Suggestion: Allow Town Ruins to persist indefinitely.

[DaniGTA]

In the current settings of Towny it is only possible to set the disappearance of ruins, only in hours. I would not want to let the ruins disappear on my server so that even after a long time the name of the city stands.

An option to disable the disappearance of ruins I would like to see here.

[LlmDl]

I think you're talking about the revert-on-unclaim feature.

The install guide explains how to disable this: /tw toggle revertunclaim (used in every world.)

[DaniGTA]

town_ruining:
  town_ruins:

    # If this is true, then if a town falls, it remains in a 'ruined' state for a time.
    # In this state, the town cannot be claimed, but can be looted.
    # The feature prevents mayors from escaping attack/occupation, 
    # by deleting then quickly recreating their town.
    enabled: 'true'

    # This value determines the maximum duration in which a town can lie in ruins
    # After this time is reached, the town will be completely deleted.
    # Does not accept values greater than 1000.
    max_duration_hours: '1000' 

Thats what i dont want. I would like to completly prevent a automatic deletion of a ruin.

And in the install guide i didnt find the explaination.

[LlmDl]

Ah, you are not talking about the revert on unclaim. You are talking about the Town Ruining, more often it is people talking about the revert.

The most you can get with Ruining is 1000 hours.

[DaniGTA]

Yes I know that the maximum setting is 1000, because the function to turn it off completely is not yet available I made this feature request with the hope that it will be added. So that on my server even old ruins still have a name.

[LlmDl]

  - Change max-hours for Town Ruins from 1000 to 8760 (one year.)
    - Closes #4970.

I'm not going to make it infinite (because then all of the code/messaging has to change to allow for both systems,) but I have made it so your ruins can last for a year. If you really want them to persist longer someone can reclaim it and delete it again after a year.

[DaniGTA]

can you raise it up to 10 years? Because 1 year would be to low for my world.

[LlmDl]

No you cannot raise it to 10 years.

Is one year of having a place on your map unclaim-able and completely grief-able not long enough? Will your player-base not completely raze the land to an ugly crater?

[DaniGTA]

no i have a friendly server where players see ruined citys as old citys with no active players but will leave it as it is.

[MilesBHuff]

Same situation as DaniGTA. Our server doesn't allow griefing, but does allow looting. And the community is mature and respectful. Abandoned towns have consistently undergone this pattern: everything of value taken, everything else left behind. We actually had someone revitalize a dead town more than a year after it was abandoned, and given the favourable location of some abandoned towns, it's bound to happen again. I would like to keep map markers on these towns, and I would like for it to be possible for people to revive them in-place. They aren't building a new town over the old; they're inhabiting the old.

[LlmDl]

That's the thing, when its ruined it cannot be claimed by anyone but town members (who if it went for longer than a year, presumably do not want to reclaim it.) As the feature stands now: it can be ruined for a whole IRL year. Plenty of time to loot and grief it as your players see fit. Then 1 year (or less if you configure it) from now people can start to claim over top of it without being residents and reclaim it wholesale. Ruins were not coded to be indefinite.

[MilesBHuff]

Ah, got it! Is there a way to make it so that the date at which only residents can claim is decoupled from the end of the ruin period?

Alternatively! An optional state after ruined, with the same icon on the map, which will allow anyone to reclaim the town. This would mean you wouldn't have to update any localizations and such. This could just be a boolean, something like persist_ruins_after_timeout.

Not sure what such a settlement would be called though. Maybe the current "ruined" state could be "abandoned", and the new post-ruined state could be "ruined"?

[Goosius1]

There are currently 3 stages of a town ruin

• (1) Unclaimable period ..... in which nobody can reclaim. Town may be looted/structures-destroyed.
• (2) Claimable period ..... in which only residents can reclaim.
• (3) Post ruin ..... only the physical blocks remain, and anyone can claim the land.

Sounds like you wish to add an option for a 4th stage Miles? e.g.

• (2.5) Claimable by anyone ... same as 2 but claimable by anyone.

