altered that kind of value.

Hope to see your new mod soon

[FaceDeer]

Hope to see your new mod soon

You can find the work-in-progress in this github repository. It's a mod to allow the creation of "pocket dimensions", isolated map blocks that players can teleport into and back out of again to return to their original location in-world.

As of writing this post the basic mechanics should all be functional. Use the chat command /pocket_admin to open an administrative interface to create and mess around with pocket dimensions, or enable the "pocket_dimensions_personal_pockets" setting to allow players to use the /pocket_personal chat command to jump into and out of a personal pocket dimension. There's a "portal" node than can be used to let players jump into a pocket dimension it's been linked to as well. A pocket dimension can have an "owner" set and can be set as protected so that only the owner can mess with its contents.

The main incomplete bits are:

* I haven't settled on what the boundary of the pocket dimensions should look like. I've coded up four different ideas so far and haven't really liked any of them, will continue to muck about. In the end these may all end up as options you can choose from.
* Need to add a way to change the "landing point" inside a pocket dimension, right now it defaults to the center of the map block.
* Maybe add some way for players to "craft" a pocket dimension, separate from the personal pockets mechanic.

Note that this is still a very rough implementation, definitely don't use this on a server you care about. Since this is not yet released I'm not making any effort to keep new commits compatible with previous ones, and a horrible bug may destroy the world at any time.

Edit: made a forum post for it here.

[Astrobe]

Thanks to Nathan who made me (re)discover this mod with his review and also thanks for going the extra mile of uploading the reviews on Peertube.

I believe this could be a killer feature for dungeons. Dungeon loot is kind of meh in particular past the early phase of the game. But if a dungeon is very likely to harbor an anchorstone (or similar)... That makes searching for and exploring dungeons way more attractive, if those devices cannot be crafted.