Hi gang! Intro As you may know Aikar and the developers have pushed out some updates lately and they have completely revised the shop signs. You use a shop sign to sell (or buy) items on a residence (they only work in town), and right now there have been quite a few changes and updates, so I think we could use a guide to explain it all. I also do this to draw a little extra attention to these changes. Please note though that the wiki has already been updated and it explains how to make player shops, and a lot more 'straight to the point' than here. The wiki is mostly a reference guide, while I'm now trying to go into much more detail. And maybe we'll also be able to use parts of this guide for the wiki page(s) as well, who knows. Now, I'm going to do things a little different this time and I'll start by briefly summing up the changes and tell you guys what you need to do to get the 'old' behavior back. I hope that this will benefit players who don't want to read a whole guide merely to get their shop up and running again. What got changed? We used to have 2 shop signs: regular shop signs and SLOT shop signs. Right now there is a third shop sign, although it doesn't have an official name I tend to call these #Signs because you use a # on the last line. Next the SLOT signs got replaced by CHOOSE signs. The major difference between a SLOT and a CHOOSE sign is that the latter will also display all the available items during purchase. When do you need to update your shop? If you're using a shop which uses regular shop signs (so with an item name on the last line) then you don't have to update anything, these work just as they always have. If you're using a SLOT sign then you may want to check your shop because these have been automatically converted to CHOOSE signs. They will more or less behave in the same way; you can click on them to see what the dialog will look like. SLOT vs. CHOOSE A CHOOSE sign is basically the same as a SLOT sign, and the main difference is that players get to see the available items in the chest its linked to, and then can select which item they want to buy. This also means that players can now see how much items you have in stock, without having to use a preview sign. Now... if you only want to quickly replace your SLOT sign with an equal CHOOSE sign then all you have to do is to specify the slot number behind CHOOSE: But as mentioned above there is a difference in that players will get to see a chest dialog after clicking the sign. This dialog shows them the actual item. After clicking on the item they'll get a confirmation dialog (just like the SLOT signs did) and after clicking the sign again they'll have confirmed, and completed, the purchase. More effort? Now, this may sound like a lot of hassle to you. You may even wonder what the heck Aikar was thinking because didn't they make the CHOOSE signs more difficult to use than the old SLOT signs? After all: when using a SLOT sign you clicked on it, saw the confirmation, clicked again and the deal was done. Now you have to click even more times. You'd be right of course. But then you'd also be ignoring the other new shop signs which got introduced a while ago: the #Signs. Because, and this is also why I decided to write this tutorial, you may not even need those CHOOSE signs anymore in the first place! In the old days we could only sell enchanted items using SLOT signs, remember? If it was shiny or if it had a very long name (does Potion:8265 ring any bells?) then you couldn't sell it with regular signs, so you had to use SLOT signs. But those days are now behind us! Want to do something even more exciting? How about selling 3 potions at the same time? This used to be a little tricky with SLOT signs but has now become a breeze with the new #Signs. You can get 3 potions from brewing, so why not from a shop sign? 3 potions for the price of one So yeah, maybe you should consider reading the rest of my tutorial after all? So about those new #Signs Well, for starters they now use this cool # sign! More seriously though, using the new #Signs has many advantages: You don't have to remember any exact names or weird item codes; just click the (pending) sign with the item you wish to sell (or buy) and you're done. You can nearly sell (and buy!) everything. Regular items, enchanted items, potions... You can customize the last line with your own item name. You can easily sell (or buy) multiple items, including enchanted or promo items. If you're out of stock then you can still buy (enchanted) items. Note: this was completely impossible when using the old SLOT signs! How to create a #Sign Once again please note that this information is also available on the wiki, but I decided to go all the way with this tutorial. You can create a #Sign just like a regular shop sign: Place a sign and leave the first line blank, then put the amount of items you want to trade on the second line, on the third line you put the price for which you want to sell the