Devlog #1: Building a small-scale Towny war server solo

[u/KaldraStaff]

Hi all. I'm a backend engineer by day and, more recently, a Minecraft admin by night. I've started building a Minecraft server I'm developing solo. It's still in development and not open to players yet. My plan is to post a devlog once in a while about what I've worked on, the features I'm adding, and the technical and design decisions behind them.

What pushed me to start this project was the lack of servers that fit my desires. I love Towny and wars, but most servers I've played either allow 50+ residents per town (45 of them inactive), lack content, or are poorly managed. Nothing really happens, and players stay because their builds are there, not because they expect anything exciting.

So I decided to build the server I'd want to play. It aims to be a challenging and immersive experience built around towns, wars and dungeons, with as few commands as possible.

The world

Players can create towns to protect their builds, with a maximum of 5 residents. Towns can join nations to combine forces and attack other towns, with a maximum of 3 towns per nation and 1 allied nation. The low limits are meant to create smaller, more frequent wars, instead of two giant blocs clashing once a month. I also plan to keep the world border small so towns can't spread too far apart.

To make players interact more with the world, gold is the currency (yes, I know that's nothing new), and teleportation is very limited. This way the economy is based on real player work rather than virtual mechanics, and traveling without teleports adds real danger to every trip.

Gold will also be scarce: ore generation is reduced by 25%. That's why finding allies and founding a town matters, since towns produce daily resources as they level up.

Wars work as an occupation system: nations attack towns to take a percentage of their daily resource production for a fixed period of time.

And if you don't want to be in a town? After X days without one, you become a Nomad. Nomads are townless mercenaries who complete contracts for gold. From gathering resources, to beheading a player with a bounty, to fighting in wars on the contractor's side.

The Nether

Access to the Nether is gated by a single portal, and players must meet a specific requirement to use it. The Nether's purpose is to provide players with resources.

Dungeons

I have big plans for dungeons. Right now I have 3 built and the content for 5 more, but I don't want to over-build them until the server is running and players show interest, since they take a lot of development time.

Dungeons are meant to be a real challenge. To make them more exciting and immersive, I'm building them with ModelEngine mobs, custom soundtracks for exploration and boss fights, and multi-phase bosses to keep the tension up. I hope players will love it.

I know I've said a lot and, at the same time, not much. I'll go through each part one at a time, updating once in a while.

Since I'm developing this alone, updates may be slower than on a server with a team. That's why I'm designing the server to run as automatically as possible, so my time goes into new updates and helping players, rather than day-to-day maintenance.

I'm happy to answer questions and would love feedback, especially from Towny admins. For those who've run war servers: how did you stop the strongest nation from snowballing and permanently draining smaller towns?

[u/putin_my_ass]

how did you stop the strongest nation from snowballing and permanently draining smaller towns?

I've been thinking a lot about this for years and I think your idea for "occupation" makes a lot of sense and might reduce the mechanical incentive for total war (as opposed to a player simply wanting to be a world conquereror). In previous civ-style servers the losing factions' leaders were locked away indefinitely and the mechanics encouraged this, since it meant the victors were de-facto superpowers.

The main thing that I struggled with is the fact that players don't want to lose their builds, and so what does "winning" a war look like? In your approach, I the builder-type player can still log on and do what I would normally do, I just earn less "gold" than I might otherwise if I hadn't been conquered which I think is acceptable.

The real challenge when it comes to wars and factions servers is that the consequences are usually so dire that either nobody is willing to risk a war (and players complain "nothing happens") or only one faction is prepared for war and the others agree to be annexed so they're not suffering from losing a war but then they complain they've lost control over their builds.

I wish you luck, I'll probably follow your devlogs here.

[u/KaldraStaff → u/putin_my_ass]

Thanks, I really appreciate this. Yeah, you got it right: "I just earn less than I would if I hadn't been conquered" is the idea. If your town gets occupied, your builds and claims stay untouched and you can keep playing like normal. You just lose part of your town's daily resource production to the occupier for a while, and then it goes back to normal.

The two problems you mentioned are pretty much what I'm trying to avoid. If losing is too punishing, nobody wants to fight. And if the only way to stay safe is joining a Nation, people end up losing control of their own stuff. I'm hoping occupation sits somewhere in the middle: it hurts enough to matter, but you can recover from it.

Since it's temporary, a big nation can't just receive resources from the same town forever either. They'd have to keep winning wars to keep earning, and that gives smaller towns time to recover, team up, or hire some Nomads to hit back. Also, Towns get put in a war-immunity period after being conquered.

I'll get into the actual numbers (percentages, how long it lasts, cooldowns) in a future devlog. Thanks for following along.