Dragonis as the replacement for nyan cats

This issue proposes a potentially controversial addition, so I'm stating everything in detail here. This discussion focuses on the addition of a singular mob (of varying types)

Functionally, these serve as a successor to nyan cat, in being rare status objects. But instead of static blocks, these are real fucking dragons. (dragonis also have very polished animations, textures and everything - it is not like any other minetest mob mod you are familiar with, with smooth movement and bone animations - see it for yourself on the server)

Dragonis adds dragon nests as spawns to the overworld. These spawns are significantly rare, and from the experience of exploring about 20k nodes (in a straight-ish line), I have only encountered 3-4 nests. Even harder is defeating them (they are not like normal minetest mobs and have behavioural patterns with dodgeable attacks, the fight is a significant challenge), and even harder is getting a rare egg drop, raising them and using them for forging (the latter of which, I will leave spoiler-free for your own discovery)

This brings the endgame content from gathering as many diamonds and/or locating nyan cats to;

find and locate dragon nests
kill the dragon, else repeat 1
get lucky enough for a drop, else repeat 1
have enough resources to hatch, raise and keep a dragon alive, else repeat 1
have enough resources to start forging with it Which certainly presents itself as a much harder and far more interesting feat than any nyan cats. Anyone who is able to go through this journey is able to display their own dragon, situated into their builds and you can't deny that a dragon dungeon is infinitely cooler than a nyan cat cafe (sorry foot)

Now onto the big question at hand;

Performance

This is one of reason why I'm even bringing it up, and mob mods have come a long way, and they are very performant now. Dragonis is very much present on several servers, some of which are highly populated, without performance issues. And when I ran it on my server, it was easy to see why; Me and raven spawn 10+ dragons (which will never happen in real situations, and the server was barely affected, see CPU & memory usage as below - even as we were watching an epic smooth battle between the dragons fighting themselves);

Screenshot 2023-04-30 042755 Neither of which peaks beyond 50%, and again, to remind, this is a situation that will never occur, there's zero chance of 10 dragons spawning in such close proximity.

Oddly enough, the concern comes on the client side, which I am not sure what happening there; but even as my client and server are running fine, raven got some occasional lag spikes. This requires your own testing (the dragons are still active on the server, just don't spawn them in the spawn build please, land spawn is fine) - but as per the screenshot above, serverside, it's a non-issue.

But even as that comes; let me remind again that dragons are very rare.. This dumbs down most performance issues to be negligible, we are not adding an entity every chunk, only very rarely, might someone encounter one. To make it even more restricted, a player might be restricted to only have 1 dragon, so even if they went through the entire complex, and painful procedure, which is definitely not in reach for everyone, it just only adds a singular mob per player - which to be honest, will be less laggy than a mall full of item frame entities.

In terms of support, this mod has been semi-actively developed and maintained for 4 years, and given its usage on several servers, it does have little to no issues. Content has been released under the MIT license, with minimal restrictions. The mob API that it comes with supports another general mobs mod as well, which falls under the first position coupled with dragonis own third position on contentDB, proving that it has been extensively ran and tested by a lot of people.

Theme / Impact

A very rare singular element doesn't do anything much to distract from the original building theme, it doesn't automatically switch it to a fantasy, RPG or whatever relevant theme. In terms of impact, it is barely noticeable, and you can ignore it if you want to. The mod does allow the forging of very overpowered tools (which require owning a dragon first), which to be fair, are very expensive (require stacks upon stacks of material), but that can be modified to mayhaps more decorative, status, or combat (combat has little to no value on a building server) items; so if anyone doesn't wish to go fight a dragon nor own one, they are not missing out. You can ride a dragon as well, but there are already plans to incorporate flying into armour pieces, so it's just an alternative.

In terms of a slippery slope, I'm putting it that after this, there will be no other mobs. This is the sole addition and will be. Any further and it does become excessive. This mainly came about to replace the nyan cat with interesting and provide a hard endgame challenge, for anyone, if they wish to, take on.

Conclusion

This adds an interesting endgame mechanic for players to own an expensive pet, only possible by the most dedicated. Its rarity coupled with its difficulty leaves minimal footsteps in terms of performance and theme and everyone wants to build a castle guarded by an actual living dragon.

The-Architect-Crew / the-architect-game