List of all things that are un-removable, and all ways Apocalypse can happen in D-town

[jasonrohrer]

Can we make a full list here of all known things that cannot be removed in some way, and any remaining ways that apocalypses can happen in donkeytown? Or if there's a ghost exploit involved, list that too.

Then I will fix all these things in one swoop.

As far as I can tell, flight distance is limited to 10,000 tiles currently, so I don't think that's part of it.

Apocalypse should be possible but it should never be impossible to stop.

[DopiePanda]

These items cannot be removed:
https://onetech.info/3304-Ancient-Way-Stone-written-map
https://onetech.info/898-Ancient-Stone-Floor

And as you can see below, this is already planned on how it will be abused.

*Censored part of the image here for obvious reasons

But the biggest problem when it comes to the apoc is the griefers using multiple accounts to chain births to the east making sure to get female every time. Then when they are far enough away for people to not be able to reach it within 24 hours, they spawn in all of their alt accounts to get the server population limit to put down the first stone.

And there is a population limit to take it down as well, so they can spawn in their alts when anyone is trying to take the apoc down to increase the player population, which also increases the amount of players needed to take it down. I think there should not be any limit on taking it down.

And maybe multiple families should be required to even start one, that would make the birth chaining strategy way harder / less effective.

ALSO, this item does not have the monumentCall tag:
https://onetech.info/2478-Seeping-Endtower-Base-normalOnly

[DopiePanda]

Also apparently if you feed a wolf puppy when they have 2 uses left they get stuck on that tile forever, which could also be used to be unable to remove flooring like in the image in the previous comment

[Archnemesister]

• Feed wolf at Use 2 makes puppy stuck forever. Solution: Bug fix
  

• Bear caves should be able to be removed. Solution: remove with shovel, hungry work.

• Pavers can get stuck on purpose and block tiles. Solution: Hit with hammer to disassemble

• Burnt launch pads can not be removed. Solution: Break with two player pick axe

[Rukhmar]

Only the first block of EndTowers check for being in the population center, making it so if they hop on at night, they can start one very very far away with all their alt accounts logged in to make that area the population center. Later blocks do not check if it is still near the center, so they can keep adding them hundreds of thousands away, even if there is like 3 accounts there but 40 people in the normal towns. The Apocalypse can technically be disassembled, but if they make it hundreds of thousands away and still place blocks, then no normal players will be able to try to fight back against it. Especially if the only people near it are just their alts and they will starve anyone else that is not them trying to get born near.

Planes do seem to be fixed to 10k tiles now, but it seems they are driving off with fertiles in sportscars and can potentially chain birth them very very far away. I know before the plane fix, they would drive off with ghosts, and put down landing strip to fly a fertile in to place the stones, but if plane is fixed, it should be fixed now. If they take a family far enough away, and the normal players die out in the normal town, it can potentially lead to all the other towns not being able to access that family's special resources (sulfur, latex, oil, etc.), since a new Eve can't spawn for that family while they hold a fertile far away.

[DopiePanda]

Good thing Daisy (Ian) was unbanned from the discord so they could brag after creating this.

[DopiePanda]

Also Any griefer can just buy the game on Steam, launch the game once to create their new account, close the game, then play via. modded client or simply use the vanilla launcher in the install folder for it to not count towards their Steam play hours. And when they have played 50 - 100 hours and have a bunch of curses, they just refund on Steam, since on Steam it will say > 1 hour playtime.

Then they can buy the game again on the same account. They can do this a couple of times before the whole account gets flagged.
But as long as they use a VPN when they create the Steam account, they can keep doing the same thing over and over, saving 2 - 10 purchases of new accounts (due to both the 50% lower price on Steam vs. website as well as the refund "exploit").

[mothma31]

Feeding a wolf puppy at Use 2 causes it to be stuck forever on that tile. This is being exploited by greifers to create hate symbols in game.

[jasonrohrer]

Dopie, my understanding was you only had 48 hours to refund the game.... is that no longer true?

Oh, damn, they upped it to 14 days.

Wow, I don't know a way around that problem, then.