item(s) and if you also want to buy items you need to place a colon (:) followed by the buying price. If you only want to buy then leave out the sell price and instead use a colon followed by the price for which you wish to buy. And finally you place a # on the last line. For example like this: A #Sign which (soon) sells 3 items for 100rupees. After you exit the editor (so you placed the sign) then the last line will change into ## PENDING ##. Now you can left-click the sign while holding the item which you want to sell (or buy) and the line will change into the (default) name of the item. If you're selling promo items then it will also show the color of the item name. Don't forget a chest! I may be stating the obvious for you but just to be sure: obviously you'll also need to place a chest which will contain the items you're going to sell, or which will store the items that you might be buying. The chest can be placed near the shop sign (below it or next to it). Of course you can also place a chest first and then place the sign somewhere around it (which is what most players do I think). Customizing a #Sign You can also customize the item name which it should show on the #Sign. You can do that by typing your own name right behind the #. For example like this: Just for reference purposes, this is what it would have looked like if you'd sell a Blizzard's eye without any customized text: Keep in mind that if you customize your name then the sign will always use a confirmation dialog. This is to prevent scamming: otherwise you would be able to fill a chest with dirt and try to sell them for 100r per block while your custom name says that you're selling gold blocks: Aya called it a tomb stone, but it's actually a dragon stone In case you're wondering: she didn't mean the tomb stones which you see in graveyards, but was referring to the fact that the dragon stone is actually part of the Dragon Tomb items (or so I've been told ).
When to use a #Sign or a CHOOSE sign? In general the #Sign can be used for almost everything. From regular items, enchanted items, potions, promo items (see above) right down to vault and stable vouchers. But a #Sign won't be able to cope with items which have some differences between them. For example horse spawn eggs. Almost every horse has a different speed or jump boost, and that's not even mentioning their different colors. And that creates a problem: if you try to use a #Sign with a horse spawn egg then the sign will only react to that one specific horse egg which you used. The same applies to signed books and supporter vouchers by the way, and although I'm not 100% sure I also assume as much for permanent protection vouchers. So when you want to sell any of these specific items then you'll need to use a CHOOSE sign. Note that at the time of writing a CHOOSE sign can only be used to sell items, you cannot use these to buy. Not yet anyway, Aikar has mentioned that the developers also want to look into a buy option someday. How to set up a CHOOSE sign The easiest way to set up a CHOOSE sign is to simply create the shop sign as you normally would (see above for an example) but instead of using # you put the word CHOOSE on the last line. Note that this doesn't have to be in capitals nor do you have to include the [ ]'s which you had to when using SLOT signs. When players click on the sign they'll see the contents of your whole chest and can click on an item to buy it. After doing so they get a confirmation dialog, this is to ensure that a player will know exactly what they'll be buying, and after clicking the sign again the purchase is made. If you're using a CHOOSE sign with a single chest then player get to see a single chest dialog (3 rows) and when using a double chest then all 6 rows will be shown. But there's more... This may remind some players about the old SLOT signs, but let's agree here to never mention those things again from here on, shall we? It'll make Aikar and the developers very happy and really: you're about to discover that you can do so much more with CHOOSE signs... Every section in a chest has a number assigned to it. You could consider all those sections to be slots, which is also where the name of "those shop signs we no longer speak of" come from In the old days such a slot was only used to determine what kind of item you were going to trade. But in the current situation you can use these to put items on display: allow people to look at what they'll be buying before the actual purchase. Better yet: you also have full control over which area of the chest is going to be used! And that makes it very easy to use one chest for multiple series of items. Let's CHOOSE horses! Horses come in lots of varieties like different speed and colors and in this example I want to sell some horses with the following speeds: 100.25% and 100.64% 101.57% 103.05%, 103.28%, 103.54% and 103.64% So basically 100, 101, and 103 percent. The fun part is that I can do this using only 1 