The Wall is a minigame challenge that I devised after settling on a chunk error.
Yes, sometimes the map generator binge drinks.
It started as something to do when I was bored, and I've since developed it into a two parts minigame, one part Roleplaying game that helps pass several nights. The rules have undergone several refinements, and I thought I'd share them with you, in case either you want to play for yourself, or if you can suggest some new rules to make it more interesting. Keep in mind the object of the game isn't to make it hard/impossible to win, but challenging and strategic nonetheless. Above all else, it should help kill some time.
The Setup
If you can find an area enclosed on three sides, that would be ideal. Of course, you're welcome to create your own setup; the only constant should be that one side is exposed to a wide, open area where mobs can spawn freely. This will be the place where you will place The Wall. You should have a well-lit courtyard on your side of The Wall, so you may move freely without risk of enemies spawning on your side.
Rules for location, size and composition of The Wall
[*:17kcxh2b]The Wall should be as long as you can manage, to provide a large area that enemies can attack.
[*:17kcxh2b]The Wall must be made porous, to not only allow you to stab enemies through it with melee weapons, but to allow enemies to track you more easily.
[*:17kcxh2b]The Wall cannot be made out of anything stronger than dirt. Initially it should be uniformly made of dirt, but in a pinch, weaker materials should work fine (aka wool). At no point can the wall be created or repaired with wood, stone, etc.
[*:17kcxh2b] OPTIONAL: You can choose to forgo spider-proofing the outer side of the wall (dirt blocks placed every second block) to allow them inside your defenses. That is up to you. However, if you choose to spider-proof The Wall, the dirt blocks composing such a layer must be accessible to a creeper explosion, so that any detonation will render that part of The Wall helpless against spider invasion.
[*:17kcxh2b] The maximum height of The Wall must be such that you can attract the attention of enemies from atop it. Therefore, extremely tall Walls are forbidden.
[*:17kcxh2b]The Wall cannot be more than one block thick; you will need it to be thin in order to attack.
[*:17kcxh2b]Torches cannot be placed on the outer edge of The Wall.
[*:17kcxh2b]There should be at least one door allowing you to access the outside area.
The Player
The situation is similar to Helm's Deep; the enemy is advancing on you, but you are safe behind your great Wall, at least for now. However, unlike the classic scene from the novel/movie, you are fighting this one alone. Poorly equipped and outnumbered, you must survive with limited resources for a number of days (until you decide to stop playing is fine).
During the day, you are allowed to prepare for nightfall. This includes eating food to restore your health, crafting new weapons, dropping off enemy loot, and repairing The Wall as necessary. However, by dusk, all preparation must cease. You are permitted to take the following into battle:
[*:17kcxh2b]Up to two Stone Swords.
[*:17kcxh2b]Up to 16 Dirt blocks.
No armor, ranged weapons, blocks other than dirt, swords of greater quality than stone, tools, or more than 16 dirt blocks are allowed.
As dusk falls, you must stand back to allow enemies to spawn as close to The Wall as possible. Once night has fallen, you must climb to the top of The Wall, and lure enemies to the edge as much as possible. Then you may return to the base, and use your Stone Sword to attack enemies through the openings in The Wall. If no enemies are available, and dawn has not yet broken, you must pull back briefly, allow mobs to spawn, and return to battle. (As long as it's available, feel free during these periods to use F3 to verify enemies have returned to the battlefield.)
Naturally, zombies won't be any threat, and should spider-proofing be in place, they won't be either. The danger comes from creepers and skeletons. Without armor or a ranged weapon, skeletons will be painful should you fail to dodge their arrows, and... need I really go into why creepers are a problem? (Well, I will mention that, for now, creepers are glitched which happens to make them harder to kill without incident with melee weapons; they sometimes stay "primed" longer than they're supposed to, exploding the instant you get close again. So long as this bug persists, the game is a bit more challenging.)