But in general, we shouldn't worry about that. We should imagine our adversary here has infinite resources. So whether they refund the game or not, it doesn't matter for whatever fix is implemented here.

[jasonrohrer]

Okay, I've been thinking about the whole situation with "building an endtower very far away." Whatever the method, be it planes or cars or birth-chaining, it's really going against the whole point of the endtower, which is that there will be a some kind of dramatic battle, or maybe even a community decision eventually made, if the server is ever getting stale.

Building a fortress around the endtower and guarding it is one thing.... building it too far away to ever reach before it's too late is another.

And yeah, it is impressive that they are so dedicated... like... traveling for 24+ hours to achieve this? I mean, if it's more than 24 hours away, that means they themselves traveled for 24+ hours at some point, right? That's insanity.

So this leads me to think about players having no control over where the endtower ends up being. If you can't control where it is, you can't put it far away.

And this reminds me of the way Orbital Alignment coordinates for the rocket are currently dolled out. Griefers aren't in full control of all the rockets, currently, so this mostly works. A griefer has as much chance of nabbing the coordinates as any other player, and there are more "other players" than griefers, so mostly other players get the coordinates.

Coordinates for rockets are dropped near population centers, but they also drop at regular intervals. If the interval is known, then a griefer could use the alt-account trick late at night to create a fake population center far away. Not worth doing for a rocket, but that would be worth doing for an apocalypse.

After rocket coords drop, they can be carried anywhere, but they must be placed near the population. Again, griefers can use alt accounts to create a false population center and carry the coordinates way out there.

===

SO.... it seems like instead of dropping coordinates for an end tower, which can be moved anywhere, we'd have to drop the actual foundation of the end tower, and not let it ever move after that.

And to prevent alt accounts from reliably creating false population centers in order to lure the drop of the end tower foundation far away, the drop would have to happen at a random interval, unpredictably. I.e., every 3 to 7 days, or something, at random.

Thus, there'd be a DING telling you an endtower foundation has appeared, and it would be nearby the population center, and then the race would be on to get there to stop it, etc.

So then griefers wouldn't be able to force the location of the endtower to be far away, unless they camped on the server with alt accounts all week long to catch the drop, but if they were doing that, they'd be infiltrated by regular players anyway.

[squishysquid]

Doesn't sound like a bad plan other than discussions about implementation details eg how long to the foundations last, and frequency of drops. (you don't want a situation they drop when 10 new people are online and it's forgotten for 6 months before surprise apoc, at the same time doing the same frequency as rocket coords sounds exhausting. weekends are best for events like that I think)

[Rukhmar]

SO.... it seems like instead of dropping coordinates for an end tower, which can be moved anywhere, we'd have to drop the actual foundation of the end tower, and not let it ever move after that.

And to prevent alt accounts from reliably creating false population centers in order to lure the drop of the end tower foundation far away, the drop would have to happen at a random interval, unpredictably. I.e., every 3 to 7 days, or something, at random.

Thus, there'd be a DING telling you an endtower foundation has appeared, and it would be nearby the population center, and then the race would be on to get there to stop it, etc.

So then griefers wouldn't be able to force the location of the endtower to be far away, unless they camped on the server with alt accounts all week long to catch the drop, but if they were doing that, they'd be infiltrated by regular players anyway.

Sounds better, but would old ones decay if not interacted with for a while? It would suck to have people not realize one is even up far away still and they go for that with birth chains again. Or make the other stages of the apocalypse check for the population center too, and make it unable to place a block if it is too far away as well? Then during the day when all the normal players are on, it won't let them place blocks on one super far away.

[Forman9]

there will be a some kind of dramatic battle, or maybe even a community decision eventually made, if the server is ever getting stale

Jason, the problem with this notion is that, without exploits, apocalypse is basically impossible.

Apoc towers require a MASSIVE investment by the tower builders and it requires ZERO investment from the apoc-stoppers to break.

This is already asymmetrical plus they have the overpowered effect of cursing.

A tower can theoretically be defended in a property fence but all the apoc-stoppers have to do is curse the defenders and wait till they all die of old age (1 hour).

