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[Landmine]

Download: Version 1.2

Older Versions
Version 1.0

Reactor Defence is an arena-based game trying to enhance the classic small arena battle. While you're trapped in an arena fighting mobs, there will be a reactor that will occasionally shut off. You have all of a dozen seconds to hit a button to restart it or you lose.
When a round of combat is completed, win or lose, you are sent back to a safe zone to rearm yourself (note: you are always supplied with an indestructible wooden sword when the round starts). Thanks to the addition of command blocks, pistons and minecarts (no hamster wheels here), the game is self-resetting and no mods are required for play. Once you caught your breath, pressing the "Start Game" button will send you back into the arena of your choice.

Whats New?
Version 1.2 has finally been released. I spent a couple days straight working on revamping the redstone mechanics so I could easily add new arenas. And it payed off. As you can see, the preview banner now shows a brand new arena: Space Station. Picking this arena (via an expanded safe zone) will reward you with more gold per win, but it runs on a dual reactor system. You must restart two reactors instead of the normal one. Unfortunately, there is no unlocking system because of redstone limits. Lastly, you can now extend the length of your game to 10 cycles instead of the normal 6, adding even more to your gold reward.
*Version 1.2 was completed in the 13w01b snapshot. However, the game should be 100% compatible with Minecraft 1.4.6. Please report any issues if you come across any*


This supports both singleplayer and multiplayer, no mods required. There are a few important notes, however:

Spoiler: Setup Notes

Rules
-Do not cheat and/or hack
-Do not use external mods that alter gameplay
-Do be kind to dogs and not spawn them inside the incinerator

Server Setup
If you run this on a server, please alter the settings to abide the following:

pvp=false
difficulty=2
enable-command-block=true
gamemode=2

General Information
The game currently features a 3-tier currency system (gold, emeralds and XP levels), multiple game-altering settings, different arenas with their own mob waves and companion dogs.

Currency
To get equipment or bonus items/blocks, you need to pay a fee. Weapons and (splash) potions will use up XP levels; armour and bonus items (like enchantment books/tables, ender chests and bookcases) costs gold and emeralds. The more you play, the better your arsenal.
Experience is gained by beating mobs into the ground. Same old, same old.
Gold is rewarded when a round finishes. Changing some game settings and switching arenas will alter how much gold you get.
Emeralds are a second tier of gold, and you trade gold for 5 emeralds. Some items cost both.

Game Settings
-Dynamic Lighting: Have a constant reminder that the reactors are turned off when this option is active. Most of the lights inside the arena will automatically shut off when the reactor fails. This does create brief lag from the lighting changes, and so it is off by default.
-Difficulty: Easy, normal and hard can only go so far. Tougher mobs and stronger attacks are what Minecraft provides. Reactor Defence provides adding more mobs per wave and a bonus to your gold reward should you win.
-Round Length: The normal 6-cycle rounds can seem to go by quickly, with all of the fighting and work. The longer 10-cycle rounds will trap you inside the arena longer. You will get paid overtime for it, though.
-Mobs: You'll be pit up against the common zombie, archer skeleton, poisonous cave spider, fiery blaze and lethal witch. In groups of 5, waves will contain more and more mobs with differing variety. Don't fret, however, because waves will reset after the fifth, giving you some break time (mostly so that you are not spawn killed, or are trying to kill off the infested arena).
-Wolves: BYOW, or the Buy Your Own Wolf program, allows players to purchase wolf spawn eggs to aid you in your defensive stands in the arena. Don't sell all your bones because BYOW does not train their wolves. PS: The incinerator has been made dog proof for your convenience.

Blah Blah Blah
If you every find yourself in creative mode, feel free to check out the mechanics behind the walls. They are somewhat labeled and, if you know your redstone, easy to understand.

