The question we should ask is not whether the game is realistic so much as if it's fun and balanced. Making it so that the character has a fun dynamic of play is paramount.
So, for Laue's comment, I do agree that these should be rare to build. The deal with building an entire town just to deal with one person, though, is that the town will grow based directly on how much you put into its development: If you trade a lot of valuable goods, you strike it rich on your own and people will flock to you because you have a lot of valuable resources that you mine and can trade off.
However, rarity is still an issue. We don't want to overflow the player. So, the basis for the town is that there's one building you can go to to pay off your debt (town hall) and one building to go buy general merchandise ("store") - these are the two most basic and the first two to be built.
For building further buildings, we have a number of options regarding progression.
1: The Player must invest for the town to grow.
This is a very player-controlled system. The player must invest a certain total value of goods or money, but when he does so, he gets to choose the next buildings. Certain buildings could have certain values, and so on. Probably difficult to program. An interesting option for this system is that a character could buy a foundation stone for each building and determine its positions. Of course, foundation stones would have to be a certain distance apart to work, to prevent overlap.
2: What the player buys determines what gets built.
This is fairly simple and intuitive. The player buys lots of weapons? A blacksmith gets built. Player likes food? A bakery or butcher or something. Player mostly prefers high-value or exotic merchandise? A foreign trader from very far away sets up shop, and so on. Again, fairly difficult to code (probably)
3: The buildings follow a simple, preset order.
This way is most likely the simplest to code and control, and mods could be put into place to determine building order. Basically, as you spend money, buildings are built in a preset order that is the same for every game.
With these systems, the town builds up only as you invest, so the more attention you pay to it, the more it grows. That way, you know where to place the town based on how much you'll use it (or, for the first option, if you take the foundation stone approach, you get to control the layout of the town completely.)
Regarding multiple foundation stones for towns, I'm not too sure there should even be several stones available unless you decide to edit one in. The foundation stone will get you a town hall, a town square and a store, and having multiple town squares might be something that you would only find if the town got extremely large. Maybe, after a long time, you could buy a second one, but I think at first you should only be able to purchase one.
Of course, I wouldn't give Nether Merchants cities or anything, that might make the game a little too easy, but it might be interesting to see a demon or something that wanders around in the Nether and will sell you some interesting stuff that you might not be able to find anywhere else. He could even have a zombie donkey or something. lol
As for the process of building, I'm not sure if they would build the town in a way that you can see, just because I don't think mobs can build anything right now, but if there comes a time where such a feature is workable, then that's A-ok. As of the current system for having mobs, I think it would be simpler if one building were generated at every sunrise and sunset until the town has reached its fullest extent, bearing in mind that the town will never take up much space - maybe 10-15 buildings total.
As for their campfires burning down the forest - that might be an interesting idea, but some players wouldn't enjoy watching their forest burn either, especially if they're relying on resources from that forest.
Question for all of you: Merchants in the Nether? Civilized pig-men or netherworld travelers, or otherworldly creatures of an entirely different kind, or should they exist at all? Maybe the Wizard and Dwarf live in the Nether, or Nether merchants are another way of getting magical fairy-dust materials and your own army of gremlins?
That's an interesting concept, Laue.... I'd be really easy to put into the tutorial so new characters won't be surprised when merchants are building their houses on their castles, they'll know to go far away with it. It also makes it so you don't have to use an editor (since some player are against editors) if you want to place the town. Very fun. :smile.gif:
This would fare quite well actually, with one simply being able to TNT cannon them into oblivion if they are unwanted, eventually making it so they never come back, or instead welcome them as villagers! Would they allow tampering with their structures, allowing one to insert their own architectural style to go with the rest of their world's "Theme", or would smashing a single cobblestone brick impose the death sentence?
As for destroying their property, I think there would only be a few things they would hold so dear that they don't let you touch them. There are a variety of ways this conundrum of destruction of property could be dealt with - one would be that they won't let you buy anything until you pay off what you destroyed, but if you filled in the blocks their buildings used to be made of, they wouldn't take down your blocks and add their own or anything.
