Gaming Hielor's Minecraft Server

[orb]

There's a nice little design for a self feeding charcoal maker on minecraftwiki. Pretty cool...

---------- Post added at 04:29 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:19 PM ----------

Actually this can even be more simplified, i just fiddled around with it and came up with this:

And here's an implementation of it embedded in the wall of the basement of my house :

 

[Artlav]

I'm also a little confused as to what need there is for this sort of thing--with the world border as it currently stands, the farthest point on the map is less than a kilometer away by nether rail, which doesn't really take very long at all.

No need, just an idea.

I was thinking in terms of a diamond block with a sign on it, that you can place, link with any other one of them, and teleport by walking on top.
Could make some interesting maze designs.

If used for rapid transit, however, that would in fact get too ridiculous.

Go back to before the server became 'LOLFARMEVERYTHING' centric. But really, it isn't a problem with the server, just with the mindset of a portion of the fellow players.

It is a metaphor of the human progress in real world.
We have a set of immutable rules, and figure out a way to get the most within their framework.
That very idea is what got mankind from being hunter-gatherer tribes struggling to survive, to our current space faring civilization.

Similarly, the server evolved along the same lines. The farms are making certain resources more accessible, and so the things being build are becoming more complex and intricate to maintain sufficient fun level.

So, it's a question of your preferred style of gameplay, really.

But I feel like that belongs in creative, or in your own private world where you aren't sticking your inflation on everyone else.

Quite to the contrary, the farms are meaningless in private worlds, where you can just go to creative, or use TooManyItems-style cheats.

Only on a server would they be meaningful, in a metaphor i told above.

 

[Quick_Nick]

Similarly, the server evolved along the same lines. The farms are making certain resources more accessible, and so the things being build are becoming more complex and intricate to maintain sufficient fun level.

"Early aluminium was more costly than gold or platinum. Bars of aluminium were exhibited alongside the French crown jewels at the Exposition Universelle of 1855, and Emperor Napoleon III of France was said to have reserved his few sets of aluminium dinner plates and eating utensils for his most honored guests." - Wikipedia

Times have changed indeed...

 

[Pablo49]

It is a metaphor of the human progress in real world.
We have a set of immutable rules, and figure out a way to get the most within their framework.
That very idea is what got mankind from being hunter-gatherer tribes struggling to survive, to our current space faring civilization.

But Pablo!, you say, you expected someone to come back with that? Why yes, I did.
Response incoming: LOLOLOLOLOL yeah okay, bro.

So, it's a question of your preferred style of gameplay, really.

Quite to the contrary, the farms are meaningless in private worlds, where you can just go to creative, or use TooManyItems-style cheats.

Only on a server would they be meaningful, in a metaphor i told above.

But clearly there are an amount of users who find that to be not fun, even anti-fun. A key problem I've always had with Minecraft as a whole, is how easy it is to acquire resources to the point where you never have to worry about ever exhausting them. That's without a farm that can produce a lifetime server supply in minutes.

I don't understand how farms of this scale are any more useful on a server than a private world. You can quickly gather more resources than the server will ever need and then the farm is useless. What you've essentially done is created your own TMI spawn command.

It really isn't a question of any one person's preferred style of gameplay, when a huge farm ruins the entire economy of the server. I like to go take the time to go mine up materials, but I can't go and trade a pile of iron for a handful of diamonds when anyone can go get a chest full of iron blocks. Your gameplay makes mine no longer viable, which is terribly sad when some of us have been playing survival on this server since 1.8, and now suddenly we don't even find the server fun anymore because of your 'preferred gameplay'. Note: It isn't the server 'evolving' if suddenly people start joining with the sole purpose of building huge farms that end up ruining gameplay for existing users. It would be laughable for someone to join a Buildcraft server complaining that no one manually mines. It's alright though to take a long standing pretty vanilla server and make it as ridiculously mechanized as possible?

 

[Chaser]

I won't say much on the topic, but having been on the server for quite awhile I thought I'd throw in my support for what I believe Pablo is arguing.

