I am intrigued with the possibilities of NPC trading to add a new level of depth to the game economy, but there seems to me to be one thing missing: a reason to travel. Oh, sure, you can travel to find new resources, but ultimately it's only the non-renewables that you'll need to seek out, because eventually every competent player settlement accumulates a way to generate most all of the renewables domestically.
So I'd like to propose a new item: import/export parcels. These would be non-stackable items, nonstackable because they would each need to contain identifying data: the x and z coordinates of the player at the time the item was created (bought from an NPC villager). They would represent generic parcels of trade goods, mail, and other freight that needs to be delivered to another village somewhere else. You'd buy them from an NPC villager in one place, and then sell them to an NPC villager at least 256 blocks away, for a profit that would be depend on the distance from where it was originally made. The farther away the villager you deliver it to, the more emeralds it's worth.
The idea here is that you'd still have a reason to develop roads, rail lines, maritime shipping routes or even Netherports between NPC villages to carry these parcels, and on multiplayer servers otherwise self-sufficient player settlements would still have things to trade with each other.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
For philosophy, law, science, religion and other topics: A Blog of Tom
Seems quite interesting.
Would this be incorporated with Chest Carts?
I reckon this could be done with chest carts, but I think something different would be more awesome; i.e. Parcel carts. These must be linked to a furnace cart (powered rails don't work with them, and a furnace cart is more deliberate) and then sent along a railway. There is some kind of rail (station rail?) at the other end, (in a village) and the villagers will take the contents of the parcel, and send back some form of payment. (Coins, as I don't like the emerald trading system. (dw, I may make a suggestion post about the recipe for said coins.)) This can be repeated multiple times. As opposed to purchasing the parcels, I think that they should be made somehow, with some paper and some wood. (<- wood?) The parcel cart is created with a parcel and a minecart.
I've tried to limit the idea to one that would work with as little change to the existing code as possible, which is why I wanted it to be simply an item you could buy from villagers and sell to other villagers. (Or, presumably, the same villager if you transported it far enough from where the parcel was first created. Doesn't matter. That creates a passenger rail industry, which is also cool.)
Parcel carts wouldn't work with the current code structure, because Minecraft only runs the simulation for the chunks in the immediate surroundings of the player. You can see this if you, for example, put a bunch of stuff in a furnace, then go away for a long time; when you come back, the furnace will still be burning at the same point it was when the chunk was saved. So the parcel cart would stop moving immediately when it passed into a chunk out of range of an active player, and only continue along the rails once a player came into range of that chunk.
But storage carts and powered rails WOULD be a potentially very efficient way of making this trade happen, provided you had some way of keeping all the chunks along the way loaded when the cart was moving. In solo games, it would be cost-effective to amass a stockpile of trade parcels, then load them all into minecarts and deliver them in bulk to a sufficiently distant NPC village to sell them there.
As for the idea of crafting trade parcels, that's an interesting one, and it could work, actually, even without NPC villagers being directly involved. Here's one possibility:
You craft a trade parcel out of say, nine of a single kind of renewable good typically used by consumers. Say, nine blocks of wool, or nine bowls of mushroom stew, or nine wheat. (Exact recipe isn't important at this point). As in the OP, the parcel is stamped with its x,z coordinates.
A trade parcel can be placed as a block, and then broken with a sword. It will drop a number of emeralds based upon how far it is from its manufacture.
Alternatively, the trade parcel can be sold to an NPC villager as in the OP.
Again, the idea here is to create a mechanism whereby villages or player settlements can realized advantages of trade, shipping goods back and forth. Self-sufficiency is good, but there really ought to be some benefit to long distance interaction.
So I'd like to propose a new item: import/export parcels. These would be non-stackable items, nonstackable because they would each need to contain identifying data: the x and z coordinates of the player at the time the item was created (bought from an NPC villager). They would represent generic parcels of trade goods, mail, and other freight that needs to be delivered to another village somewhere else. You'd buy them from an NPC villager in one place, and then sell them to an NPC villager at least 256 blocks away, for a profit that would be depend on the distance from where it was originally made. The farther away the villager you deliver it to, the more emeralds it's worth.
The idea here is that you'd still have a reason to develop roads, rail lines, maritime shipping routes or even Netherports between NPC villages to carry these parcels, and on multiplayer servers otherwise self-sufficient player settlements would still have things to trade with each other.
Would this be incorporated with Chest Carts?
I reckon this could be done with chest carts, but I think something different would be more awesome; i.e. Parcel carts. These must be linked to a furnace cart (powered rails don't work with them, and a furnace cart is more deliberate) and then sent along a railway. There is some kind of rail (station rail?) at the other end, (in a village) and the villagers will take the contents of the parcel, and send back some form of payment. (Coins, as I don't like the emerald trading system. (dw, I may make a suggestion post about the recipe for said coins.)) This can be repeated multiple times. As opposed to purchasing the parcels, I think that they should be made somehow, with some paper and some wood. (<- wood?) The parcel cart is created with a parcel and a minecart.
Parcel carts wouldn't work with the current code structure, because Minecraft only runs the simulation for the chunks in the immediate surroundings of the player. You can see this if you, for example, put a bunch of stuff in a furnace, then go away for a long time; when you come back, the furnace will still be burning at the same point it was when the chunk was saved. So the parcel cart would stop moving immediately when it passed into a chunk out of range of an active player, and only continue along the rails once a player came into range of that chunk.
But storage carts and powered rails WOULD be a potentially very efficient way of making this trade happen, provided you had some way of keeping all the chunks along the way loaded when the cart was moving. In solo games, it would be cost-effective to amass a stockpile of trade parcels, then load them all into minecarts and deliver them in bulk to a sufficiently distant NPC village to sell them there.
As for the idea of crafting trade parcels, that's an interesting one, and it could work, actually, even without NPC villagers being directly involved. Here's one possibility:
- You craft a trade parcel out of say, nine of a single kind of renewable good typically used by consumers. Say, nine blocks of wool, or nine bowls of mushroom stew, or nine wheat. (Exact recipe isn't important at this point). As in the OP, the parcel is stamped with its x,z coordinates.
- A trade parcel can be placed as a block, and then broken with a sword. It will drop a number of emeralds based upon how far it is from its manufacture.
- Alternatively, the trade parcel can be sold to an NPC villager as in the OP.
Again, the idea here is to create a mechanism whereby villages or player settlements can realized advantages of trade, shipping goods back and forth. Self-sufficiency is good, but there really ought to be some benefit to long distance interaction.