That's actually a rather difficult problem to solve...
Really well fleshed out idea if I might say. I kept trying to find issues with it, but I really couldn't. The only thing I'd like to add is that these cities and towns that are permanent should be very far into the wilderness, and one stack of diamond should definitely not be enough for a diamond. Maybe 5 stacks to a diamond.. maybe.
Really though I like the idea.
The exchange rate would be up to Notch, though I do agree about diamonds. I also think think permanent settlements should be far enough away that you don't regularly get bothered by them, though, as I posted in my last post, they would be centered around an invisible point that could be moved using a map editor.
Ok, here's my problem: the merchants will impede on my efforts to built giant fortresses. What will prevent me from simply dynamiting these villages into oblivion? Will this result in the merchant's relatives declaring war on me? Will they impose some sort of blockade on my home? Just wondering. A full scale war would add so much to this game (perhaps my necromancy based army of minions could help?).
That's a fair idea, and I like it.
For the part of the impediment on fortress building, they would build far away from you and the build point would be movable. Here's how this might work in my mind.
Every town has an imaginary block (similar to the spawn point) around which the town is based. Every town is identical, and built up around the invisible block based on its location. So what if I want to build a new fortress right where this town is? Well, there's certainly room for that. Using a simple map editor, you would have to move the block.
As for the wars, that would be a fun addition but probably take a lot of RAM to work. Yes, though, I think if things developed to the town state or higher, people would send guards to you and begin to attack you. The fort would also have a small armory where weapons are kept (and can be stolen from ;D ) and guards would come out of this barracks if you decide to attack the fort. In the case of the Wizard and the Dwarf, the Wiz would send his goons after you until you manage to kill him. He'd make a fun epic boss if you let him get powerful enough.
I tend to agree with what you're saying, Obollzzor.
The initial merchants would stay for the shortest amount of time (1-3 days) while the guarded, more affluent ones would come and stay for longer.
I think this idea was really cool and well explained! But I think they should be able to notice in other ways than campfire or lights. And for how long would they stay in your area?
It would depend on the number. At first, the small caravans or single merchants would stay from 1-6 days, while large caravans would stay for maybe a week to start off, the time period increasing until a permanent camp was built (which would eventually progress into a town.)
I apologize if I'm reposting an idea, search doesn't work right now.
The Band of Merchants
The Travelling Merchant is a mob (or a group of mobs - a caravan) which has a very low probability of spawning at the corner of your map each day and approaching you with buyable goods. They set up camp in the countryside somewhere and their campfire smokes and lights make them abundantly obvious. While they're camped on your land, the merchant or caravan will hunt pigs and maybe cut down a few trees, and fight mobs if they approach them. Each merchant or group has a camel or donkey which carries their wares, and the merchants themselves are armed to defend their goods.
How this works is that each block is assigned a value (dirt = 0, cobblestone or wood = 1, coal = 3, diamond = 256, gold =200) where the value of that item in total is how much you must barter in order to receive objects of equal value (I have to spend one full stack of 64 cobblestone for one diamond). When you approach the mob's beast of burden or cart, you may open a trading screen. There, you may freely switch items between the inventories, and a small counter shows the total value of the trade - if you try to take items without paying enough, the merchant won't allow for it, and if you try to spend more than the worth of what you're buying, it will ask if you're sure. If you kill all the merchants attached to the beasts or cart, the items are yours for the taking - but the merchants may travel in groups and/or have armored guards and are strong enough in numbers to kill you even on peaceful mode (if they even spawn in peaceful mode). Also, if you kill a lot of merchants, they'll stop coming around.
The value and number of goods in a caravan depends on the number of merchants in it. A single merchant may have things that you could get with a little bit of effort (refined iron, some weapons, armor, and tools, bucket, etc.) while larger caravans have a larger carrying capacity (more donkeys) and more exotic items (records, diamonds, redstone, saddles, stained glass, dyed cloth)
Coinage and Treasures - an Alternative to the Bartering System
So let's say I've been digging for awhile or, if advanced AI eventually comes to play, I've got somebody digging for me. Well, I've got a lot of gold and diamonds now and nothing to do with them, I have plenty of weapons, but I want some TNT. Well TNT has a value of 55, and I want to get the most for what I have.
