Minecraft Frontiers

Good Morning MF Community. My name is Aaron, aka Isaiha, and I am the creative design lead for Minecraft Frontiers (otherwise known as the illustrious Lead Builder). This summer, nay this year, has been for me and my team amongst the busiest of our lives. If you’ve read our recent announcement and news posting by Tomas, I would reiterate here the same thing that was there in that work, school, and personal time has been hit and miss for us but over time we dealt with things in our lives that are both important and necessary. Always make your personal life goals and needs first before anything else and when you have time, enjoy some Minecraft.

Creative Development

Now enough about me...Why am I here with you today? As the creative design lead, it is my job to bring to life the world in which Minecraft Frontiers lives, through building and designing the landscape, the buildings, dungeons, and the very rocks and trees you see in the world of MF. I am here today to give you a sneak peek feature into how we have transformed and developed some new areas since our prototype launch phase a few years ago into some pretty realistic and amazing creations to show not only what is possible to do with our creativity and design, but to really emphasize creating an engaging user experience when it comes to entering the world and seeing what’s around you. Of course, we are limited by the bounds of what is available to us in Minecraft. But with every new content release update for Minecraft, it brings with it usually a new set of items or blocks that allows us to be even more detailed and creative with our designs.

With all that said, let’s show you some of the things we’ve been working on!


Recently Implemented Locales

• Elpida Expanded - When I returned to MF as the design leader, Elpida was a tiny town. All that it had to itself was a few rows of buildings, some squares/courtyards, and a couple gates and towers, as well as a single dock for a small ship that was poorly designed. In fact, if you’ve seen (or have not seen) the prototype trailer that was released a few years ago, it actually shows how much addition we added AT THAT TIME to the city of Elpida.
  
  
  
  Now? There’s even more! A non-exhaustive list of new and added buildings and structures is below:

• The Ruins - Welcome to the Ruins of the Island! There is a history behind these old, aged structures. You will find many ruins on the entire island, but what is most interesting about these is that they are not only located next to elpida, but also being restored by the Explorers Guild! These ruins will likely have quests and other hidden and ancient things to uncover. You never know what you will find in the ruins next to Elpida. There is also a fully intact, weathered fortress on the hill next to these ruins. Alongside this is a under construction religious temple that is undergoing restoration, hence all the construction scaffolding. This newly added locale will bring lots of interesting new features to...

What a busy summer for most of our team. Between work, school and trips, my personal time for MF was hit and miss. Still, there was a steady bit of progress on the project. Let me give you a short update on what we completed, what's left and where we are headed.

Development
Our Discord public channels may be quiet, but the private team chat is always buzzing. There have been 471 updates to our code in the last 30 days alone. This trickled down into 41 new fixes/features. Since our last update in April, there has been 1291 updates, 375 new features/additions.

Recently Implemented Features

• Internal Tooling - a complete overhaul of how we define gameplay components in the background. This means we can design new items / recipes / plots / or even NPCs, directly from our internal development website. This had to be done through text files previously, leading to a fair bit of complexity. Now, everything is stored neatly in a dedicated website toolkit.
  
• Craftable Schematics & Architect - purchasing houses in-game now requires a craft-able schematic item. Whether you are a citizen or a politician, you will first need to craft (or buy) a schematic of the building. This leads to a new crafting profession, the Architect. Being an architect is a complex, time and resource intensive job. It will require a huge amount of dedication, but the rewards are great. Not only are buildings necessary to progress your town, they are also one of the most expensive items to produce. We see the architect as a profession for dedicated players who love to pour time into understanding complex recipes.
  
• Subscriptions - players will be able to donate to the project, unlocking rewards in return. Because our donations are strictly non-pay-to-win, we needed to code a unique plugin that lets us reward players with things like dialogue options or lore items.
  
• Crafting Leaderboards - being the first person to discover an item comes with a reward. Players who uncover a new recipe will be globally announced, stored in a leaderboard, and their item will say it's first of its kind. We plan to use this later down the line, handing out awards for our most dedicated crafters.
  
• Dungeon Designer - a custom built piece of software. This allows us to create dungeons out of tiles, stitching new explorable places in minutes as opposed to hours. We are planning to release regular new dungeons for players to enjoy post-launch. Having a designer tool makes this feasible.
  
