u/Greenwood4

The End dimension might be the only way for a group to create a genuine safe haven on 2B2T.

Normally, it doesn’t matter how many people you have or how strong you are. The moment any base of yours is discovered, it’s doomed.

There are countless griefers with essentially infinite resources and respawns. You could kill them a hundred times and it would only delay the inevitable.

That is unless you had some way to stop them from coming back.

It is impossible to set your spawn in the End with vanilla mechanics. You can’t enter the End except via a specific spawn area.

In theory, a large and rich enough group could go to the End and set up a sophisticated defence system and guard roster, so that anyone coming to the End is automatically killed by Wardens and traps.

That would allow them to create a truly safe haven - an End Empire. Even if someone slips through or turns traitor, all you have to do is kill them and they’re done. They’ll have to risk themselves at some point if they want to grief anything, and if they die there’s no way back in for them.

It would take a ton of organisation, resources, and probably at least two dozen active and well organised players.

But it’s possible. I’m surprised nobody has tried it yet.

Recently, some companies have been pushing these new AI programmes that can turn a prompt into a game.

These games are often messy and almost unplayable, but the main problem is a moral one. Much like other art mediums, AI threatens to dilute the work of real artists with slop. It stinks of a lack of integrity.

Still, being able to make a terrible but playable game with only a prompt has a lot of potential. It got me thinking of how this could be used ethically to help with honest game development.

Perhaps this tech is best used for playtesting in the very early stages of game development.

If you have a game, it can take years before it reaches a playable state. By then it’s often far too late to adjust significantly to feedback, since most of the game is already coded. You just have to hope your original idea is actually a good one.

Some game studios get around this like how Valve did for the Portal games, but that’s not something most developers have the resources for.

Using an AI programme though, you could start rudimentary playtesting right after the early design phase. If you made a ton of simple assets and designed an incredibly long and complicated prompt, you could get something to test out your idea with.

Obviously this wouldn’t be a real game - the AI made it, not you - but there’s nothing stopping you from making it into a real game based on feedback.

Would this be an ethical use of AI in game design?

I always enjoy experimenting with niche combat mechanics and trying to find viable PVP styles that I can make from them. One such style is the spear.

This weapon is usually just used to lunge around quickly. Without an Elytra it’s pretty useless since it relies on high speed for its damage.

However, I think there might be a missed trick here. What if we tried using the spear’s jab?

Basically, with nothing but Speed 2, you can do a clean melee combo using a spear. Charge an opponent to knock them back, then jump for a clean crit to line them up perfectly for the next combo.

The charge does most of the damage while the jab knocks the enemy back for the next salvo. This lets you utilise the full extent of the spear’s reach.

So long as you don’t miss and the enemy doesn’t ender pearl, this can let you infinitely combo someone without risking getting hit at all. You can even attribute swap an axe to disable shields at this medium range.

Is there any world where that strategy could work?

Would it ever be better to run a server in sessions rather than having it be up all the time?

Time zones would be an issue, but if you found a time that did work for your players I could see sessions being better in lots of ways.

1: Everyone is online together. No play session is ever dull.

2: No need for grief protection to the same extent as normal - if everyone is online together they can stop griefers directly.

3: Players won’t get left behind in progression as often. This type of server would be ideal for someone who is employed.

4: Moderation is a lot easier and more reliable - you can keep a close eye on things during the sessions and then leave the server be until the next one.

5: Players don’t get burnt out as easily. If you can only play during a 6 hour window once a week, players will be forced to pace themselves.

By using a bow as part of a shield break combo, you have a way to pressure opponents without risking getting hit in return. There are only a few other ways to do this, such as a shield stun (which might not even be in later versions) or a sprint 3-block hit (which assumes your opponent isn’t also sprinting). Of these methods, the bow is perhaps the easiest and most reliable.

Not only that, but bows let you punish players who play too passively. By buffering an axe crit, a player can just bait you into breaking their shield for a free hit and then run away until their shield recharges. With a bow, that won’t work anymore due to the increased range.