My options are to spend a lot of raw materials on this stuff and get a pretty sizeable return (maybe 10 TNT blocks) or I could, perhaps, give the traders what they want, so they can go off and sell my rare goods for double what they spent in some unseen city hundreds of miles away. So, I go to my forge and mint my own coins of pure gold, raising the value of my material nearly twofold. (This would imply that there need to be multiple coins - silver, copper, and gold, which would all have to be found and mined.) Or, if I want to really get some bang for my buck, I can go build myself a crown, a scepter, or some very regal but otherwise useless armor, either to wear for myself and look really awesome, or to sell for a massive return. Other treasures I could produce would include decorative chalices, a candelabra which I could use to light my house, and so on.
Progression - Rags and Bones to Wood to Stone
So let's say I've built myself a very sizeable home and workshop, and I've been producing and trading for useful goods for a long time. Well now the merchants like me and know that I'll bring them back good fortune, so they go out into untouched wilderness outside of the lands that I build on and begin to build themselves a little fort or town, first out of wood, then stone. Here, there is a much more permanent flow of self-sustaining merchants, who bring in and out items of greater value.
So here's how the progression of merchants works: The more value I give away in trade, the larger and more permanent the group of merchants. The first merchants to come by will be single merchants with little to sell, but still bearing some useful or somewhat rare items from time to time. As I spend more, larger groups come by, setting up camp for longer and longer, until they finally decide to build a little town and farm along a river, lake, or ocean, and begin to farm and self-sustain. The town grows over time and they replace their wood buildings with stone and build a little wall, maybe a church or a town hall or something. This would all be programmed in to work the same way every time - they build the exact same little town in every game, or maybe there are a couple or three templates for them to work with. Whatever the case, that little town is eventually a small fort for me to trade with, and it usually has a lot to offer for me that I can't get or don't want to spend the time looking for (clay and bricks, anyone?)
As a short addition, the lengths that caravans would come and stay would also depend on the development.
Here's a list of the progression.
Unguarded, lone merchant: 1-2 days
Guarded merchant: 3-6 days
Caravan (small - 2-3 merchants, 1-3 guards): 6-8 days
Caravan (large - 4-6 merchants, 3-5 guards): 10 days
Semi-permanent trade camp - indefinite, until progression
Town - indefinite, until progression
Walled town - indefinite, until progression
Building The Camp - The Mechanics
Now, there are a lot of issues with trying to build an NPC town in a randomly generated map in any organized way, free of glitches. I've got an idea, but I'm not a programmer, so it might not be very good. Who knows.
I've noticed that, using the map editor MCEdit, I can change my spawn point. This made me a happy ferret, but also gave me an idea for how a town would be built.
When the NPC merchants decide to make a semi-permanent camp, a generation point is chosen somewhere far away from the character's hauntings and spawn point, but within sight distance, on a relatively wide, flat area. The generation point is similar to a spawn point, in essence, but is the point around which the town is built. The buildings in every town are in the exact same position relative to this point, though they adjust with stairs and ladders for height differences. When the point is set, the merchants begin to build the camp.
The first thing the merchants do is set up their fires and build a tall tower, so the player can see them from afar with the smokes, light, and tower up in the distance. There could also be a "merchant compass" which points at the centerpoint of the town at all times.
The generation point of the town, like the spawn point for the character, would be movable using an editor or some other control. All materials would be brought over by carts and therefore the player doesn't have to worry about having all his/her resources mined. This also adds for the option of some rare materials (marble, etc.) for building that the character can only get from merchants.
Debt, Crimes, Punishment, and All-Out War
So let's say I'm a little criminal and want to go pillage and plunder the town - how do I pay for my deeds?
The value system may give us an answer.
There are a variety of crimes a character can commit against the town, among them being theft, murder, destruction of property, and battery.
Theft and Destruction of Property work in essentially the same way: When you steal or destroy something, you have to pay its value in gold or goods before you can buy anything else (in the trade screen, this comes up as negative value, or debt.)