• Weapon Itemization - we completed our basic armour and weapon itemization. We will launch with Swords, Long Swords, Zweihanders, Maces and Daggers. Each weapon type comes in 5 different damage sets, meaning 25 unique weapon playstyles at launch. This is excluding weapon quality and legendary weapons!
  
• Dungeon Blocks - our NPC script functionality has been extended to blocks. Now we have things like illusory walls, poison traps, invisible bridges and more.
  
• Boss Mechanics - we started playing with some unique boss mechanics. Each of our signature bosses will have completely unique fight mechanics. Part of the encounter will be learning through trial and error - trying to figure out what obliterated your party and how to overcome this. With 12 dungeons at release, this should be quite a ride for those who enjoy the combat.

We are currently working on

• Architect Itemization - I finished the first 2 tiers of the architect profession. There is 3 more to go. It's taking a lot of time, as the profession incorporates many of our mechanics. Recipes will need rare gathered ingredients, political imports, boss drops and items obtained in "production facilities".
  
• Meta Events - we are hoping to launch with repeated, public events. These will be scheduled, scripted encounters with some of our NPCs. Players will need to gather together and defeat bosses threatening the environment. Except instead of the boss being statically spawned in a dungeon, the boss will come to you! Imagine a quest campaign on steriods. Each event will be quite different to each other and they will happen regularly, delivered automatically without our staff. We see these as end-game content that's fun and repeatable.
  
• Crafting Specialisations - players will be able to progress through crafting guilds. This will let your character specialise in a discipline, unlocking rewards like legendary recipes. Our goal with this is to encourage players to pick a "theme" for your character and be known for a specific craft. If you want to go for a hybrid specialisation worry not, you still can.
  
• Production Facilities - you will now be able to craft and build a range of production facilities. These are buildings that generate rare resources over time. Ingredients like Sandstone or Ebony will need a dedicated production facility. This means part of the crafting...

Buzz Buzz
March has been a busy month for our team. We started ramping up recruitment ahead of release. The development team locked down the features that will be necessary for launch - and now they are in the process of turning them into reality. Both the builders and lore writers have been organising content and throwing in new additions for you to explore.

The forums have been a little quiet, but our internal Discord channels have hundreds (if not thousands) of messages a day.

Here is a March update from across our teams:
Management
I have spent most of last week processing staff applications. There has been strong interest in our server, with some brilliant applicants. The happy news is that the work has come to fruition - we on-boarded several stellar members. The build team has grown by Tyler, who is now a full staff member. We've also had strong contributions from prospective staff build members, with GWolf being promoted to work on server related content. We have two new developers (Farcon and Thomas), a new lore writer (Zelda) and an artist (Shokk). All of these members are incredibly talented at what they do, bringing new talent to MF, helping to crunch down towards 1.0.

Development
With four developers now on the project, the dev team is more then capable of delivering a consistent flow of features, both for launch and beyond. We submitted 37 features and bug fixes, with 28 left for release. This pace is likely to pick up considerably as our two new developers get settled in. The team has finished major features that are now ready for launch, including a redesigned plot system, new stamina, food, and region plugins. We also have new internal tools - such as the ability to move maps across servers (to update the play server with new builds), or a whole new internal website for designing items.

Building
At the beginning of March, we had set up our public trial world. This allows any prospective builder to hop on and contribute to our building efforts. The builds created in the public space can then be migrated over to the game play areas, so no eye-candy gets left behind. We had over 10 builders join us in trial world, creating well over 30 new buildings - some of which you'll see as player housing in game! Next to that, we drafted out the new content needed for release. Isaiha has been hard at work upgrading the visuals of the island, from the coasts to new points of interests to visit. Matt, the creator of most our dungeon content, has proposed a modular dungeon design. Known as the cultist dungeon (to be announced next month), this will be the largest and most challenging piece of content for players to tackle.

Community
Alir and Quann have been consistently delivering new event plans for the past two months. Thanks to them, there is now a clear and reliable schedule of both story and community events. We will announce our specific event plans in the coming month, but you can expect engaging and rewarding activities on a weekly basis, with larger story-driven pieces every other week. I am quite excited about this personally, as it is a big step up from our event efforts in the prototypes. We are moving away from individual events, to thought out campaigns and story arcs. These build up the storytelling towards climactic moments where players get to shape the outcomes of the world.