Seems relatively easy to do technically, BUT consider the implications:

• No town would ever actually get deleted
• Your map could get very noisy and hard for players to use
• There is a question of exploits e.g.
  • could players use the many ruins on the map to exploit town proximity limits ?
  • could players use the ruins as a source of reclaim-money e.g. reclaim a town then unclaim all its plots.
  • could players use the ruins as a cheap way to get town plots e.g. claim a few towns then merge them ?.
• Players wanting to make a fresh start, might be prevented from doing so on many occasions, e.g. although they wanted to make a completely new town, they had to reclaim an old town, rename it, and delete its townblocks.
• The only advantage of this extra stage seems to be a preservation of the town name and its location on the map. Hiowever since there is no historical information about the town - who lived there, what happened there etc., is it really enough to justify the added complexity?

Consider this alternative:

• Rather than the complexity of an extra ruin stage, I suggest to consider a new feature called "historical markers". These could be placed by people actually interested in a particular set of ruins, and could contain both the name and a little bit of history about the site. These could also be useful for other historical purposes too, such as marking a world-wonder or battle site,

[LlmDl]

Consider this alternative:

• Rather than the complexity of an extra ruin stage, I suggest to consider a new feature called "historical markers". These could be placed by people actually interested in a particular set of ruins, and could contain both the name and a little bit of history about the site. These could also be useful for other historical purposes too, such as marking a world-wonder or battle site,

Yeah Minecraft has had signs that can accomplish this for a long time. I believe Dynmap even has player-created markers.

[MilesBHuff]

@Goosius1 These are all very good questions!

No town would ever actually get deleted

Yes, that's the goal. If a town is somehow completely devastated beyond recognition, I can delete it manually. But Minecraft is a virtually limitless world, and there's plenty of room for any number of towns.

Your map could get very noisy and hard for players to use

No it wouldn't. This is a question of scale. Here's a dramatic example: http://map.settlescape.org/?worldname=world_the_end&mapname=the_end. At first blush, this seems extremely busy; but that is just an artifact of the scale. As you zoom in, you realize all the portal icons prove to be quite useful, and are not excessive at the right scales.

For towns, business at any scale can be avoided by requiring a fairly large distance between towns, and only allowing the map to zoom out to a comparably appropriate scale. Here's our current map: http://map.settlescape.org. Tarn, Delta, and Aikau are all very close to the minimum distance allowed between homeblocks.

could players use the many ruins on the map to exploit town proximity limits ?

In what sense? You mean as a kind of denial of area kind of thing? That would prove very expensive. Thus far, in over 2 years of runtime, no-one has managed to break our economy.

could players use the ruins as a source of reclaim-money e.g. reclaim a town then unclaim all its plots.

We don't return money when unclaiming plots. In fact, I have an issue out to make negative amounts possible, meaning people would be charged for unclaiming plots: https://github.com/TownyAdvanced/Towny/issues/3650

could players use the ruins as a cheap way to get town plots e.g. claim a few towns then merge them ?

Not if the configuration is designed well. On our server, a town is $10k to found, and $1k per bonus plot. Towns have only 1 free plot at all sizes -- all growth is bonus plots.

Players wanting to make a fresh start, might be prevented from doing so on many occasions, e.g. although they wanted to make a completely new town, they had to reclaim an old town, rename it, and delete its townblocks.

If they want a completely new town, they can journey on to free, unused land. If they choose to reclaim an old town, it would be pointless to delete its townblocks.

The only advantage of this extra stage seems to be a preservation of the town name and its location on the map. Hiowever since there is no historical information about the town - who lived there, what happened there etc., is it really enough to justify the added complexity?

Yes, that's correct -- an indication of the existence of the ruin, to help players find it. Maybe as an alternative, though, don't preserve any history -- just have an icon with the tooltip description being "Ruined Town" or something simple. That might simplify implementation considerably?

Rather than the complexity of an extra ruin stage, I suggest to consider a new feature called "historical markers". These could be placed by people actually interested in a particular set of ruins, and could contain both the name and a little bit of history about the site. These could also be useful for other historical purposes too, such as marking a world-wonder or battle site,

As @LlmDl pointed out, manual markers are already a thing in Dynmap; and, in fact, I have used manual markers for this exact purpose in the past. Still, it would be nice if the markers were handled by Towny itself. If someone founds a town on a marked place, I have to go and manually remove the marker. Likewise, if a town goes defunct, I have to find where it was on the map, and manually add an icon there. Each of these is a config change to https://github.com/SettleScape/server/blob/master/minecraft/plugins/dynmap/markers.yml.

