Minecraft Frontiers

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...

Hello explorers,
What’s lore? Where’s the lore? And what can we see from incoming, new lore? Is lore actually important? Well I’ll tell you!

I hope this helped answer some of your questions about the Minecraft Frontiers lore, and if you happen to have any more questions just ask below.

Cheers,
Chad

Combat is at the core of our experience. Naturally, it is one of the first systems we drafted out. With our update to 1.9, combat is getting an overhaul, offering even more choices for the players. Paradoxically, it is not the blocking that is being added (we had that in already). The new addition is a feature we call damage types.

The Vision:
Minecraft does not offer a rich combat experience to begin with. In the heat of the battle, players usually only run away or hit the enemy as often as possible. Even with the addition of shields in 1.9, vanilla combat still leaves a lot to be desired.

In the spirit of Minecraft Frontiers, our custom combat plugin makes sure the player always has something to think about. Do you want to block? If you attack, are you opening yourself up to a counter attack? Do you have the support from your allies if you go all out? During every moment of the battle, the player has a range of options available. Combat is no longer only about hitting the enemy in the most efficient manner, it is also about outsmarting your opponent.

Frontiers Combat:
Our combat system consists of three components:

1. Damage Types - picking the correct equipment for the fight.
2. Stamina Management - deciding which action to take.
3. Action Skill - carrying out the action skilfully.

To be the winner, you will need to master all of these aspects. Doing one thing correctly and failing the others will result in a difficult fight (and probably your defeat).

Damage Types:
This is the newest addition to our combat - and it is something we are very excited about. In our first beta test, the limitations of having a single damage type were becoming obvious. A sword that does 6 damage is better than one that does 3 damage. One that does 9 damage would be better that one that does 6 damage. You get the idea. There was very little "thinking" when choosing equipment. The decision simply comes down to figuring out which weapon offers the most damage over a period of time.

With the introduction of damage types, weapons no longer only have one damage value. Instead, they may deal various types of damage. For example, a sword might do 3 piercing damage and 3 fire damage. At the same time, another sword will deal 3 piercing damage and 3 ice damage.

Similarly, armor and shields will protect you from specific damage types. A fire armor set will help you a lot against fire weapons, but will be useless when fighting an ice sword. This should result in a very interesting decision making process. Players will be able to figure out which enemies are vulnerable to which types of damage and equip themselves accordingly. There will not be a clear "best weapon", as certain weapons will be better in different situations.

Stamina Management:
This aspect of combat makes sure players approach the skirmish tactically. Every player has a set amount of stamina that slowly regenerates over time. Both attacking and blocking drains your stamina, so it is up to the player to figure out what action is the best.

Blocking is usually cheaper than attacking. This means that timing your blocks correctly will result in a stamina advantage for you, in turn allowing you to exploit an oponent who cannot defend themselves. On the other hand, blocking for a long period of time will slowly drain out all of your stamina, leaving you open to a dangerous payback.

A nice by-product of this is the fact that weapons come in different varieties. Large, heavy weapons usually dish out a bit more damage, but drain a lot more stamina. A dagger may be weaker, but will allow you to attack a lot more often. Combined with damage types, this results in an incredibly rich array of combat styles to choose from. No two players (or NPCs) will ever fight the same way.

Action Skill:
Finally, it is important to be accurate with your attacks and blocks. Missing a lot of attacks in vanilla Minecraft may not matter much. Here, every missed attack means wasted stamina, which is detrimental to the outcome of the fight. Similarly, poor blocking timing and direction will leave you exposed to a counter attack.

When confronting NPCs, they will each attack in a different way. They dynamically adapt to the weapons they are using, resulting in a very interesting experience when fighting a new NPC for the first time. It is up to you to learn how each NPC prefers to fight and exploit their weakness.

There are many situations where combat may be the viable course of action. From dungeon crawling with a group of friends, proving your worth against others in the arena, to hunting animals out in the wilderness. No matter the reason, we hope you will always have enough choice to make every fight memorable.

Will you...