Wall Breach
In the event that a creeper should detonate, most likely due to a skeleton's arrow striking it, but also possibly from failing to retreat fast enough with a melee weapon, it will blow a large hole in The Wall, certainly large enough for other mobs to get through. In gameplay terms, you could safely abandon that section for the night, because mobs follow you and aren't smart enough to go around gaps in walls. However, in RP terms, and for the sake of this game, if The Wall is breached, you must assume enemies will take advantage of the breach, and you must remain in the area to defend it. This penalty lasts well into the next day, as no enemies can be within eyesight before you are permitted to leave in search of blocks to repair The Wall. If you have sufficient blocks to repair the gaps, you can move again; otherwise, you're stuck. You must also remain around or in the area where The Wall once stood; you cannot retreat to avoid the line-of-sight of other enemies. (In practice, this gets interesting when a creeper catches you standing next to the crater of another creeper.)
Food
Food cannot be eaten during the night; you're under siege! There's no time for a meal. During the day, you are permitted to use whatever food you have available to heal yourself. (Challenge variants: (1)The player must grow crops for a food source, and the farm must be small enough that a massive stockpile of Wheat cannot be achieved; (2) The player can only eat a limited number of food items to heal up.)
Dawn
As day breaks the next day, the player can begin the process of collecting items that they were not able to collect during the night, and begin preparation for the next day. However, if the player is able to spot enemies that are not destroyed by the daylight (including burning enemies taking refuge under a tree), the player is required to take to the offensive and attack the stragglers. Again, no ranged weapons are allowed. If a Spider has turned neutral, you are still required to kill it, on the grounds that it was a hostile.
Victory Conditions
There are a variety of options here, and you can set them as you wish. Perhaps surviving for X number of days, or acquiring a certain amount of a specific item (after playing this game for a while, I've stockpiled a large amount of Gunpowder). It's quite open-ended. Alternately, you can do as I do, and just play it for a while with no objective in mind.
It's probably bleedingly obvious but I'll say it anyway: Getting killed means you lose.
It's actually fairly simple in practice; most of the rules I ended up making up as I went along to keep things interesting. With the game's AI the way it is, the game isn't hard- I have yet to die while doing this (came close once with three skeletons at once)- but it should be entertaining at least, and help pass a few nights while hopefully providing a bounty of mob-dropped items. Certainly beats grinding them out, and should be more fun than waiting at the bottom of a mob trap. Again, any questions, comments, suggestions on the game are welcome and appreciated. Thanks for reading; take care. :smile.gif:
The Wall is a minigame challenge that I devised after settling on a chunk error.
Yes, sometimes the map generator binge drinks.
It started as something to do when I was bored, and I've since developed it into a two parts minigame, one part Roleplaying game that helps pass several nights. The rules have undergone several refinements, and I thought I'd share them with you, in case either you want to play for yourself, or if you can suggest some new rules to make it more interesting. Keep in mind the object of the game isn't to make it hard/impossible to win, but challenging and strategic nonetheless. Above all else, it should help kill some time.
The Setup
If you can find an area enclosed on three sides, that would be ideal. Of course, you're welcome to create your own setup; the only constant should be that one side is exposed to a wide, open area where mobs can spawn freely. This will be the place where you will place The Wall. You should have a well-lit courtyard on your side of The Wall, so you may move freely without risk of enemies spawning on your side.
Rules for location, size and composition of The Wall
[*:17kcxh2b]The Wall should be as long as you can manage, to provide a large area that enemies can attack.
[*:17kcxh2b]The Wall must be made porous, to not only allow you to stab enemies through it with melee weapons, but to allow enemies to track you more easily.
[*:17kcxh2b]The Wall cannot be made out of anything stronger than dirt. Initially it should be uniformly made of dirt, but in a pinch, weaker materials should work fine (aka wool). At no point can the wall be created or repaired with wood, stone, etc.
[*:17kcxh2b] OPTIONAL: You can choose to forgo spider-proofing the outer side of the wall (dirt blocks placed every second block) to allow them inside your defenses. That is up to you. However, if you choose to spider-proof The Wall, the dirt blocks composing such a layer must be accessible to a creeper explosion, so that any detonation will render that part of The Wall helpless against spider invasion.
[*:17kcxh2b] The maximum height of The Wall must be such that you can attract the attention of enemies from atop it. Therefore, extremely tall Walls are forbidden.
[*:17kcxh2b]The Wall cannot be more than one block thick; you will need it to be thin in order to attack.
[*:17kcxh2b]Torches cannot be placed on the outer edge of The Wall.
[*:17kcxh2b]There should be at least one door allowing you to access the outside area.
