1.17 World Reset

Here's how I'm envisioning the 1.17 reset going down:

1. Everyone meets in the lobby at a specific date and time.
2. After a few minutes or we have a critical mass, the Survival gate opens up for access. Everyone jumps through.
3. For the first month or so, maybe longer, first-time players who join the server are teleported to a random location in the new world. This disperses people away from spawn.

If we like it, random-tp-on-first-join might stay in place permanently.

Dispersing people away from spawn allows us to build up the spawn area as more of a community space/shopping district than Channelside was. Channelside started out as a tiny private build before it became the basis for Malloc; lets do something intentional this time!

Proposed Changes

Use the 1.18 generator datapack

Minecraft 1.17 doesn't include the new world generation yet, but Mojang provides an official server data pack that brings it to 1.17. We'll be using this and hopefully the transition to 1.18 won't cause any big problems. Or we'll do another server reset, who knows.

Using Residences instead of Towny

Towny is big and heavy and seems too complicated for people to figure out. In the past, Caminus used Residences. Lets do that again; the plot claiming is intuitive, you're not stuck on a grid, and PvP isn't actually the core focus of it. If we want PvP, that can still happen, probably better off as another minigame server via the lobby.

New Region Mechanics

Regions 0.3 is getting released this month. It includes a bunch of exciting new features that we'll be using:

• Create new region posts by placing a special lantern item, instead pestering an admin to do it for you
• Region posts consume charges, to make their use a bit less gamebreaking.
• Regons can get banners and customized colors!
• World Hubs: Charging a region post enough times will level it up into a world hub. World hubs are instantly accessible from any other region post, including other world hubs, however this isn't bidirectional; non-hub posts can only be accessed from adjacent posts, just like before.

NPC Server Town

In order to guarantee the availability of region post items, we'll be building up a town around spawn that provides some basic shops, along with the ability for players to rent out shop space in town via Residences.

The server town will feature some goofy NPCs to build some RP ambiance, along with the portal back to the lobby. This also gives us a community-wide canvas to do group themed builds, like pride month, holidays, birthdays, whatever else we want to collaborate on.

Server-wide boosts

A common scheme to monetize and pay for a server is to sell server-wide boosts. In order to not violate the minecraft EULA, real money purchases cannot give any individual player an advantage over another, be it through buying XP, buying blocks, buying in-game items, and similar. Instead, servers let players purchase a limited-time buff that applies to everyone on the server, such as double XP for an hour, give everyone some ephemeral snowballs for a snowball fight, cosmetics, things like that. We already have cosmetics in the lobby, I don't see why we can't bring a couple of them into Survival.