I don't think Artlav's metaphor works. Minecraft is not a simulation of human civilization, or even a simulation at all. It's a game.

Games are designed experiences, and the processes of mining and gathering resources in Minecraft are what most of the mechanics support. Mobs are only necessary (and sometimes surprisingly frightening) because the game intends for you to brave the twisting, convoluted caverns to find the iron, coal, and diamond you need.

To come out of the caves and build something out of the materials you found there makes the experience rewarding and impressive. There's something particularly exciting about seeing your spawn location slowly transformed into something else, knowing that every stone you placed on the commune, for instance, was mined by someone in its mountain.

Skipping the resource gathering, or making it a more automated process, is not akin to humanity settling down in one place and farming, it's taking away what many find to be the most fun mechanic in the game (or at least, necessary to make the entire experience enjoyable).

 

[Quick_Nick]

If enough people abstain from using such farms, those people can still maintain an economy of their own. It will just not consist of everyone on the server.
However, even without using farms, I do still have 'too many' resources anyways. I've mined out tons of resources and nothing in vanilla requires 'huge' amounts of resources.
Again... I stick with Voltz. On vanilla I COULD just dump all my stuff and start over, but it's still the same game over and over again. (I'm not really one for building structures)

 

[Pablo49]

If enough people abstain from using such farms, those people can still maintain an economy of their own. It will just not consist of everyone on the server.
However, even without using farms, I do still have 'too many' resources anyways. I've mined out tons of resources and nothing in vanilla requires 'huge' amounts of resources.

Yeah, I've thought about that, and it is viable. We were talking over in #mc earlier about possibly having a separate world for "serious" gameplay. The latter could let anyone who wants to, have a fresh start without our resources we've been collecting from the start.

But you bring up a point I tried to touch upon before. It's so easy to gather too many resources in minecraft, huge farms never made sense to begin with.

 

[Artlav]

Games are designed experiences, and the processes of mining and gathering resources in Minecraft are what most of the mechanics support. Mobs are only necessary (and sometimes surprisingly frightening) because the game intends for you to brave the twisting, convoluted caverns to find the iron, coal, and diamond you need.

To come out of the caves and build something out of the materials you found there makes the experience rewarding and impressive. There's something particularly exciting about seeing your spawn location slowly transformed into something else, knowing that every stone you placed on the commune, for instance, was mined by someone in its mountain.

That kind of gameplay is fun as well.
Some people like both - the near-creative large scale there, and the careful gathering over here, some like one and not the other.

I guess the key question for us is what kinds of people are on this server, and how can the two types of gameplay be united in one server.


There were plans for adding a resource world.
How about if this world would be one-way, and permanent?
That is, you can get resources out of it, but you can't get anything in (with a few exceptions, like wood).
Then, the miners would take the resource world (where farming is banned), and the farmers would keep the current one.

Does that solution makes sense?
Hielor, is this technically feasible to do?

Yes, this essentially bisects the server, but it's either that or democracy.

 

[Eccentrus]

well yes it is indeed a problem, but when the developers put that feature in, it is inevitable that someone will exploit it in some way, especially in a server this large, and the only solution will be, well, mods.

It does take some fun out of MC especially for us who have played it since before the launch (me from 1.7 here), the most fun times I have in the server is actually when I go to the caverns, getting lost with woo, but don't forget that there's a lot of fun as well in sharing our builds around, the first time I built the Leeuwenhoek, I was very happy with the responses I got, and this is an experience that many of us share, minecraft, since the beginning, is not only about mining, it's also about building, and yes for a person who's more of a builder like me, getting to creative and just build like that is no fun, no resource gathering, no understanding how expensive our creative ideas are, and being able to build large-scale structures in the server, even though with some help from farms, is gratifying. Designing the build in creative isn't even 10% of the whole effort, and that is exhilarating!