Spoiler: Image Gallery

It might seem lazy, but it would be much easier to check out the image gallery rather than post all the screenshots here.
V1.2
Image Gallery

v1.0
Image Gallery

Spoiler: Known Bugs

There are some issues that can occur when playing the game, and while I cannot do anything to fix them I have provided insight on how to cope with or avoid them wherever possible.
-Buttons are known to go missing at random intervals. Please seek the button dispenser to recieve new ones. Different coloured blocks are placed where buttons are located
-On servers, weapons are notorious for being at a constant 1-hit-remaining state. As part of making the weapons indestructible, server players will experience their weapon constantly breaking and returning to their inventory. Singleplayer has no such issues reported
-Adventure Mode does not stop players from breaking Glass, Redstone, Redstone Torches, Redstone Lamps, Buttons or Leavers. Please refrain from destroying them

Special Thanks To:
Ferrishweel42 and VictimOfScience as testers
SethBling for his many MCEdit Filters
DavidsKanal for a template spawn section (partly modified for this)

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License

[Crzydrvr]

Made an account just to say that me and my buds loved the game. It's awesome.That's all that needs to be said.

If you're willing to accept it, some feedback:

-We loved the idea of having to go back to the button to avoid losing the round, and it was incredibly challenging (and fun) if the reactor time coincided with the start of the next wave of enemies. But it did get a little dull after a couple of rounds since we only had one room. An idea that I would LOVE to see in an update or something would be to make more rooms and either randomize which "dungeon" you enter when you click the enter game button or make a whole bunch of buttons that lead to different rooms. Maybe make it so that you'd have to use the gold you win to unlock more dungeons. Having a variety of rooms with different levels of difficulty and/or size would make this map even more enjoyable and for a lot longer period of time.

-we screwed up the game once when I accidentally disconnected during a round, and so I had to bust through the wall and walk back to the break room to click the emergency reset button. That one was a minor and easily solved issue, but maybe making emergency "give up" buttons in the room itself would be nice (just in case we ever feel like we're getting whooped anyways or something).

-The break room was a little small to be honest. I kinda imagine more of a "shop" type feel than a little "Garden of Eden", although I did like the fact that you went a different route. But at the very least a little more room to move around would be nice. Especially since one of our guys is pretty big on enchanting and anvils and immediately tried to set up a clump of bookshelves with his gold.

Overall, I have to say it's a great gametype with a lot of potential and I can't wait to see where you go with this. For anyone else reading this, I completely recommend the map. Play it with your friends. It's worth the few minutes it takes to download and set it up in a server.

Me and my buds are looking forward to what you've got in store for this in the future. Keep up the awesome stuff! Totally fine with offering any suggestions or feedback if you're okay with it.

[Phonix96]

I really like it! good job!

[Landmine]

Crzydrvr, on 26 November 2012 - 04:18 AM, said:

Made an account just to say that me and my buds loved the game. It's awesome.That's all that needs to be said.

If you're willing to accept it, some feedback:

-We loved the idea of having to go back to the button to avoid losing the round, and it was incredibly challenging (and fun) if the reactor time coincided with the start of the next wave of enemies. But it did get a little dull after a couple of rounds since we only had one room. An idea that I would LOVE to see in an update or something would be to make more rooms and either randomize which "dungeon" you enter when you click the enter game button or make a whole bunch of buttons that lead to different rooms. Maybe make it so that you'd have to use the gold you win to unlock more dungeons. Having a variety of rooms with different levels of difficulty and/or size would make this map even more enjoyable and for a lot longer period of time.

-we screwed up the game once when I accidentally disconnected during a round, and so I had to bust through the wall and walk back to the break room to click the emergency reset button. That one was a minor and easily solved issue, but maybe making emergency "give up" buttons in the room itself would be nice (just in case we ever feel like we're getting whooped anyways or something).

-The break room was a little small to be honest. I kinda imagine more of a "shop" type feel than a little "Garden of Eden", although I did like the fact that you went a different route. But at the very least a little more room to move around would be nice. Especially since one of our guys is pretty big on enchanting and anvils and immediately tried to set up a clump of bookshelves with his gold.

