Minecraft Frontiers

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...

Hello Adventurers!
We are very excited to announce events, a new community experience! This is a sneak peek of what is to come. The first event will be happening in the coming weeks!
Events Summary
Events are a captivating part of Minecraft Frontiers. They deliver a rich, storytelling experience, with you in the lead role. From exploration of ancient ruins, to averting a political crisis, players will embark on journeys shaping the future of the world. While events have not been mentioned before to the public, it has been a feature we have been looking forward to since the start of the project.

There are two kinds of events: community events and story events. Community events are built around a minigame, with the goal of bringing people together and having fun. They happen in a less story driven setting. Think arena tournaments, treasure hunts, races, or light roleplay evenings. On the other hand, story events represent a deep experience with rich lore. They let you shine in the spotlight as you follow the story arc over the course of several weeks. Story events often have multiple outcomes, giving you the opportunity to sway the future of the game world.

Sneak Peak
While we don’t want to give away too much too soon, I can promise you that the first events will give you the exploration of your lifetime. A long forgotten tale is returning to Elpida, waiting for you to uncover its mysteries. You definitely don’t want to miss out on our events - participating in each one will come with exciting rewards.
We are very excited to share this tidbit of information with you. But we are even excited to see what the community thinks of it.

Cheers,
The Minecraft Frontiers Team, Saphiria

Merry Christmas and happy holidays to all of our community members!

No matter where in the world you are, the Minecraft Frontiers team wishes you only the best this Christmas. Remember to relax and spend time with your friends and family. After all, that's what Christmas is about.

So you are here looking for something interesting and new? You are in the right place! Read on and get to know our idea - an idea that will not only completely change the way people play Minecraft, but will bring back what many videogames are missing.

Foreword from the owner:
I'm Tom, 23 years old, studying Psychological Research (you know, reading people's mind and stuff). I love a good story, enjoy games and meeting people from all walks of life. The number one thing that makes games fun for me is immersion - if it can make me believe I am there for just a minute, I'm sold (@Tomas).

Quite a few people were interested in my idea and now we have a team of about 14 people working on and off, trying to deliver this beast of a project! We have Matt, a champion at everything from organizing staff to managing plugins. Our awesome builders, who have been placing blocks into some pretty neat formations (screenshots below!). We have a couple of lore writers thinking up impressive stories that are both original and make sense. It's all blending together great - and there is always space for new talent. So that's our passionate team, here to create a bold new frontier.


The Project:
Think of an RPG server with classes, quests, levels and a storyline that guides your character from a nobody to the savior of the world. Now throw that idea out the window! When we sat down to design this experience, it was instantly obvious that majority of games out there are the same old thing, just slightly different settings. Our goal is to make a player experience that is like nothing you've played before. We call it a living universe. What is a living universe?

• Plays on its own - it lives without the need for a single player. Farmers plant crops to make a living. Bakers buy the wheat and sell their bread to others in the marketplace. Politicians make big decisions for citizens and collect taxes. Warriors explore the wilderness and defend trade caravans. It is constantly interacting with itself, resulting in a completely dynamic experience.

• Smart NPCs - so the above sounds like the smartest NPC system there could be, right? Well there is more. NPCs chat with each other, share their experiences and knowledge. Did a thief steal from a caravan on the other side of town? Well the other trader won't know about it - unless someone told him! The goal is for each NPC to have a meaningful life, making decisions on a daily basis - possibly being "smarter" than most players!

• Expanding towns - if a city prospers and the villagers are happy enough to make love, politicians will start thinking about expanding the town. If you don't log in for a month of two, chances are you will come back to a very different place - full of new buildings not created by the admins, but planned and built by the NPCs!

• Dynamic economy - the town economy goes beyond supply and demand. If warriors bring back rare weapons, the old iron daggers will drop in value - but that's not it by far. A player set up a new bakery that makes tastier and cheaper breads than the old bakery in town? Locals will quickly realise and start enjoying the new yummy breads. Shame on the old greedy baker who is now out of a job!

The Players:
So we have a world that lives on its own. Where does the player come in? That is the beauty of it all. You log in and have a meaningful decision to make! Who will you be? There are literally hundreds of possibilities and our team is here to let you be who you want to be. Through systems promoting role-play and interaction, we let you blend into the already living world.
You not only get to explore this rich universe, but since everything is dynamic, you also get to change it! Things you do and the way you spend your time really makes an impact. No more RPGs where you log in with level 1, stop playing a month later and no single soul cares. As soon as you log in, the world has already changed!
We keep our fellow role-players at heart, letting you do things like:

• Write your own lore - and if you ever get in trouble, don't be surprised the elected senator can dig the local library to find out records on your character.
• Own valuable property - no endless plots. If you want to own a building at the heart of the town, you have to work for it. But if you are lucky enough to own that tavern in the town square, you bet all those NPCs will flock to your events!
• Be known - both players and NPCs will get to know you over time. If you feel like it, you can even dabble in politics to really stir things...

Music is easily one of the most overlooked parts of any game. Done right, it can go by without being noticed in-game. But if it’s missing, the experience will never really captivate you. When I think back on the games I’ve loved over the years, they all share something in common – a memorable soundtrack.

When working on Minecraft Frontiers, we understand that if we want our explorable places to stand out, they will need a soundtrack to accompany them. Whether you are walking around the capital, or fighting your way through a dungeon, the memories you keep should have the right flavour to them. Music lets us quickly express what the current setting means. Is it a dangerous area? Is this part of town full of rich politicians? Was this ruin built thousands of years ago? All these questions would take pages of lore to answer, but a soundtrack can do that in couple of seconds.