Lore
Our lore team has grown to two members - with Zelda hopping in last weekend and already fleshing out several key non player characters. For release, we will spend time making sure players have interesting people to meet and befriend. Driven by our now working reputation plugin, the Lore team will be able to deliver deeper responses from the characters around you. We have also been working on new environments around the island, establishing the stories behind the enemies you will fight. We will announce a lot more on Lore in the weeks ahead.

Marketing & Wiki
You will see the team focusing a lot more on player-facing content. As we approach release, we will be ramping up our media efforts, with videos, posts and announcements throughout April and May. We are aiming for a 2-week lockdown period. After we finish designing all the plugins and the content, we will leave two weeks for media, player interaction and internal testing. This will give both the staff and the players time to get ready for release and our launch weekend.

Plans for April
The team has shifted gears. With new members joining all our branches, we are focusing our efforts on content creation. This means April will see new additions in content across all aspects of the project. The biggest features and game play content will be put together in this coming month, from new signature builds, to plugins and itemisation. We are also hoping to fill the additional spaces in our Marketing and Community teams, starting to focus on a release...

An update video, showing some of the upcoming features.
We'd love to hear what you think!

Crafting has always been at the heart of Minecraft Frontiers. It is the primary avenue of generating coins for both you and the city. It is our most detailed system, including multiple-step recipes, fully custom items, variable recipe difficulty and links to the trade/export game-play. You can read about all of those on our wiki.

In this post, I'd like to open up a discussion around a feature called crafting disciplines.


Disciplines
As a player, you are free to pursue any activity in Elpida. We won't restrict you from attempting to craft a specific item. That said, the intricate multi-step crafting process means that specialisation is necessary. Crafting a sword will require obtaining a range of ingredients and intermediate components - from blacksmith's hammers, to rare ores or sharpening stones. None of these will be useful when crafting a healing potion.

This means our recipes are naturally organised into disciplines. Each discipline is a group of recipes and items that complement each other.

Launch Content
Previous beta tests included 4 crafting disciplines: Cooking, Blacksmithing, Jewellery Making and Alchemy. For launch, we will be adding Carpentry and Curating. Each of the 6 disciplines will be getting new content, including materials, recipes and crafting mechanics. Here is what each discipline represents:

We have additional disciplines planned for post-launch updates. You can also except a constant stream of new items and export requisitions for the disciplines listed above.

Unique Patterns
To make each discipline feel authentic, they each have a unique design philosophy. Crafting swords will feel very different to making potions or drafting houses. Even if you end up using the same in-game mechanics, the underlying recipes will show very different patterns between disciplines. Each path has a quirk to it. This allows you to experiment with the different disciplines, finding just the right play-style for you.

This has two functions. Each discipline will feel fresh and different. If you choose to be a baker, you will learn the nuances of making bread - the process will be second nature to you. On the other hand, it makes transferring between disciplines challenging. A highly experienced blacksmith won't necessarily excel at making houses. There will be a learning curve to pick up, which makes your time investment in a discipline worthwhile and valued by other players.

Each discipline has a unique aspect to it:

Minecraft Frontiers is a custom-built, innovative historical experience. The server is unlike any other, placing focus on community building, role-play and meaningful decisions. The project has seen over 60 staff members chip in to create a world that's both authentic and exciting at the same time. The best news? It is opening soon!

If you have been following us over the years, this may come as a surprise. I'd like to devote this post to answering some of your questions and most importantly, revealing what's in store for Minecraft Frontiers. Make sure to read all the way to the end, there is a lot to announce!

The Concept of Minecraft Frontiers

• Authentic World - making a story that is worth living.
• Player Power - letting players make choices that matter.
• Community - building the whole project with the community in mind.

We have always seen this as a project run by the players for the players. This is deeply rooted in our project culture - starting all the way in 2013 with me inviting the first co-founder, to the community-centric plans we announce today.

Sleeping Beauty
...

Starting with Prototype 2, we are introducing our rewards framework!

