Results from adding BTW to a Vanilla Server

[Battlecat]

I run a small friends and family server that's running a world over a year old. One month ago I finally convinced enough people to let me add Better than Wolves to the server at the same time we updated to 1.4. I thought today would be a good day to let you know how that has gone.

It was a rough first week since we had spread out quite far under the vanilla spawning rules. Some people (myself included) have their bases upwards of 5000 blocks out from spawn. In spite of the extensive nether railway system (which I insisted they build), there were several rage quits by players due to hardcore spawn after third and fourth deaths in an evening. I managed to convince them that wearing armor and a bit more caution might be appropriate and the death rate went down significantly. :-) One cool thing, I actually didn't get a single complaint about loosing the ability to skip night!

Once I passed that hurdle, my friends began poking the features of BTW. The quality, depth and reward quickly became apparent to them. The beauty of the windmill animations was one of the first things commented on. But then they started to discover the changes: Dirt and Wool Slabs. Boats floating on the surface of the water when broken instead of sinking to the bottom. The Mattock and Battleaxe. Automation of drudge work. Farming of the moss stone, moss and cracked brick.

One month later, only a couple of players are really taking full advantage of the full suite of tools and automation processes. But everyone has an anvil in their base and I've heard nothing but compliments on the quality of the features. One friend was practically dancing when he saw the new wood aesthetic items you added recently. And another player has been digging into the automation tree recently with an enthusiasm I never would have expected. He loves the flaming concentrated hellfire blocks by the way.

I would call the addition of BTW a rousing success, especially since the server is seeing more activity now than it did when it was pure vanilla. The hardcore changes are startling and take some getting used to but my players have realized that they enhance the game and have embraced them. One of my players commented that the focus of the BTW tech tree is quite an interesting contrast to the relative incoherence of the recent official updates.

So I'd like to take this moment to say thanks for Better than Wolves Flowerchild. It's really re-invigorated the game for both myself and my friends.

[EpicAaron]

This is nice to hear! I have been wanting to do the same thing with my friends, but the first hurdle of "installing mods" is harder for them to figure out than expected.

[FlowerChild]

Awww....shucks man. Yes, this was indeed much appreciated and your timing was absolutely perfect.

Thank you :)

[EdzyWhat]

+1 for an awesome post Battlecat. It definitely does make MC with friends and fam better. I'd love to see your world sometime!

[finite8]

Always nice hearing success stories of BTW.

[Battlecat]

This is nice to hear! I have been wanting to do the same thing with my friends, but the first hurdle of "installing mods" is harder for them to figure out than expected.

I've found the MCpatcher is a really good way to introduce players to installing mods. Fortunately it works just fine as long as they don't miss the "only install the btw-jar folder" portion of the instruction! It's got the bonus of being much less intimidating than opening up the .jar file, although I certainly don't get the relucance. I've got the added bonus of all my players living in a relatively small geographic area so I can provide in person technical support.

Oh and just for you since you asked EdzyWhat, here's a quick tour of some of my builds on the server. I'll pop by some of my friend's stuff at a later date if there is interest.

In case anyone is wondering, the texture pack is my own personal blend of Misa's Textures, Albion and a few others developed in collaboration with my server members. Sadly, I don't have permission from any creators to share the textures publicly so I'll have to keep them to myself. But if you like them, Pucc has a lovely 100% Misa compatible texture pack that I would recommend instead.

First we have spawn. Most of the houses were built by server members. The centerpiece is a vanilla warehouse and mob system.

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The warehouse design is pretty strongly based off Etho's Chocolate Island Warehouse, complete with the mob elevator in the center. I built it larger but it recently ran out of space to store all vanilla items.

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But my proudest project on the server is the area I simply call the City. It's a 4 minute rail ride in the nether to get to this are and it's my primary home on the server. I'm called the king of unfinished projects because I have so many half complete projects sitting around!

The current centerpiece in The City is the Hanging Gardens. I love this build. I designed it in Autocad and was really pleased with how it turned out.

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The City is also the center of my Better than Wolves operations. This windmill is where all my primary work on the mod was done. Behind it on the right is a fully operational, but horribly ugly automatic hemp farm. The redstone on the left is a small autokiln and auto pottery experiment.

