So I know they’re inevitable, and people really don’t want to see their creations go to waste (especially the ones involving countless hours of work), but they are required to implement some updates and bring the full game closer to realization.
I want to discuss a few potential ways around this problem, and see if they can be implemented in time for the first world-wipe. I’ve had these ideas floating around in my head the last few days as I’ve been debating the amount of time I want to sink into building when I know it’ll get wiped in favor of worlds with even better features.
When it comes time, at the very least I think it would be nice to keep open the old server for a week or so. Even with the advanced warning that a wipe is on the way, it would be nice to just have some time to move over half-completed project designs manually and things like that. This is the bare minimum that I would request.
Now in minecraft, I’ve only ever played on the xbox, so I really don’t care about throwing my old world away since the experience becomes somewhat bland after awhile with the map size restriction. I could see me taking a different stance if I was on pc, but then again there’s probably tools to save creations out there. but in a game like this, with the massive worlds and travel between them, I don’t think I’d want to start fresh as often, considering a new experience is just a portal away.
If possible, I think it would be really cool to give people the choice of carrying creations through the wipe. It would be nice to just regenerate the world with the updates, using the same seed (so our creations don’t randomly end up buried or floating) so the lakes and mountains and topography is kept the same, but then record where the user placed creations and plop them on top of it all. If there are conflicts with new blocks/structures or trees or something, just don’t spawn our builds on those blocks. Then let us deal with fixing our stuff.
Since there will be a warning ahead of time, maybe put a system in place allowing users to flag the blocks they would like to see make it through. Maybe make them flag every block, and turn the world into creative mode so we can fly and get the big stuff flagged quickly. Even if it took 2 people working together an hour to flag every block of a massive build, I believe it could still be less time than it would take to build it all over again. For some builds, only the shell might need to be flagged and the inside flooring and stuff might be so easy it’s not even worth flagging. Maybe you could have it tie-in with the beacon system so users don’t even need to tag their stuff, just set a specific option on the beacon.
If it would require way too much memory to store all this info, maybe there could be a cap on how much should make it through, or make the users responsible for the blocks they flag store the info on their own storage devices and re-upload it once the world is wiped. If the user were allowed to store build information, it would be interesting to allow us to manipulate where we want the build to end up, so if keeping the same seed wasn’t possible, we could find a similar location and move all the x/y/z values of the blocks to move a building to a suitable location. I’m not saying allow us to spawn our creations at anytime, just one copy of each flagged creation, and only on the first few days after a world wipe. I’m sure there are people that argue against keeping the same worlds around, but there will be new fresh servers to appease those types of players, and besides, these worlds are massive!
Anyways, that’s my thoughts on the matter. How the devs end up dealing with world wipes will immensely affect the amount of time I end up sinking into this. I’m still going to be playing it a lot, but after thinking about this deeply, I don’t know if I feel like attempting another luca castle-size build (or even finishing the interior of it) knowing it will just go to waste. I’d gladly sink another dozen hours into something really big and cool, but only if I have the guarantee it can survive the end of the world.
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