Creating the plugin:

The music plugin (MF Music, as we call it internally) has already gone through several iterations. We want our experience to be easily accessible by anyone – the music system has to be handled by your Minecraft client. Downloading an extra piece of software is a hassle the player should not have to go through. The early prototypes of the system were interesting, allowing us to play the custom soundtrack to our players, but they did not respond to the world at all. The main point of having music is to attach it to the world in a meaningful way. Without it dynamically adapting to the world, there is little point of putting all the effort in.

Today marks the day when the system is complete and rolled out on our test server.

A powerful system:

In the current state, the soundtrack seamlessly integrates with our regions. Not only will you hear music based on which region you are in, the soundtrack is also able to prioritize a specific location. Are you in a tavern in the capital? The soundtrack will understand that being in a tavern overrides being in a town, selecting the tavern music. This allows us to define very specific areas in the world that will have a signature piece of music attached to them. Dungeons may be broken up into sections (or sections of sections, the inception potential is endless), giving you just the right song for your memorable boss fight.

Next to that, the soundtrack is able to change on the fly. Coding all of our plugins internally means everything can dynamically respond to what is going on. The soundtrack is no exception. The songs attached to regions are not set in stone, but can change as the world itself is changing. Walking through town, doing your Sunday grocery shopping, will sound very differently than walking the same street during a bandit invasion. The current system is as flexible as any of our other features, able to adapt instantly to what the world is doing.

A taste of our world:

All of our music was created by professional artists. When it comes to immersion, we strive for delivering something that will blow you away. Music is a big part of our experience, so we decided there would be no compromises. As a result, all of our songs are properly licensed. We are able to deliver great quality with no fear of copyright infringement.

Trading is the core of our Economical simulation. With all of our plugins being designed in-house, we have the opportunity to create systems that are tightly linked to one another. Trading is no exception, as it seamlessly weaves into everything the players (and NPCs) do.

Our Economical simulation is inspired by our real world, so this article may be a bit too heavy for some readers. At the same time, those who love trading and business will appreciate the depth we are going for.
Currency in other games

In a large majority of games, coins are generated by everything the player does – you kill a monster, it drops gold. You finish a quest, it drops gold. You sell your stuff to an NPC, it drops gold. In all of these situations, the gold is generated out of nothing, increasing the total amount of gold present in the game world. In other words, when you first start the game, no one has any gold. As players progress, the overall gold in-game increases with no limit.

When you first start playing, nobody else has gold, so you can buy a lot with it – a house, the best piece of armor, a rare pet. As more and more people generate gold, the gold you have loses value. When everyone has 1000 gold, your 10 gold coins don’t mean all that much. A house no longer costs 10 gold (everyone would have hundreds of houses if it did). It instead costs 1000 gold. Is the house 100x better than before? No. So why is it more expensive? Your gold coins lost value. This is called inflation.

To prevent inflation, games create money-sinks. If coins get generated out of nothing by simply playing the game, a money-sink is a system where coins disappear into nothing. This tries to provide balance by removing currency on one side, while it is being generated on another. A money-sink is similar to and admin shop: someone loses gold while no one gains it. An example would be purchasing a mount-riding license, paying transportation fees, or losing gold when you die.

There are two big flaws with this system. First, it does not feel natural to earn money out of nothing. In the real world, if I get paid by my employer, it is out of the money they have. He is not magically printing it in his basement (hopefully). Second, as more people play the game and get better at earning money, the developers are forced to create more and more money-sinks to balance that out. As this never really works out, you still see rapid inflation in most games. Leaving an online game for a year, you'll come back to find your money worth next to nothing.

What are we doing differently?

The system we have tries to give you the feeling of meaningfully earning and spending money. Instead of magically generating money for everything the player does, we funnel currency into Elpida through trade. Trade is the process of sending items off shore, in exchange for currency. This is where the coins are magically generated in our world. Part of the coin goes to the player, while the rest goes directly into the town treasury through taxes.

The money then stays in Elpida for quite a while. Players trade the currency between each other, with NPCs and with the town. This means a lot of the payments you make on a daily basis aren’t gold-sinks. Money doesn’t disappear, it just gets traded to someone else. If you go to an NPC and buy 10 expensive bottles of wine, they will have the money you gave them and spend it themselves at a later point. If you buy a land permit from the town, all of the money you spend will go into the town’s treasury. Likewise, if an NPC rewards you for your help, it will be from their personal bank account. This results in a much more connected environment, an environment that makes more sense intuitively and feels alive.

By keeping the currency in the loop for a while, the way in which you spend it suddenly matters. If you do not buy equipment from NPCs, but instead blow your money on a fancy town house, that makes a lot of impact. NPCs will have less money to spend, while the town will have more. At the same time, if you don’t pay taxes and hide your money with your friends, the town stops prospering, while players get more money overall. Banks will not just be a place to store your coins, but elaborate institutions where smart bankers can keep or release their money based on currency value predictions. There are numerous ways your spending impacts the economy.

As much as we love keeping money in the loop, there also needs to be an equivalent to a money-sink. Inflation would skyrocket otherwise. Again, we do not place the money-sinks inside the players’ transactions, but rather apply them to the town. Each town will have to spend their earned money on upgrades, upkeep and and importing goods from afar. This is where money is removed from the...