Overall, I have to say it's a great gametype with a lot of potential and I can't wait to see where you go with this. For anyone else reading this, I completely recommend the map. Play it with your friends. It's worth the few minutes it takes to download and set it up in a server.

Me and my buds are looking forward to what you've got in store for this in the future. Keep up the awesome stuff! Totally fine with offering any suggestions or feedback if you're okay with it.

Sorry it took so long to reply, but thanks for the feedback.

As far as multiple arenas go, I believe it would be entirely possible. Of course, adding in unlockable "dungeons" would mean the bigger safe-zone. I'll see where the designs take this "safe-zone"/trading post. As a side-note, during my tests my friends would place the enchanting tables and anvils inside the arena. Really wasn't a smart idea.
For the give-up button, it would make it too easy to farm gold the way I currently have things set up. At the start of each round every player gets 1 gold. Even if I set up a command block to remove a gold from every player, if 4 players gave their gold to one, there would still be 3 free gold. I'll have to look into dealing with that issue, though.

Phonix96, on 26 November 2012 - 01:09 PM, said:

I really like it! good job!

Thanks.

[Landmine]

If you haven't noticed already, I've added a poll. In tandem with new arenas, I was wondering what you players want to see both in arenas and game-mechanics.
As far as arena themes go, there will be changed to how the mobs spawn, but very little chance to change the mobs that spawn. I'm not sure how people will feel about having creepers run around the field, and ghasts are just massive (normal spiders like to suffocate in the dispensers). New arenas also means different layouts and new ideas for game mechanics, one being the dual-reactor (you have to reset 2 reactors every time there is a shutdown).
Game mechanics will add functionality. From being able to buy new obstacles (or take them away, perhaps) to a new All-or-Nothing difficulty (big payoff if you win, but you loose your entire inventory if you fail). When you play, what do you want to see/be able to do?

[Crzydrvr]

Is it too much to ask for all of the above as far as room types? I feel like I'm being a little greedy but they all seem like they'd be awesome (and even better, PLAUSIBLE) options. You could name them in the format of a single word that describes them (like "Factory" for the first one, "Pipe" for an underwater tunnel system, "Mineshaft" for an abandoned mineshaft theme etc.).

I like the idea of enchanting, but I think (looking at the results of my group's playthrough) having an enchanting room where you can enchant items would be better than handing out pre-enchanted weapons. If you could create an already-made enchantment room (and toll a fee of something like 25 gold pieces to open the doorway to it) I think that would be the ideal case for me personally

I also think that taking out the in-dungeon weapon and food dispensers (other than the spare button dispenser and potions) would be a better idea than having them straight in the room itself. It would make the game more interesting to play if guys run out of weapons and armour in the middle of a round (and honestly, we die so often even with the armour and weapons that food doesn't really do much to help us, and you respawn with your inventory anyways even if you do die/starve). If possible, you could have another villager (or a few for different weapons) who would sell you them in the break room.

Hope that helps out a little.

[Landmine]

Crzydrvr, on 07 December 2012 - 02:56 AM, said:

Is it too much to ask for all of the above as far as room types? I feel like I'm being a little greedy but they all seem like they'd be awesome (and even better, PLAUSIBLE) options. You could name them in the format of a single word that describes them (like "Factory" for the first one, "Pipe" for an underwater tunnel system, "Mineshaft" for an abandoned mineshaft theme etc.).

I like the idea of enchanting, but I think (looking at the results of my group's playthrough) having an enchanting room where you can enchant items would be better than handing out pre-enchanted weapons. If you could create an already-made enchantment room (and toll a fee of something like 25 gold pieces to open the doorway to it) I think that would be the ideal case for me personally

I also think that taking out the in-dungeon weapon and food dispensers (other than the spare button dispenser and potions) would be a better idea than having them straight in the room itself. It would make the game more interesting to play if guys run out of weapons and armour in the middle of a round (and honestly, we die so often even with the armour and weapons that food doesn't really do much to help us, and you respawn with your inventory anyways even if you do die/starve). If possible, you could have another villager (or a few for different weapons) who would sell you them in the break room.