[Goosius1]

Hi, Lets step back a bit from the specifics I think it will be useful to do so.

The key question at this stage, is a practical one

• For adding a 4th ruins stage, it should be clear now that lots of work might be required by the TA team: exploring the implications, design work, new configs, code changes, user guide configuration recommendations, and continuing user support work etc.
• The payoff is to keep the name & location of ruined towns on the map, with no historical information at all.
• Question: Is the payoff worth the work?

In my view it is not:

• This feature would only add a small bit of information town ruins, but nothing about other equally important historical sites (e.g. battles, tournaments, world-wonders, global conferences, explorations etc.)
• Even for town ruins, only the name and location would be preserved. Without additional time-consuming/extensive historical research by players (e.g. trawling discord, interviews, pinging globally for more information), the name and location of a ruin would often not be enough to add any useful information to the generally anonymous character of such a site.

Solution?:

• Perhaps the solution to your requirement is to build on on the way you were already handling it ?
• It sounds like you were manually handling the map markers.
• First off, it seems to me that that task should be handled by players who wish to be historians.
• These players would have more time/capacity than you to both add the markers and add easily-accessible historical details.
• Further, they could manage adjustments and deletions (if needed) of the markers.
• Further, they could handle all sorts of historical sites (battles, world-wonders etc.), not just ruins
• I'm not familiar with the dynmap features in this area, so don't take this as an identification of an existing solution, rather as an algorithm idea which could provide a good cost-benefit ratio.

[DaniGTA]

Such a big change is not necessary for what we want to have. Just the markup on the map is enough for us.

I don't need historical information about a city, but that would be a nice extra feature.

Even the message when you enter a city that it is a ruin is exactly what we want and to give the city a name even if no one has been there for 10 years.

Some side info what the players will do and what i expect.

A player would build a town with other players and give it a town name with towny. When the players have stopped playing, the town will exist as a ruin. So that other players can see the city name even after several years. And when the old players come back they can reclaim it without problems.

The only thing that still prevents us from doing so is the limitation of the lifetime of ruins.

[LlmDl]

If you want to use ruins like that you can just make the town not a ruin, give it an NPC mayor and if someone wants to buy it, sell it to them manually.

I'll say it again, the ruins feature is not made to support a town indefinitely. Going from 1000 hours to 365 days is more than enough to support the ruins feature. You guys aren't requesting a ruin, you're requesting a persistent town, which I've laid out how you can sustain that. (Using the NPC mayor or by unruining and re-ruining a town.)

[MilesBHuff]

If you want to use ruins like that you can just make the town not a ruin, give it an NPC mayor and if someone wants to buy it, sell it to them manually.

I can live with this. It's not a bad idea, actually; although it has some drawbacks:

1. No-one would be able to loot the town (I could manually change the town-wide perms, I guess.)
2. The town icons would look the same as normal towns on the map -- they would not use the ruins icons. Players would think they were living towns.
3. Requires manual intervention, and players will not be able to reclaim the town without admin intervention.

This does give the basis for a potentially interesting feature. Perhaps a boolean that says, as an alternative to deletion, towns are assigned to an NPC, have no protections, are reclaimable, and use the Ruins icon on the map. While in such a state, the town would not collect taxes or pay upkeep. Upon reclamation, the NPC would be deleted.

Such towns could be called "abandoned" instead of "ruined". They would use the town settings for 0 population.

[MilesBHuff]

@DaniGTA If the above suggestion is good with you, can you rename this to "Suggestion: Abandoned Towns"? If the devs are okay with that concept, we might be able to get the issue re-opened.

EDIT: Nevermind -- I've gone ahead and just filed a separate issue (#5041).

[MilesBHuff]

@DaniGTA Looks like there's now a TownyHistories plugin:

In Other News, Sponsors now have a new plugin available to them:

TownyHistories What happens when a Town is deleted? Where Towny leaves off, TownyHistories takes over. Towns become Ruins, appearing on your Dynmap, Lecterns mark the old spawn point with a book that has recorded some historical information about the now defunct Town, and more... See Discord for details!

(Above quote originally posted in the change notes for the 0.97.0.9 pre-release.)

This may help address some of your concerns.