The main reason all this actually matters though is that despite not scaling with strength, bows can still be used to inflict potion effects with tipped arrows. Using the right Fletcher, you can get tons of weakness arrows to debuff opponents, or you could use Instant Damage 2 arrows to help kill opponents at range.

A lot of PvPers I’ve talked to absolutely hate weakness, since they see it as a meme strategy. They also hate it because it’s actually very effective against them.

You could also use a crossbow for this, but the bow does a lot more damage overall and it can be fired multiple times in quick succession, which is good for keeping aggressive targets at bay. It’s best to use a Punch 1 bow for this, so that you have just enough knockback to combo a netherite player without sending them flying out of sword reach.

I’ve been getting into Engineering lately and with the help of learning both in and out of the game, I’ve gotten a good grasp on the main engineering role. I can fix wires, set up a tesla, and put the station back together when someone blows a hole in it.

I’m still not sure where to start with atmospherics though. There don’t seem to be any online guides and I haven’t found many atmospheric technicians in game to teach me.

I know the basics, like how to lay pipes and the general idea of how to make electricity from gas, but I’ve still got no idea where the station’s atmosphere actually comes from.

When the station runs out of O2, how do we fix it? If the air alarm is going haywire and the air scrubbers are glowing red, what do we do to fix it?

Would it ever be at all worthwhile to skip bismuth or tin and instead enter the Bronze Age with silver and gold?

By combining copper, silver and gold you can make Black Bronze, one of the best and coolest looking alloys in the game. The problem is just getting enough silver and gold to make this worthwhile.

I know gold and silver can sometimes be found in quartz veins, but I don’t know how frequently. Is there any way to know which quartz veins have gold and silver in them?

I’ve helped design a lot of servers and civilisations in the past. While what we see on the Unstable SMP seems impossible, you could actually replicate the same vibe on a real server with a few tweaks.

The hard part isn’t the hardcore - it’s the offline problem.

In the videos, almost all of the players are online at the same time. This means that you can’t just blow up capital city while most of the guards are asleep, or kill an important player while they are afk.

So, on a real server, you’d need to do it in sessions. Every Friday evening for six hours or so the server would be playable, but that’s it. This means that almost every active player on the server will be online at the same time. It also has the benefit of making the server far healthier to actually play on, since you can’t just play for 12 hours straight to get an advantage over everyone else.

As for the hardcore part, in practice you couldn’t just ban anyone that dies unless you have a truly absurd number of people wanting to join. Instead, you’d give people a temporary ban if they die and allow them to join a few sessions later, but with a new skin and username via commands. They’d also be spawned in a completely different part of the world and banned from metagaming about their previous life. They’d be like a brand new player - a completely blank slate.

With only a moderately sized server using these rules you could pretty well have the same vibe as Unstable.

There are lots of ways to make power, but usually in engineering we just immediately set up a Tesla or Singularity which provides all the energy we’ll ever need.

Since those power sources are so dangerous and easily sabotaged though, I was wondering if it’s possible to get by without them!

Is it viable to just use the AME then fix up all the solar panels and call it a day?

Spoilers ahead for Spoke’s prison arc videos!

I’m a fairly new viewer and there’s something I don’t understand about Spoke’s latest videos.

Why does Mapic hate Spoke so much in the story? He seems to blame Spoke for being imprisoned, but Mapic was imprisoned by Null entirely on his own accord. Spoke didn’t even know about it until several weeks later. The main reason that both Spoke and Jumper ended up imprisoned as well is because they were trying to free Mapic.

Even after Mapic tried to kill him, Spoke still did everything he could to break them out. At one point he directly saved Mapic from execution and shared his stolen equipment with him. Despite that, Mapic still tried to kill him the next chance he got.

The playtest has been out for many years now and the game seems to be in a fairly stable state.

Are there any plans to ever release the game formally?

I’ve recently started running my own settlement, but I’m not sure how to expand it without waiting for random overseer events.

The settlement is in desperate need of more buildings and production but I have no way to actually build them besides waiting for a citizen to propose it.

Can I not just build houses myself and connect those to the town?