It'd be nice if the town world wasn't just boring superflat grass beyond the boundaries of the town -- it'd give those of us with residences near the edge something nice to look at out our windows, since we can't see as many other players' interesting constructions. It seems to me it shouldn't be that hard to generate a new world seed (maybe with 'large biomes' on), find a nice big plains biome where the town's footprint wouldn't look out of place, and then world-edit the surrounding terrain into the actual town world, outside of the current town boundaries. If the admins are interested, I'd be happy to experiment with generating some single player worlds and locating big plains areas we could use for this purpose. Depending on the multiplayer world file format, I might even be able to extract the suitable chunk data for easy import to the live files.
I also think that the outside border of the town map is kind of weird. Even a simple thing such as a bordering mountain with grass and an occasional tree would make it look pretty.
I quite like the idea of surrounding town with mountains and making it sort of like a valley. Nice idea
I like this idea too, and none of my residences are near the border. I think that at the very least having a team go around and put bonemeal down EVERYWHERE out in that boring area would spruce it up a bit.
Even if it were a player project, like Town Beautification or something, where a group gathers up the excess dirt people tend to get, then go outside the town borders and are allowed to terraform. It would take some time and dedication, and probably a mod or two to oversee the whole thing, but it would probably be easier than anything else.
My smp3 residence (It's always been my res, never planned to move and never will ) is right next to the town border. I would like something nicer to look at than this:
My res on SMP 1 is right next to the town border, it would be nice for something to be there except plain fields.
I really support this. I've always felt the town needs to be refreshed and updated; obviously many disagree.
i have a few res' on the sides of town, it isn't that hard to look away, but it would be pretty for something to be there. i think its a good idea. -if it could be done, that would be awesome.
I think it wuld be ool if each server had a unique surrounding, the valley idea on one, jungle surrounding another. Maybey even have one seem likes it under ground in a giant cave. "Light issues i know" but you get where im going with this. it may just end up having people contending for residents on the boarder I know if 9 had a jungle layout on the outter ring i would be there
So far I kinda like the community beautification idea. If anything were to be done at all, I suggest expanding the town residences by 1 all the way around. Set ownership to admin and allow players to build out there for a few weeks. Then lock it all down with the knowledge of anything left, stays left. Players would make structure, land masses, water bodies, etc. If its a community project, every server would be different. This would work well when the new wild comes online as it would provide resources for all kinds of things.
Building the landscape by hand would be cool in theory, but I think in practice it wouldn't look very good because it would be sooooo much work to do well. I think it's more likely we'd end up with a bunch of half-..efforted.. little ponds and maybe people would plant a bunch of saplings because that's easy, but I doubt we'd see really pretty, realistic and dynamic landscaping in more than a few spots on a server or two. That's why I thought it'd be more practical to generate some single player worlds, find areas of them which could contain a flat space the size of the town, and then world-edit those surrounding chunks into our existing town world. Then we get nice landscapes just like Minecraft generates by itself, without people having to go out and build them all block by block by block.