Players who get involved in our regular events, or simply even participate in the Prototype 2, will get some sweet rewards as a token of our gratitude.

We are also announcing scheduled events! While people play at different times, events give us a great opportunity to bring our members together. This means you'll get to enjoy the MF experience with tons of people around, earning rare items in the process.

Events:
Events are activities scheduled to take place at a certain time. They usually last around 2 hours, often supervised by one of our staff members. There are three types of events:

• Story Arc Chapter: This is a substantial piece of story driven content. Our lore writer @cman64 has written three amazing story arcs - full blown tales designed to last several months. Each story is themed around a significant event in Elpida, putting our players in the driver's seat. These story arcs are broken down into chapters - 2 hour bite-sized pieces of content. That way we can deliver this rich experience in a very approachable way. Every 4 chapters, players experience a finale - a climactic turning point in the story, often forcing the players to make a decision, in turn affecting the shape of Elpida forever. These will be starting in Prototype 3.

• Major Server Event: These are not part of a story arc, but often have a decent amount of planning behind them. They are stand alone experiences (unrelated to one another). Most of these will be run by our community coordinator @Alir99. They may include things like treasure hunts, PvP tournaments, races or small story events. These will be starting in Prototype 2!

• Minor Server Event: Running on odd weeks (less busy times), minor events encourage roleplay through small staff incentives. They revolve around sharing stories, interacting with secondary characters or simply gathering the players in one place. Minor events allow us to keep the fun rolling, while giving our events staff a break - they require little planning. An example of this is a tavern night. These will also be starting in Prototype 2!

Participation Points:
As players take part in the Prototype test, they collect participation points. These points are gained for turning up at our scheduled events, but also for completing key milestones on our server. At the end of the prototype test, your point balance will decide what participation reward level you are. Needless to say, the higher your participation level, the greater the rewards.

Getting Points
The following deeds will earn you points:

One of our main goals is making the world respond to players in a personal way. A wealthy trader will be praised by the craftsmen, but despised by the thieves. A talented hunter may impress the Warrior's Guild, but won't mean much to the noble politicians. This behaviour is made possible through our reputation plugin. In connection with NPCs, reputation delivers a unique game experience for every player, one that they are personally responsible for.

The game world hosts a variety of factions. Some large and prestigious - such as the Elpidan Traders or the Warrior's Guild. Some much less known - a circle of herbalists or a group of beggars. NPCs have preferences for factions, often sympathising with one or two. As players interact with NPCs belonging to a faction, the faction itself will develop an opinion of the player. In turn, this may change the way a faction responds to you quite dramatically.

Reputation Points
Players gain reputation points with each faction separately. Positive actions improve your standing, while negative actions decrease it. Most factions are neutral to you by default and have ten possible reputation tiers. As you interact with a faction's NPCs, your points will shift in the background. You may not know your exact standing, but you may usually ask an NPC for the tier. Below is a breakdown of the tiers for most factions in Elpida:



Progression:
One thing we wanted to avoid is grinding for numbers. That is, doing the same stuff over and over again to gain reputation. For that reason, a player does not have one overall reputation, but a standing with every single faction in the world. Your actions will often influence multiple factions at once, some in a positive way, some in a negative one. Slaying wolves will make the hunters appreciate you, but may anger the herbalists. Selling goods off-shore might impress the trade office, but the Elpidan nationalists may frown at you.

This means there is no "good" way of playing the game. You can never be the winner in everyone's eyes. Instead, the reputation signifies your unique standing in the world. No other player will have the exact same reputation pattern to you, making the world respond to you in a slightly (or greatly) different way.

Impact:
The NPCs are scripted to recognise reputation and respond to it appropriately. In most cases, only one or two reputations matter to an NPC. A trader won't really care if the beggars like you, but will care about your trade guild standing. Having a positive standing with the NPCs has many benefits. These may include:

• Access to shops or special goods.
• The ability to learn secrets and gossip.
• Having influence and control over groups of NPCs.
• Getting to areas otherwise inaccessible.
• Learning crafting recipes.

Overall, having a positive standing will make NPCs respond to you in a more positive way. Having an extremely positive standing (the very top tiers) may mean NPCs view you as sort of a celebrity. Drinks on the house, guards trusting your judgement, voters wanting you as their politician. It is always advised to try and improve your reputation standing when possible.