Murder and battery cause the character to have to pay a value as well, but the value is much higher for battery, and even higher for murder.
When your debt gets to a certain level, the town starts sending guards after you that won't kill you, but will either plunder your things, destroy your property, or beat the daylight out of you and then leave. If it comes down to a certain level even further, then the guards will kill you instead of beating you, and if the merchants have enough to spend, the guards will attack your properties with TNT.
What about other forms of debt? There are a variety of cute options for how a player might accrue debt, such as gambling mini-games or a money-lender that comes along when the town gets a wall.
Survival Multiplayer - I Am My Own Merchant
So let's put this into a Survival Multiplayer game, except that instead of traveling merchants, players themselves can set up their own little stores, and, using the "Store Counter" block, they can place their goods into a counter belonging to them, and leave it be while other players come by and buy the goods. The player can toggle items on and off that can be used to buy (so I could have a counter that only accepts gold coins, redstone dust, and buckets as currency) so they can't be griefed with fifty stacks of cobblestone if that's not what they want.
All in all, this is a game mechanic built around the idea of adding a few extra people to the game, as well as a completely optional way for players to trade for goods and start their own enterprises. It would make for a fun way of working things online, and also help characters along who want help in their own single-player worlds. I would like to repeat that the feature is optional, since the merchants won't grow at all if you don't spend money on them, so if you don't want to have merchants in your game you can either toggle them or just ignore them.
Optional Addendum - The Wizard and The Dwarf (related to the Merchant idea)
The Wizard and The Dwarf are a pair of semi-intelligent AI mobs that appear at the beginning of the game, and more of them appear as you explore, though they're very sparse. The Wizard is a mob that can cast magical spells and summon gremlins that run around and do his bidding, whatever it may be, and the Dwarf mines and builds a cobblestone tower for the Wizard. They start out neutral, but will like or dislike the player depending on if he/she attacks the Wizard, Dwarf, or gremlin mobs, or if he/she buys things from the Wizard.
The Wizard would be a valuable resource for the character because you can either raid him for resources and spells or you can buy them (buying resources and causes the wizard to grow in power, but stealing causes him to become more aggressive and he'll begin to try to steal from you and mine more of your resources.) As the Wizard becomes more powerful, he begins to make better spells and resources, which the player can buy or steal for hours of good, clean, fun.
Tl;Dr: Merchants that get better as you spend money and eventually build a town, coinage and treasure, players can set up stores in SMP, massive wars if you attack too many merchants, an awesome wizard.
How about this one.
There would be a resourced called "Salt" - and what salt can do is a variety of things (preserve meat, improve quality of cooked goods, etc.) One of these things would be that, when you put it in water that is heated by lava within one or two blocks of it, that water gains healing properties. Salt would be relatively rare and found in subterranean lakes, mines, or next to oceans. This way, you have to spend a resource to gain the healing properties, they eventually wear off, but you still have a source to go heal while you dig.
I agree for the most part with Tarkastio, but I still think that super mobs that spawn mini-mobs wandering around would be great (even though making a big mob is very difficult, from what I've heard) and I also think it would be amusing to have the civilized mobs wearing clothing such as lederhosens, armor, and generic NPC villager clothing.
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So, for Laue's comment, I do agree that these should be rare to build. The deal with building an entire town just to deal with one person, though, is that the town will grow based directly on how much you put into its development: If you trade a lot of valuable goods, you strike it rich on your own and people will flock to you because you have a lot of valuable resources that you mine and can trade off.
However, rarity is still an issue. We don't want to overflow the player. So, the basis for the town is that there's one building you can go to to pay off your debt (town hall) and one building to go buy general merchandise ("store") - these are the two most basic and the first two to be built.
For building further buildings, we have a number of options regarding progression.
1: The Player must invest for the town to grow.
With these systems, the town builds up only as you invest, so the more attention you pay to it, the more it grows. That way, you know where to place the town based on how much you'll use it (or, for the first option, if you take the foundation stone approach, you get to control the layout of the town completely.)This is a very player-controlled system. The player must invest a certain total value of goods or money, but when he does so, he gets to choose the next buildings. Certain buildings could have certain values, and so on. Probably difficult to program. An interesting option for this system is that a character could buy a foundation stone for each building and determine its positions. Of course, foundation stones would have to be a certain distance apart to work, to prevent overlap.
2: What the player buys determines what gets built.This is fairly simple and intuitive. The player buys lots of weapons? A blacksmith gets built. Player likes food? A bakery or butcher or something. Player mostly prefers high-value or exotic merchandise? A foreign trader from very far away sets up shop, and so on. Again, fairly difficult to code (probably)
3: The buildings follow a simple, preset order.This way is most likely the simplest to code and control, and mods could be put into place to determine building order. Basically, as you spend money, buildings are built in a preset order that is the same for every game.
Regarding multiple foundation stones for towns, I'm not too sure there should even be several stones available unless you decide to edit one in. The foundation stone will get you a town hall, a town square and a store, and having multiple town squares might be something that you would only find if the town got extremely large. Maybe, after a long time, you could buy a second one, but I think at first you should only be able to purchase one.
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As for the process of building, I'm not sure if they would build the town in a way that you can see, just because I don't think mobs can build anything right now, but if there comes a time where such a feature is workable, then that's A-ok. As of the current system for having mobs, I think it would be simpler if one building were generated at every sunrise and sunset until the town has reached its fullest extent, bearing in mind that the town will never take up much space - maybe 10-15 buildings total.
As for their campfires burning down the forest - that might be an interesting idea, but some players wouldn't enjoy watching their forest burn either, especially if they're relying on resources from that forest.
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The idea grows. lol
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As for destroying their property, I think there would only be a few things they would hold so dear that they don't let you touch them. There are a variety of ways this conundrum of destruction of property could be dealt with - one would be that they won't let you buy anything until you pay off what you destroyed, but if you filled in the blocks their buildings used to be made of, they wouldn't take down your blocks and add their own or anything.
That's actually a rather difficult problem to solve...
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The exchange rate would be up to Notch, though I do agree about diamonds. I also think think permanent settlements should be far enough away that you don't regularly get bothered by them, though, as I posted in my last post, they would be centered around an invisible point that could be moved using a map editor.
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That's a fair idea, and I like it.
For the part of the impediment on fortress building, they would build far away from you and the build point would be movable. Here's how this might work in my mind.
Every town has an imaginary block (similar to the spawn point) around which the town is based. Every town is identical, and built up around the invisible block based on its location. So what if I want to build a new fortress right where this town is? Well, there's certainly room for that. Using a simple map editor, you would have to move the block.
As for the wars, that would be a fun addition but probably take a lot of RAM to work. Yes, though, I think if things developed to the town state or higher, people would send guards to you and begin to attack you. The fort would also have a small armory where weapons are kept (and can be stolen from ;D ) and guards would come out of this barracks if you decide to attack the fort. In the case of the Wizard and the Dwarf, the Wiz would send his goons after you until you manage to kill him. He'd make a fun epic boss if you let him get powerful enough.
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The initial merchants would stay for the shortest amount of time (1-3 days) while the guarded, more affluent ones would come and stay for longer.
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It would depend on the number. At first, the small caravans or single merchants would stay from 1-6 days, while large caravans would stay for maybe a week to start off, the time period increasing until a permanent camp was built (which would eventually progress into a town.)
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The Band of Merchants
The Travelling Merchant is a mob (or a group of mobs - a caravan) which has a very low probability of spawning at the corner of your map each day and approaching you with buyable goods. They set up camp in the countryside somewhere and their campfire smokes and lights make them abundantly obvious. While they're camped on your land, the merchant or caravan will hunt pigs and maybe cut down a few trees, and fight mobs if they approach them. Each merchant or group has a camel or donkey which carries their wares, and the merchants themselves are armed to defend their goods.
How this works is that each block is assigned a value (dirt = 0, cobblestone or wood = 1, coal = 3, diamond = 256, gold =200) where the value of that item in total is how much you must barter in order to receive objects of equal value (I have to spend one full stack of 64 cobblestone for one diamond). When you approach the mob's beast of burden or cart, you may open a trading screen. There, you may freely switch items between the inventories, and a small counter shows the total value of the trade - if you try to take items without paying enough, the merchant won't allow for it, and if you try to spend more than the worth of what you're buying, it will ask if you're sure. If you kill all the merchants attached to the beasts or cart, the items are yours for the taking - but the merchants may travel in groups and/or have armored guards and are strong enough in numbers to kill you even on peaceful mode (if they even spawn in peaceful mode). Also, if you kill a lot of merchants, they'll stop coming around.
The value and number of goods in a caravan depends on the number of merchants in it. A single merchant may have things that you could get with a little bit of effort (refined iron, some weapons, armor, and tools, bucket, etc.) while larger caravans have a larger carrying capacity (more donkeys) and more exotic items (records, diamonds, redstone, saddles, stained glass, dyed cloth)
Coinage and Treasures - an Alternative to the Bartering System
So let's say I've been digging for awhile or, if advanced AI eventually comes to play, I've got somebody digging for me. Well, I've got a lot of gold and diamonds now and nothing to do with them, I have plenty of weapons, but I want some TNT. Well TNT has a value of 55, and I want to get the most for what I have.
My options are to spend a lot of raw materials on this stuff and get a pretty sizeable return (maybe 10 TNT blocks) or I could, perhaps, give the traders what they want, so they can go off and sell my rare goods for double what they spent in some unseen city hundreds of miles away. So, I go to my forge and mint my own coins of pure gold, raising the value of my material nearly twofold. (This would imply that there need to be multiple coins - silver, copper, and gold, which would all have to be found and mined.) Or, if I want to really get some bang for my buck, I can go build myself a crown, a scepter, or some very regal but otherwise useless armor, either to wear for myself and look really awesome, or to sell for a massive return. Other treasures I could produce would include decorative chalices, a candelabra which I could use to light my house, and so on.
Progression - Rags and Bones to Wood to Stone
So let's say I've built myself a very sizeable home and workshop, and I've been producing and trading for useful goods for a long time. Well now the merchants like me and know that I'll bring them back good fortune, so they go out into untouched wilderness outside of the lands that I build on and begin to build themselves a little fort or town, first out of wood, then stone. Here, there is a much more permanent flow of self-sustaining merchants, who bring in and out items of greater value.
So here's how the progression of merchants works: The more value I give away in trade, the larger and more permanent the group of merchants. The first merchants to come by will be single merchants with little to sell, but still bearing some useful or somewhat rare items from time to time. As I spend more, larger groups come by, setting up camp for longer and longer, until they finally decide to build a little town and farm along a river, lake, or ocean, and begin to farm and self-sustain. The town grows over time and they replace their wood buildings with stone and build a little wall, maybe a church or a town hall or something. This would all be programmed in to work the same way every time - they build the exact same little town in every game, or maybe there are a couple or three templates for them to work with. Whatever the case, that little town is eventually a small fort for me to trade with, and it usually has a lot to offer for me that I can't get or don't want to spend the time looking for (clay and bricks, anyone?)
As a short addition, the lengths that caravans would come and stay would also depend on the development.
Here's a list of the progression.
Unguarded, lone merchant: 1-2 days
Guarded merchant: 3-6 days
Caravan (small - 2-3 merchants, 1-3 guards): 6-8 days
Caravan (large - 4-6 merchants, 3-5 guards): 10 days
Semi-permanent trade camp - indefinite, until progression
Town - indefinite, until progression
Walled town - indefinite, until progression
Building The Camp - The Mechanics
Now, there are a lot of issues with trying to build an NPC town in a randomly generated map in any organized way, free of glitches. I've got an idea, but I'm not a programmer, so it might not be very good. Who knows.
I've noticed that, using the map editor MCEdit, I can change my spawn point. This made me a happy ferret, but also gave me an idea for how a town would be built.
When the NPC merchants decide to make a semi-permanent camp, a generation point is chosen somewhere far away from the character's hauntings and spawn point, but within sight distance, on a relatively wide, flat area. The generation point is similar to a spawn point, in essence, but is the point around which the town is built. The buildings in every town are in the exact same position relative to this point, though they adjust with stairs and ladders for height differences. When the point is set, the merchants begin to build the camp.
The first thing the merchants do is set up their fires and build a tall tower, so the player can see them from afar with the smokes, light, and tower up in the distance. There could also be a "merchant compass" which points at the centerpoint of the town at all times.
The generation point of the town, like the spawn point for the character, would be movable using an editor or some other control. All materials would be brought over by carts and therefore the player doesn't have to worry about having all his/her resources mined. This also adds for the option of some rare materials (marble, etc.) for building that the character can only get from merchants.
Debt, Crimes, Punishment, and All-Out War
So let's say I'm a little criminal and want to go pillage and plunder the town - how do I pay for my deeds?
The value system may give us an answer.
There are a variety of crimes a character can commit against the town, among them being theft, murder, destruction of property, and battery.
Theft and Destruction of Property work in essentially the same way: When you steal or destroy something, you have to pay its value in gold or goods before you can buy anything else (in the trade screen, this comes up as negative value, or debt.)
Murder and battery cause the character to have to pay a value as well, but the value is much higher for battery, and even higher for murder.
When your debt gets to a certain level, the town starts sending guards after you that won't kill you, but will either plunder your things, destroy your property, or beat the daylight out of you and then leave. If it comes down to a certain level even further, then the guards will kill you instead of beating you, and if the merchants have enough to spend, the guards will attack your properties with TNT.
What about other forms of debt? There are a variety of cute options for how a player might accrue debt, such as gambling mini-games or a money-lender that comes along when the town gets a wall.
Survival Multiplayer - I Am My Own Merchant
So let's put this into a Survival Multiplayer game, except that instead of traveling merchants, players themselves can set up their own little stores, and, using the "Store Counter" block, they can place their goods into a counter belonging to them, and leave it be while other players come by and buy the goods. The player can toggle items on and off that can be used to buy (so I could have a counter that only accepts gold coins, redstone dust, and buckets as currency) so they can't be griefed with fifty stacks of cobblestone if that's not what they want.
All in all, this is a game mechanic built around the idea of adding a few extra people to the game, as well as a completely optional way for players to trade for goods and start their own enterprises. It would make for a fun way of working things online, and also help characters along who want help in their own single-player worlds. I would like to repeat that the feature is optional, since the merchants won't grow at all if you don't spend money on them, so if you don't want to have merchants in your game you can either toggle them or just ignore them.
Optional Addendum - The Wizard and The Dwarf (related to the Merchant idea)
The Wizard and The Dwarf are a pair of semi-intelligent AI mobs that appear at the beginning of the game, and more of them appear as you explore, though they're very sparse. The Wizard is a mob that can cast magical spells and summon gremlins that run around and do his bidding, whatever it may be, and the Dwarf mines and builds a cobblestone tower for the Wizard. They start out neutral, but will like or dislike the player depending on if he/she attacks the Wizard, Dwarf, or gremlin mobs, or if he/she buys things from the Wizard.
The Wizard would be a valuable resource for the character because you can either raid him for resources and spells or you can buy them (buying resources and causes the wizard to grow in power, but stealing causes him to become more aggressive and he'll begin to try to steal from you and mine more of your resources.) As the Wizard becomes more powerful, he begins to make better spells and resources, which the player can buy or steal for hours of good, clean, fun.
Tl;Dr: Merchants that get better as you spend money and eventually build a town, coinage and treasure, players can set up stores in SMP, massive wars if you attack too many merchants, an awesome wizard.
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There would be a resourced called "Salt" - and what salt can do is a variety of things (preserve meat, improve quality of cooked goods, etc.) One of these things would be that, when you put it in water that is heated by lava within one or two blocks of it, that water gains healing properties. Salt would be relatively rare and found in subterranean lakes, mines, or next to oceans. This way, you have to spend a resource to gain the healing properties, they eventually wear off, but you still have a source to go heal while you dig.
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