Hope that helps out a little.

The whole idea of new features is to add them, thus I want them to be plausible. As for asking for everything, I'm not a man of infinite time. I'm looking for what people want the most so that I can bring it to them sooner. In the end, I hope to have included them. That said, I cannot please those who do not provide feedback.

Enchanting, as of 12w49a, is going to change. As good as enchantments are, getting level 3+ of anything makes you pretty strong, which is why bookcases are quite expensive. Right now, my idea is that you'll have a selection of enchanted books to buy for a cheaper price, an enchanting table at a higher price, and bookcases will still be quite expensive. Armour is probably going to increase in price because I see people grabbing diamond armour too quickly; it would do no good to have diamond armour once you unlock a second arena.
But for your question, upon adding new rooms and expanding the safe-zone, I will probably take your idea: adding in an enchanting room to unlock with everything enchanting.

I'll also be relocating weapon/potion purchases. It will allow maps to be more creative (less redstone to try and work around) and I wont need a copy for every arena.

On the topic of different arenas, I've hit a slight roadblock. Unlocking arenas currently has no balanced unlocking system. Using a drop-in gold/emerald counter system is easily tricked, and XP doesn't seem appropriate. If you have input on how to unlock more arenas, please make a post. I'm willing to read all comments.

[Crzydrvr]

Landmine, on 09 December 2012 - 02:48 AM, said:

On the topic of different arenas, I've hit a slight roadblock. Unlocking arenas currently has no balanced unlocking system. Using a drop-in gold/emerald counter system is easily tricked, and XP doesn't seem appropriate. If you have input on how to unlock more arenas, please make a post. I'm willing to read all comments.

I think there was a map called Chronotide, where you had to place down a block in order to activate some redstone, which would trigger another set of pistons and redstone wiring that would do things like shift blocks and blow up TNT. Perhaps you could PM the makers of that map for advice? I know it's not the most reliable piece of advice, but as you said other options are really not appealing.

I think XP would be the best option personally, but maybe that's just me.

[Landmine]

Crzydrvr, on 13 December 2012 - 05:44 AM, said:

I think there was a map called Chronotide, where you had to place down a block in order to activate some redstone, which would trigger another set of pistons and redstone wiring that would do things like shift blocks and blow up TNT. Perhaps you could PM the makers of that map for advice? I know it's not the most reliable piece of advice, but as you said other options are really not appealing.

I think XP would be the best option personally, but maybe that's just me.

Hmm, I'll look into maps like that, see if they have good systems. Otherwise it's XP or playing X rounds to unlock a new room (which I don't think is a great idea).

[Landmine]

Version 1.2 has finally been released. It took quite awhile to edit all the redstone I made, but I have been able to add a brand new arena: the Space Station with dual-core action.
Unfortunately, I did not come across anything that would allow for an unlockable arena selection, so they are all available first thing. In addition, the selection room does not display the currently selected arena. This is due to room size and the redstone surrounding the outer walls.

Never-the-less, seek the first post for the download and enjoy!
Next up, another arena and some hidden mob spawners in the previous ones (we'll see how testing goes).

[Lord_Eclipse]

This looks neat I haven't played it yet but I'm sure it will be fun.

[Landmine]

Lord_Eclipse, on 05 January 2013 - 09:11 PM, said:

This looks neat I haven't played it yet but I'm sure it will be fun.

Hope you enjoy it and give some feedback.

In other news, I updated the first post with some new information, and made a couple small adjustments to the polls (which is to see what you guys want for the next version). Suggestions on ideas are still welcome.
Also, there is now a planet Minecraft page to check out (this thread will likely stay the project hub, however): http://www.planetmin...eactor-defence/