The first time the IronFarm was working I was like "Damn, after months of selling apartments in irons, I'm getting poor again", but I understand and accept that it is just how a real economy works, and if it wasn't Gerdih, anybody else would have the same idea and execute it. It is in the nature of humanity to make the most out of a mechanism, and this of course doesn't exclude minecraft, and farming doesn't even come from a bug, it's really hard to argue when the developers didn't make any attempts or efforts to prevent farmings such highly economical and useful resource. And the newest update 1.5 is especially geared towards redstone automation, and we just can't really argue against mechanizing what we loved to do in the past when the developers especially now intend for the players to, well, build advanced mechanisms, well in fact MC updates as I see it are now more and more closer to the IndustrialCraft or RedPower than the manual mining-orientation it had in the past.

Yes I do miss the times of 1.7 when I got to dig a gigantic pit just to build my castle, but those times are long gone, the flow of the game has been changed a lot, if you want to play in a previous version server, perhaps we can set up one, or join many of them which are available out there, but as Hielor decides to continue updating, we have to accept the consequences these updates bring, namely a change of the game, and I still love the server and the game and will continue to build and be a part of the community in it.

And yes, I understand that the SkyCity plate, especially in the state that it was for the past year, is hideous at best, but now we have at least some buildings going on, and in the holiday season I am sure that Arrowstar and Gerdih will finally finish their buildings, and I will finish the parliament and hopefully the SCU will be in its full scale by then and the commune will not be reffered to as "the city" anymore as there will be two fully functional cities :lol:

And yes, I agree that we need to build the commune area much more, and having a real neighborhood. My idea of turning the Leeuwenhoek design from a simple Carolingian house into a full blown apartment tower was based on the fact that nobody have any houses there, so I saw a market available (since nobody was actually bothered to build their own house in the commune at that time except for a select few) for people who have faraway homes and might need a personal place to stash or sleep in the commune, and the rest is history.

 

[Mindblast]

Go back to before the server became 'LOLFARMEVERYTHING' centric. But really, it isn't a problem with the server, just with the mindset of a portion of the fellow players.

...

I'd feel more like playing on the server if I felt the work I put into my projects had any value.

Being one of those "LOLFARMEVERYTHING" type players THIS (the last sentence in the quote above) is exactly why i build farms. I was of the impression that the work i put in building farms benefits all players on the server, freeing them from the mostly boring task of collecting certain resources. It didn't even occur to me this could be unwanted.

I mean i like the occasional digging and caving as well but this is only such a little percentage of what the whole game has to offer. I love playing around with redstone circuitry and building the strangest contraptions. And no it is not half as much fun to build this stuff in creative.

Note: I understand all the work put into those farms, they are creative and take a lot of work, and I get that. But I feel like that belongs in creative, or in your own private world where you aren't sticking your inflation on everyone else. I'd love nothing more than to personally stuff them, and the stores of the items from them, full of TNT and blow them sky high.

Oh except to stuff them full of TNT you'd need to use the mob farm or witch farm because you'd need ****loads of gunpowder.

Seeing that you mention inflation, thats were our mindets actually are completely different. I don't even believe in the fun aspect of a player driven economy in a creative sandbox game like Minecraft. I want to share what i have with others freely. I love marveling at beautiful architecture like the Leeuwenhoek or Orbs place or Rosewood Island or even some of the buildings that are now being built in Skycity (i agree the platform itself isn't exactly a beautiful design but oh well..). That to me is the cool thing about minecraft, not "i mine 3 hours, you mine 3 hours and then we exchange resources"... why not free people from as many of the boring tasks as possible and give them more time to actually invest in creating beautiful things.

tl;dr: I'd like it more if we played survival instead of creative. I just don't think that is something that can be 'fixed'.

And survival to you is exactly what? When is a player leaving survival in your opinion ? When he builds his first hut in the wilderness? When he builds a bigger house? When he builds a castle, a city?

If i just want to run around killing mobs with bow and sword i can play World of Warcraft or something... The special thing about Minecraft is that i can actually build incredible stuff in a world shared with others, that i can come up with cool ideas for traps so i don't even have to kill the mobs myself.
I don't know any other game like that.