The Player
The situation is similar to Helm's Deep; the enemy is advancing on you, but you are safe behind your great Wall, at least for now. However, unlike the classic scene from the novel/movie, you are fighting this one alone. Poorly equipped and outnumbered, you must survive with limited resources for a number of days (until you decide to stop playing is fine).
During the day, you are allowed to prepare for nightfall. This includes eating food to restore your health, crafting new weapons, dropping off enemy loot, and repairing The Wall as necessary. However, by dusk, all preparation must cease. You are permitted to take the following into battle:
[*:17kcxh2b]Up to two Stone Swords.
[*:17kcxh2b]Up to 16 Dirt blocks.
No armor, ranged weapons, blocks other than dirt, swords of greater quality than stone, tools, or more than 16 dirt blocks are allowed.
As dusk falls, you must stand back to allow enemies to spawn as close to The Wall as possible. Once night has fallen, you must climb to the top of The Wall, and lure enemies to the edge as much as possible. Then you may return to the base, and use your Stone Sword to attack enemies through the openings in The Wall. If no enemies are available, and dawn has not yet broken, you must pull back briefly, allow mobs to spawn, and return to battle. (As long as it's available, feel free during these periods to use F3 to verify enemies have returned to the battlefield.)
Naturally, zombies won't be any threat, and should spider-proofing be in place, they won't be either. The danger comes from creepers and skeletons. Without armor or a ranged weapon, skeletons will be painful should you fail to dodge their arrows, and... need I really go into why creepers are a problem? (Well, I will mention that, for now, creepers are glitched which happens to make them harder to kill without incident with melee weapons; they sometimes stay "primed" longer than they're supposed to, exploding the instant you get close again. So long as this bug persists, the game is a bit more challenging.)
Wall Breach
In the event that a creeper should detonate, most likely due to a skeleton's arrow striking it, but also possibly from failing to retreat fast enough with a melee weapon, it will blow a large hole in The Wall, certainly large enough for other mobs to get through. In gameplay terms, you could safely abandon that section for the night, because mobs follow you and aren't smart enough to go around gaps in walls. However, in RP terms, and for the sake of this game, if The Wall is breached, you must assume enemies will take advantage of the breach, and you must remain in the area to defend it. This penalty lasts well into the next day, as no enemies can be within eyesight before you are permitted to leave in search of blocks to repair The Wall. If you have sufficient blocks to repair the gaps, you can move again; otherwise, you're stuck. You must also remain around or in the area where The Wall once stood; you cannot retreat to avoid the line-of-sight of other enemies. (In practice, this gets interesting when a creeper catches you standing next to the crater of another creeper.)
Food
Food cannot be eaten during the night; you're under siege! There's no time for a meal. During the day, you are permitted to use whatever food you have available to heal yourself. (Challenge variants: (1)The player must grow crops for a food source, and the farm must be small enough that a massive stockpile of Wheat cannot be achieved; (2) The player can only eat a limited number of food items to heal up.)
Dawn
As day breaks the next day, the player can begin the process of collecting items that they were not able to collect during the night, and begin preparation for the next day. However, if the player is able to spot enemies that are not destroyed by the daylight (including burning enemies taking refuge under a tree), the player is required to take to the offensive and attack the stragglers. Again, no ranged weapons are allowed. If a Spider has turned neutral, you are still required to kill it, on the grounds that it was a hostile.
Victory Conditions
There are a variety of options here, and you can set them as you wish. Perhaps surviving for X number of days, or acquiring a certain amount of a specific item (after playing this game for a while, I've stockpiled a large amount of Gunpowder). It's quite open-ended. Alternately, you can do as I do, and just play it for a while with no objective in mind.
It's probably bleedingly obvious but I'll say it anyway: Getting killed means you lose.
It's actually fairly simple in practice; most of the rules I ended up making up as I went along to keep things interesting. With the game's AI the way it is, the game isn't hard- I have yet to die while doing this (came close once with three skeletons at once)- but it should be entertaining at least, and help pass a few nights while hopefully providing a bounty of mob-dropped items. Certainly beats grinding them out, and should be more fun than waiting at the bottom of a mob trap. Again, any questions, comments, suggestions on the game are welcome and appreciated. Thanks for reading; take care. :smile.gif: