Post-Scarcity Minecraft

Hi! With a bit of luck and hopefully not too much fuss, you can do this too. Here is the server mod: I’m using it on a 1.12 version of Spigot.

SnowballMadness.jar_.zip(61k)

That’s if the thing you want to do is to run the mod on your own server. The source code is also on my github :)

This project has existed for some time now, I’ve just gained more insight into what it actually is. It’s got some things in common with anarchy servers, but I didn’t really design it for that (on the whole, my brother Dan coded it in Java, and I took that and added lots more Java to the existing structure that’s more in line with game design and gameplay choices)

I’ve been thinking about the old days when I used to stream Minecraft stuff more on my channel (or other channels). It was a simpler time before a lot of bad things happened, but I don’t think it was all nostalgia. We were playing a game that was expanding, but were getting things like new block colors, moderate expansions of what we had: in many ways it still resembled the olden times when there wasn’t much TO Minecraft. It was what you made it.

The Snowball stuff I designed, was all about bridging the gap between Survival and Creative. You could make certain things very easy. You could make blocks without issue, create vast structures, install floors or fly about or zap enemies as if by magic… if you spotted them in time. The thing these mods removed was scarcity. There’d be a method to take anything you had, and make vast amounts of it. If you could get a thing, you could grind up any amount of it, like a duplication glitch that was turned into a game mechanic.

And then it was adjusted so, if you weren’t careful with your tools, they could turn and bite you, doing ridiculous things. For some time, the ‘multiplier snowball’ exemplified Snowball Madness: two stacks of snowballs with a stack of TNT right up top, and you could obliterate everything including yourself in a single misclick, or prank-click. That one feature is nerfed: you can bounce your shots by stacking snowballs this way, but no more of the exponential multiplications of doom. While funny, they were a funny-once, too unreasonable to leave around for regular gameplay.

The thing is, if you learn Snowball, you’re thinking of multiple ways to deal with both your basic tasks, and ways to deal with the gotchas that Snowball can sometimes spring on you, and the common factor is post-scarcity. It’s not creative mode, but you can generate resources probably quicker than in creative, certainly if you count building structures or clearing spaces. At the same time, it’s not giving you jobs to do beyond what you might think up to accomplish particular tasks. Building a fort? Are you making stacks of blocks (do you have your one starter block to work from?) or are you basing it off a structure like a big sphere or cylinder? If you build something wrong, can you use the tools you have to delete the thing you made, or do you go too far and make a big hole? If you do that, do you turn it into a base or move elsewhere and try again? If you want a big hole, do you want an exploded, blown-up one, or neat walls down to a cave floor, or to bedrock?

That’s not a hypothetical question as I’m going to try and make this server accessible. Go to my Patreon and I’ll put the server IP there (I’m unsure if it will work right away for outside users, but I’ve got it on a permanently-on laptop in my basement, and my fiber should have little trouble handling a small Minecraft server, even with several people playing). I’ll leave it up, probably restart it now and then when nobody’s on there, and we’ll see what happens. This used to be my socializing before my life was just plugins, and it’s probably a good way to do Q&As on youtube streams and just talk about stuff.