The tower defenders are then all pushed out of spawn and unable to continue to defend.

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A POSSIBLE SOLUTION:

Once a stone is placed it CANNOT be removed.

This balances defense/offense and ensures that there will eventually (even inevitably) be an apocalypse.

This is a good thing because the server ABSOLUTELY needs occasional wipes and the player base is literally never willing to let go.

[MrMendeleev2]

jasonrohrer wrote:

Building a fortress around the endtower and guarding it is one thing.... building it too far away to ever reach before it's too late is another.

I agree with Forman9 on this one. There will be no fortresses, no role-play opportunities around the tower, because it's a massive investment of time from builder side, and all can be destroyed in a matter of seconds.
To add to that, 5 year curses is a significant price to pay, and oh boy, do you get cursed for role-play tower...

Forman9 wrote:

Once a stone is placed it CANNOT be removed.
This balances defense/offense and ensures that there will eventually (even inevitably) be an apocalypse.
This is a good thing because the server ABSOLUTELY needs occasional wipes and the player base is literally never willing to let go.

I would suggest a different approach. Make only one stone possible to remove every 6 hours. That put's anti-apoc team into position to defend the tower same way apoc team did it before anti-apoc took over.
Make it so endblock can only be added to seeping tower (same as right now), but in the similar way make it so it's only possible to remove one from base tower (not seeping one). Then make seeping tower transition back to base tower after 6 hours, so they go back and forth. Lastly, make it so removing block from tower makes seeping tower

To reiterate:
tower goes not seeping -(6h)->seeping -(6h)-> not seeping ...
on block added: seeping + endblock -> not seeping + 1lvl (same as right now)
on block removed: not seeping + hands -> seeping - 1lvl + hands with block (only from not seeping can you remove block)

jasonrohrer suggests:

SO.... it seems like instead of dropping coordinates for an end tower, which can be moved anywhere, we'd have to drop the actual foundation of the end tower, and not let it ever move after that.
And to prevent alt accounts from reliably creating false population centers in order to lure the drop of the end tower foundation far away, the drop would have to happen at a random interval, unpredictably. I.e., every 3 to 7 days, or something, at random.
Thus, there'd be a DING telling you an endtower foundation has appeared, and it would be nearby the population center, and then the race would be on to get there to stop it, etc.
So then griefers wouldn't be able to force the location of the endtower to be far away, unless they camped on the server with alt accounts all week long to catch the drop, but if they were doing that, they'd be infiltrated by regular players anyway.

I don't like it, this way will cut off any possible role-play opportunity, forcing tower into the wilderness every time.
Yes, to make successful apoc, as of current rules, you have to do it far far away, but there are unsuccesssful role-play attempts from time to time which this change will kill off.

What I would suggest is:
Make it similar to alignment coordinates. Copy some kind of divine chants to the paper, but make it so paper decays in say 6 hours. this paper would allow to place first endtower block. This will allow role-play as well as bound attempt to 6 hour travel radius.

[jasonrohrer]

Yeah, having the coords be mobile, so you can decide where to place them, but making them decay quickly, is a fine idea. I wouldn't do 6 hours, but maybe 30 minutes or something.

It's actually pretty cool to have the endtower attempt happening far away. That makes stopping it a cool quest. But not so far away that it's impossible to reach in one lifetime.

And no, these wouldn't be dropping every 6 hours like the rocket coords. More like 2x per week, at random.

And if no one goes to get the coords from the spot, then they just disappear after some time... maybe after 8 hours or something. So there are not "sleeper" endtowers waiting to be built forever.

Having the other layers of the tower need to be near population centers (instead of just the foundation) doesn't fix anything, since whatever trick is used to lay the foundation (alt accounts late at night) would just be used to place the other layers, eventually. Even if there's one layer placed per night, if it's too far away to reach, it's impossible to stop.

[chachachae]

If you use a direction changer on a paver, but the paver gets stuck before being able to move a full tile (bear caves or launch pads blocking it, etc) after the changer, it becomes stuck forever.