 

[n122vu]

I can see both sides of the coin here. I'm with Pablo in that I think the whole part of the game that drew me in was the mining down and discovering a cavern full of iron and redstone, and finding diamond and gold, etc, and then using what you found to craft armor, a sword, make sure you're safe from mobs so you can go mine more to build what you want above ground (or below - underground food/tree farms, etc), or so you're more safe in the Nether.

However...

I have also taken advantage of the Iron Farm on several occasions because, let's face it, we all do stupid stuff, sometimes you're distracted when you're trying to accomplish something, walk off a cliff. Get blown up by a creeper. Honk off a Ghast in the Nether, and fall through a floor to a cavern below when running from it. Sometimes, when that happens, you can't always make it back to where you died to get your items back, and maybe you're out of resources in your local or stashed backup chests. So then you have to spend time mining to find iron for more armor, pickaxe, sword, etc. Which is fine, per my point above. But when you have a limited time to play, as I do lately, it's kind of discouraging to think, man, I'd really like to finish that Nether railway, but I don't have any armor, or wood, or even a pickaxe, so I've got to start over and get all that before I can finish it. All because I want to be able to bring resources back to the commune chests from my mine in the southwest, without it taking a day of boat travel to get there.

And I've also built an obsidian generator. True, it is a 1:1 trade for redstone, but you also have to have a diamond pickaxe to mine it, which does eventually break down, and is not farmable.

But I tend to lean toward the former. I think some of these farms just cheapen the experience a bit. And with the addition by the developers of ways to automate things with hoppers, even more so. Brings me to another point. Just because the developers intend for something to work a certain way, doesn't necessarily mean it is good or makes the game or the experience better. To me it means they see a trend in the way some players are using the game, and are capitalizing on that trend to try and draw in more players.

I guess it boils down to choice though, and that's the big thing. If you don't like the farms, don't use them. Go mine/grow your resources. Heck I did. I used the community tree farm back in the beginning of the new server to get up and running. Then I started my own small one underground.

True, farms cheapen the value of some items, but these items were intended to be used for crafting, not currency. Any bartering should be decided between players, it's not a mechanic that was designed into the game. And if you're 'charging' other players, for example, to gain a resource, that's fine if it works between you and them. But then if that resource suddenly becomes abundantly available to all, well, go get yours if you need it and want it, it's there.

 

[Evil_Onyx]

I like the idea of only being allowed to take a set of armor and tools to the new resource world, but being allowed to bring back anything. It will bring back some real survival to the server. As the current world has mostly been explored and in areas heavily developed.

 

[orb]

Skipping the resource gathering, or making it a more automated process, is not akin to humanity settling down in one place and farming, it's taking away what many find to be the most fun mechanic in the game (or at least, necessary to make the entire experience enjoyable).

But clearly there are an amount of users who find that to be not fun, even anti-fun.

Using autopilots in Orbiter is breaking the gameplay, too, and is anti-fun. I never understood why people prefer flying DGIV over the standard Delta Glider. For me, autopilots were never enjoyable. The entire flying experience is more enjoyable when you perform burns and attitude changes manually.

I have nothing against the resource farms on the server. They can be used by people who need it, which doesn't mean you need to use them, too. You can still go mining, if you prefer.

On Minecraft server it may be not enjoyable for people joining it for example a year after the world was created, when they need to go mining far away, because people who were here since the beginning mined most of the resources from vicinity of the Commune (I still use stone tools for most things, if I don't need harder materials and I don't intend to enchant them, even though the iron awaits in the Iron Farm). Yes, I know the resources may still exist there, but why would I want to spend a month underground, while I'd prefer to build something on the surface instead? I'd play in single player instead, if I wanted to mine and mine and mine, without need to ask anyone if I can mine there.

It would take me another half of year before I'd build another rail line other than the one connecting Commune portal with my lighthouse portal, and then, why should I build another one, when I could use the mined resources in another way?

