Hello everyone, Just your friendly neighborhood madlad once again coming to you all with another addition of I don't feel like doing all this work manually and wish I could just pay for it to be done! Specifically, I would like to see the following service be added to the list of available Senior Staff Services. Now the pricing and all that can easily be changed/discussed I wanted to just put it out there to see if we can help cut down the mundane tasks for us base builders. Land Clearing / Flattening: Out at Azarinth, I have literal millions of blocks that I need to be removed in order to build all my underground infrastructure. However, several hours of work barely make a dent into the digging all that needs to be done down there. I even end up trashing everything I mine down there so the only thing consumed is EXP bottles to repair my tools and my time. I propose a service that we can hire out one of our lovely SS (or Admin, I won't discriminate ) to come out and make a simple cuboid selection with their magic "//wand." Run a nice "//count" command to see the number of blocks in the designated space. Charge a fine rate of [let's just put this here as a temp price] 0.1r / block. Charges the player, and runs the final command of "//set air." Kaboom. Hole created. No resources were gained from the process, and then all that time that would have been spent digging can be spent building! Please view this professional made demonstration of this wonderful idea: This could be done to flatten land, drain ocean temples, dig holes, any large mundane task can easily be skipped with this luxurious service! So much time could be saved! I would stop wishing and just bug Elfin so much for services he'll go insane! So many benefits! Let me know if you would use it and for what if this was such a service at our disposal!
But then what of the likely thousands of hours people spent clearing out spaces for farms/outposts? Seems a bit unfair to now say, "hey there's a DDTT for outside of town" Yes, it'd be convenient, but isn't the purpose of the Frontier to be as close as possible to vanilla?
That's just something that happens with changing games. I've made dozens of farms and such throughout the years and had them break or become super inefficient when a new feature comes out. That's just something that happens I feel in games and plus with this method, you get 0% of the materials you would have gotten if you did it by hand so I feel rupees for no materials but loads of time saved far surpasses any disappointment of this not being a thing earlier. Plus if a massive area needs to be cleared, let's use a single hole out at Azarinth as the example, the price could be massive in terms of rupees. One of the holes I have is 161 x 161 and is 61 blocks deep. If I wanted to pay to remove every block in that space, it would be roughly 1.5 MILLION blocks. At the suggested price I have above, that would be 150k. However, I would go far larger than even that (since now I could go deeper with 1.18) and thats just a single hole I need out of dozens of similar size. Digging it by hand on/off for a year and we're barely 50% done. I don't find it particularly fun to do mindless digging like this and even if that price were QUINTUPLED I'd still do it in a heartbeat due to the sheer mundaneness of it. Sorry for the rant like response. Just wanted to paint the scenario I find myself in at the moment. I don't see EMC as vanilla as it is Vanilla with Sprinkles at this point. There are things you can do in EMC that you can't do in vanilla and vice versa. This wouldn't be NEAR as big of a problem if TNT dupers were allowed, even TNT from dispensers would be amazing since then we could arrange bombing-arrays above a blast site. But alas, neither is an option on EMC so EMC should give an option that we can use to make up for the fact that these things are vanilla features [or oversights when it comes to the dupers] that have been taken away.
Spending rupees and not getting the mats in a chest does seem to be a fair way to handle it. And it would create another rupee sink. . . Not overly opposed to it and not overly in favor of it. It seems acceptable as a QOL improvement - assuming there would be some type of limiting factor to the amount of blocks/depth.
One of EMC biggest assets is its non-resetting vanilla frontier 10-year old world. By adding this service would somewhat devalue all the effort other players have done through the years of creating our 10 year old the way it is today. I also feel you have a great opportunity to do a Big Dig event to help you dig out an area. Not opposed to saving a player’s time, but what is being asked is skipping Group play and part of the vanilla integrity expected of the frontier world. Two of the main features of EMC’s branding. Also, some structures removals have indeed occurred in the past, however in extraordinary circumstances, such as griefs. /bmode protection, another SS service in the Frontier world, also has the following limitation: Selections will be limited by the visible structures in the area. Senior Staff members will not be protecting all 50,000 blocks surrounding your outpost, for example. so if accepted, it would probably not be, clearing all the blocks near your outpost… If accepted it should be on a case by case basis. Possibly combined with Empires, so the service has a limit per Outpost of 105k(100k but with room for error; also not opposed to going to 250k), blocks cleared. It would give a headstart to any build in an Outpost, but it would not completely devalue the vanilla effort expected from building in the frontier.
I would, but the main issue is the fact that Utopia is the location of said base, so it vastly limits participants. I have and do hire workers to come mine but none last more than a few hours and then quit out of sheer boredom. If there are any Gold/Diamond supporters that need a job or like to mine, please let me know haha.
EMC Building size scale: Small, Medium (town) Large, Massive, Humongosaurous (frontier) Cyber-sized (rendering not possible of full build)