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Standing on top of the winmill, my temporary animal pits. The massive brick and netherbrick tower is a huge BTW operated mob farm. It has four separate spawning towers in it using vine traps. With most of the local caves lit up, the production rate is insane. The smaller tower to the right is my Battosay inspired 5 minute timer which I got up and running last night. I couldn't resist building the water spiral design.

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Here's the item sorter for the mob tower. I'll admit, I use ice streams to transport the items horizontally so I only had to build a single sorting system. The buoyancy characteristics caught me off guard when I originally design this, but it separates out everything quite nicely I think. Only two things that aren't separated are scrolls and string.

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Last but not least for today, here's my mob system storage facility. Unfinished of course but with 6 double chests worth of storage space for each item. The marble texture floor is my interpretation of the whitestone texture. It's from Dante80's Voxelbox old texture pack if anyone is wondering.

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If there's interest I'll take some more shots, particularly of some of my friend's builds. That's it for now, enjoy!

[EdzyWhat]

Very cool builds overall. I don't know where to begin on specific compliments. I guess I can say that thats the first BTW windmill aesthetic that I've actually fallen in love with (I always forget sandstone for some reason, but you use it really well, along with the nice use of negative space on your corners). Very cool and massive stuff.
:)

[SterlingRed]

AutoCAD? I imagine 2d right? I'm more familiar with inventor and pro/e than cad itself. I've often wondered about using a modeling program for concepting designs for minecraft builds. But I always end up in paint instead as its pretty straightforward even if it doesn't let me do everything I want to.

[Battlecat]

@EdzyWhat: Thanks kindly, I really love how that building turned out. I love the combination of sandstone and stone brick.

@SterlingRed Yeah, it's 2D only design, I wouldn't know where to start with the true 3D design. Besides, that's what I do in game. In cad, I just establish a unit grid which I use to layout out plans and profiles of buildings in a grid world. I've got hundreds of ideas on my sketch pad which I'll never have time to build. I'd show you a screenshot but I left the physical drive that contains my ideas at a friends house last week! :-(

I particularly like using Autocad to plan out unusual shaped curves and for mirroring designs. I can lay out precision curves and then approximate them using squares to generate the blocky version of a curve. I'm particularly planning on designing arches that take advantage of the BTW subblocks in the near future to create higher resolution curves for some future buildings.

[tom_savage]

You and your friends put my 'friend' server to shame. None of my friends have any good design ability. Cobblestone boxes are usually abundant.

[finite8]

Sigh. My attempts to get my friends into BTW has failed. The current description is "I just find myself building BTW stuff to get more BTW stuff that ultimately didn't have a goal other than just automating mundane stuff".

Sigh. The point has been missed. They want to go to Tekkit. My only relief so far is that our current plan cannot support tekkit as it is too much of a resource hog.

Back to the Official BTW server for me. At least you guys get me.

[FaceFoiled]

Your builds are looking amazing man. :)
I've been trying to get some real life friends into BTW as well. Unfortunately quite a few off them are rather silly, and don't want to join an established server. They want to start off on a server newly, where they can "compete" with everybody else getting up the BTW tech chain and stuff. A bit silly in my opinion, but hey. :P

[Whovian]

Sigh. The point has been missed. They want to go to Tekkit. My only relief so far is that our current plan cannot support tekkit as it is too much of a resource hog.

Ugh, it would be nice if the words "respect," "modders," "permission," and "copyright" meant anything to Tekkit. If you want a tech pack, try FTB. If you want a better tech mod, try BTW.

[schubeast]

I just recently (over Thanksgiving) was overvoted to revert our server to pure vanilla. It was a small, friends-and-family server, and we had switched to BTW in September. Myself and three other players were the only ones to really go for it in terms of BTW stuff. What really turned players off was hardcore beds. Despite setting up a command block as a teleporter from spawn to our railway hub, which led to an extensive rail network, the players just didn't go for it. They also didn't like not skipping the night cycle.
Can't win 'em all... I'm playing the last save of our world with BTW on SSP now on and off, just not the same anymore.

Any suggestions for a good BTW, non-anarchy server? (yes, I'm too lazy to look them up myself)