chest if I want to. Sure: I could simply dump all the horse eggs in my chest and then let the players sort it out themselves. But here's the problem: the faster the horse, the more money I want to get. And this is why we can also use ranges with CHOOSE signs. I'm going to use a single chest (which has 3 rows) and place each horse speed which I want to sell on a separate row. So something like this: If you look briefly at those numbers I showed above you'll see that the first row of a chest contains numbers 1 to 9. So to sell horses with 100% speed we'd use a CHOOSE sign in the range 1-9. The horses on the second row, 101% speed, would be CHOOSE 10-18. And finally the last row with 103% would range from 19-27. Here's what I came up with: In case you're wondering: I used GripCEO at some point because I kept being PM'd by players And if a player clicks on the sign for 103 speed horses, the one in front, then this is what they're going to see: Now, in my examples I simply used the word 'free' as price so that I didn't have to pay anyone back, but obviously you can easily use a real amount of rupees there in your own shops. When it comes to CHOOSE ranges then you're pretty much limited to your own imagination. If you want you can even combine CHOOSE signs with #Signs, something which I did in my shop: All the available Inkstain editions sold from a single chest. The Inkstain is an in-game newspaper made and maintained by our own Hashhog, and my shop has been a re-seller for quite some time now. I always sold one single edition (the most recent one) because of the sometimes varying prices but most of all a lack of space in my shop. If you want to know what I mean then you should visit /v +inkstain on SMP8 to check out the official Inkstain building and shop. But thanks to CHOOSE signs I can now sell all available editions using one single chest. And the prices in my shop are only 1r more than those in Hashhog's shop, this was initially done to cover for the vault costs. You could use this same approach to sell support vouchers or any other item which has multiple varieties of whatever you wish to sell. Maybe you'd like to sell all kinds of wooden planks (oak, dark-oak, birch, spruce, acacia and jungle) for the same price? In that case a CHOOSE sign could be all you need. You simply dump all your wood planks in a chest, place a CHOOSE sign and players can then chose themselves which variant they'd like to buy. But if you use something like this then I do suggest that you sell more items at once, so that players don't have to clink endlessly Something else to know about CHOOSE signs Well, I explained most already, but there's one final detail which you might like to know: when a player selects a certain item then a CHOOSE sign will give them that specific item, but only if there aren't more available from somewhere else in the chest. Just like its predecessor a CHOOSE sign will start selecting items in a slot other than the one clicked. In most cases this doesn't really matter all that much, but it could be useful to know if you're using automations to keep your stock in check (like redstone machinery and such). This is also why I started out with showing you how you can use a CHOOSE sign to mimic the old behavior. Finally: how do we remove all of these signs?! If you try to remove a modern shop sign with an axe then you might be in for a weird surprise: instead of removing the sign it'll most likely get changed so that the sign will now try to sell your axe, even if it was a voters axe! Fortunately there's no reason to panic: just hold the sneak key (crouch?) and then break the sign. This is basically not much different from trying to place a sign on a chest (or crafting table). And there you have it... A summary of all the changes in the new shop system and some hopefully compelling reasons why you should really consider letting go of the old ways, because the new signs provide you with a lot more options and flexibility, as you can see above. Now, you may have noticed that I left several things out. I didn't mention how you can use the old shop signs nor did I mention anything about /createshopmode. For all those specific details I'd really want to refer you to the creating player shops wiki page. My main goal here was to explain the differences between the old and the new system, and to give you guys some examples why you might want to start using the current methods. I know that it may seem like a bit much, but I also hope you got a bit of a taste of all the extra features and possibilities which we now have. And please remember: if you have any questions about all this then be sure to ask! Using something new can always be a little bit tricky or confusing at first, but that's why we're here to help each other.
AH, you told me you'd make this guide, I don't need it yet, but I'm sure I'll need it one day, thank you very much for making this and, you did only need two posts? that's short for you, isn't it?