On the other hand, having a negative standing may make your life more difficult. You should always avoid the most negative tiers, as that will cause NPCs to attack on sight. A slightly negative standing may lead to more expensive prices, closed doors where others are welcome, little information in dialogues, or overall unpleasant attitude from the NPCs.

The system is designed in such a way where pleasing everyone is impossible. But it is a good rule of thumb to try have a positive standing with the "Citizens of Elpida" at least. This faction represents the overall feeling of Elpidan citizens towards you. Having a negative reputation among the citizens will make the game very difficult. If you want to be an unlawful citizen, you'll need to be smart about it.

A Personal Touch:
Our goal is to let you play the game your way. The world may appear the same to everyone, but it will respond differently. It is very likely your reputation profile will naturally reflect your play-style, enhancing your game even further. If you spend a lot of time crafting and trading, you will access some very tempting crafting perks, from priority imports to Mastercrafted recipes. If you hunt animals for rare trophies, the hunter's guild may reward you with a legendary sword. Helping our the Elpidan guard defeat bandits may land you a sweet spot in the Elpidan army - how about a personal guard watching over you?

As with all of our plugins, we will constantly keep on adding more unique behaviours sensitive to reputation! We have big plans for reputation, from robust guild communities, to NPC nobility throwing wild parties in their villas.

Let us know what you think!

Prototype 2 adds a range of new features. Crafting is no exception. The first prototype was heavily focused on crafting, giving us a lot of feedback to work with. This thread offers an in-depth rundown of the changes you will see when you log in.

The Minecraft Frontiers economy is built to reward effort and smart thinking. In terms of crafting, this means the more time you spend with the system, the more profit you can potentially make. A player who spends their time blacksmithing should be rewarded with wealth and fame in that area. While this was true in our first iteration, a lot of feedback voiced that crafting is very hard to get into. For that reason, we focused on making crafting more approachable, while allowing seasoned crafters to stand out even more.

Difficulty Tiers
Our crafting recipes have always used a four dimensional difficulty system. That is, an item may be difficult to craft in four different ways - it may require rare ingredients (rarity); it may require a range of different ingredients (quantity); the ingredients may come from players of many different professions (diversity); or the crafting process itself may require many steps (complexity).

While this system offers a lot of variety in difficulty, it is also not intuitive. This is why in Prototype 2, we added three difficulty tiers - "easycraft", "normal", "mastercrafted". Unlike the four dimensions of difficulty (which we are still using to design items), the difficulty tiers are explicitly stated on items. You'll see an item's difficulty tier both in-game and on the Wiki.

This allows crafters (especially starting ones) to immediately know how difficult the crafting process is going to be. Each discipline has a few Easycraft items - these are fairly simple and are designed to introduce you to the crafting discipline. Normal items represent a large majority of recipes. These range from fairly easy to craft, to very advanced items. Finally, each discipline has several mastercrafted items. These are the most profitable, but are also very challenging to make. A crafter should avoid these at first, unless they have some time on their hands.

Mastercrafted items are the pinnacle on crafting - the ultimate product. Each mastercrafted item has unique lore to go along with it. This makes them very memorable and rewarding to make. They have the best performance and some NPCs may even respond to their users in a different way.

Recipe Knowledge
A big part of the crafting system is learning recipes. This is what distinguishes a veteran crafter from a novice. Everyone is able to craft anything, but if you don't know which components to use and in what order, you won't get far. However, the most common feedback from Prototype 1 was that learning everything is tedious. This is a fair comment, as we can't expect a completely new player to spend hours trying to craft a simple item.

To make crafting more approachable, we will be revealing certain recipes, in a systematic way. Here is how recipe knowledge will work from now on:

We hope the difficulty changes make crafting a lot more accessible to the general public, but still give players enough space to excel at their discipline.
New Disciplines
All of our crafting recipes have been overhauled for Prototype 2. Don't be surprised if some of your notes from Prototype 1 don't hold up any more. Each discipline should now have clearer progression. Item values are more in line with what you would expect. A loaf of bread is no longer more expensive than an inventory full of gold.

When it comes to crafting disciplines, we follow the vision...