Possible wealth sink for Player Essence?

[Protonull]

Player Essence is a custom item used to fuel pearls and various high level factories. But once you've got yourself an established nation, unless you've got some Guantánamo Bay and or are pumping out XP like nobody's business, then you and your citizens will start to accumilate the stuff, even if you aren't actively server voting to get 3 additional Player Essence each day.

From what I can tell, there's very little in terms of Player Essence trading. Instead, it seems that nations tend to 'nationalise' the Player Essence of their government officials who then may occassionally call upon their citizens to donate. And this is fine, I have no problem with that, but it just seems a shame that a custom item is relegated to mostly just being mindlessly passed along to someone else or being burnt/despawned. I feel like the average player should have more agency with this custom item.

Therefore, I propose some means of being able to convert Player Essence into Fossils. Assuming a 1:1 conversion, that's a maximum of 7 fossils a day.

[nebula161]

I like this idea even though it's just Orinnari wanting to auction off his massive essence stockpile

[Protonull]

I make no claims of neutrality :P

[Solitaire7]

Player essence definitely needs either new sinks; for current non-viable sinks to actually become viable or for current viable sinks to have their costs increased. You can tell from the monthly chart of voting here https://minecraft-mp.com/server/305231/stats/ that voting has been falling off even after population has levelled out and that there is obviously no pressure to vote for or buy/sell essence making it entirely redundant.

I don't have any ideas as to what to suggest in regards to new sinks. But current non-viable sinks could definitely be made viable. Netherite tools could be made useful, I don't know how they've done it but CivReign give extra logs with certain tools from grown trees (not placed logs) this could be done for 100% of breaks with netherite axes making them the next tech tree level and a viable essence sink .Similarly netherite shovels could be made to give double sand/gravel/dirt etc... for non-placed blocks. And netherite picks could have their bonus ores be actually worthwhile (in the 30-40% range most likely) as at the moment it is very questionable as to whether 20% bonus ores actually exceeds the increased cost of a netherite pick. This would create a continuous essence/xp sink that doesn't currently exist, while still requiring diamonds to obtain tools.

In regards to the current sinks that are viable I'd say that xp could definitely be increased slightly but not a lot, currently the essence costs are equivalent to 2 level 30 enchants per essence. Similarly bastions could be increased again but feel like more than another 32-64 essence would be going over the top. Bastions also aren't a resource that needs to be continually produced in very large quantities. What is really needed to make essence (and therefore voting) important is a wider variety of essence sinks, making netherite tools actually viable would definitely help

[RedDevel2]

I like the idea of turning them into fossils, although I'm not confident many would considering what you get mostly from those is dirt/gravel/sand. probably not worth it for most. Essence could also be used as fuel for factories instead of charcoal. probably then the high end expensive ones like the advanced cauldron, the diamond factories, the bastion factories etc. Wing was open to adding special functions to netherrite tools like treecapitator and 3x3 mining to make them more desirable and worth the resource sink.