If I wanted only to mine and not farm anything other than food, I'd do it in my private world, because I can't be bothered to build automated farms there by myself, which would be used by nobody else. But what's the point of building them in single player anyway, when you can cheat to get the infinite resources in other ways?. That's how I see it.

My idea of turning the Leeuwenhoek design from a simple Carolingian house into a full blown apartment tower was based on the fact that nobody have any houses there, so I saw a market available (since nobody was actually bothered to build their own house in the commune at that time except for a select few) for people who have faraway homes and might need a personal place to stash or sleep in the commune, and the rest is history.

And it's good to have the Leeuwenhoek. The Commune might have been a place to build a private house when you were in the game at the time when the world was created with only a few other people around, but not when you joined later, and the people who built in the area around Commune no longer log in to the server.

 

[Hielor]

So, I sort of touched on this a few months back when the subject of the advanced resource farms came up:

It's the game developers I'm annoyed at for adding the feature in the first place--I feel like it reduces the value of caving or mining jaunts when you could just go build a collector instead and end up with essentially infinite iron in the long run for a finite amount of work.

My thinking is...if we're in a game world where most resources are abundant and cheap and all you need to do to get a double-chest full of iron or even gold is just stand in a given spot for an hour while you go take a shower and read a book... why aren't we just in creative mode? That way we can all see just how creative we all are without having to worry about silly things like mining in a game where "mine" is part of the name. We can all make castles of whatever materials we want without having to worry about how those materials were acquired.

My issue with that is that I (and I'm not the only one) aren't particularly creative when it comes to building things. I mean, look at what I've built on the server: a giant stone dome (which I couldn't end up using), a small pyramid that has a neat effect inside, and...that's it. I would probably never play on a creative server.

Edit: On that note, I have to conditionally disagree with Pablo about megascale projects. In a survival world (and I mean a true survival world, not the pseudo-creative world we have now) with mostly finite resources, I think large-scale projects are kinda cool, because they represent a significant investment of time to acquire the resources as well as build the thing itself, making it a much more impressive achievement than just making the same thing in creative.

I honestly like caving, and I was rather proud of my four stacks of iron blocks before the iron farm came about. I had been considering building something out of iron blocks, but now that iron is a cheap renewable resource, there's nothing special about a building made of iron. Before, it would've been "wow, that's a lot of work to have collected all that iron..." Now, it's "oh, iron, okay."

It's not just a matter of currency between players, although with the server operating on a barter system that's definitely a consideration. And "well, you don't have to use the farms" isn't really a valid answer anyway, because I'd be a fool to go spend two hours mining when I could just afk at the iron farm for those same two hours and end up with more resources (and not have to smelt them, either!)

-----------

As for using the new world as a survival world, a couple thoughts/concerns:
- I believe it's technically possible to have a world not share inventories with other worlds. I'm not sure if it's possible with our current addons to keep some items while getting rid of others, or to have items only go one way. I'm also not sure if ender chests can be disabled in that case.
- What happens when there's more new resources we want added to the game? The original plan was to just re-create the resource world, but if people are going to be living there permanently, we no longer have a solution to that.
- On a somewhat related note (w.r.t. server resources), I don't think anyone uses the old world anymore, ever, but there's a lot of cool stuff we built there. It was suggested in #mc last night that I could offline the old world forever, and share a zip file somewhere of the world and the nether, so if someone wants to explore the server's history they can. What do people think of that?

 

[orb]

And "well, you don't have to use the farms" isn't really a valid answer anyway, because I'd be a fool to go spend two hours mining when I could just afk at the iron farm for those same two hours and end up with more resources (and not have to smelt them, either!)

If you don't like resource farming and want to disable it, install some plug-in that will disable all mob drops when they aren't killed by a player. It wouldn't prevent the item drops from XP farming, but you'd still need to kill the mobs to get their drops by yourself (and villagers would hate you, if you wanted to get the iron this way).


Anyway, there may be players that can find 4 stacks of iron in just one caving expedition, but I'm not the one of them. I had had only about 2 stacks of iron ingots reserve before the Iron Farm came, and a half of stack of gold ingots before the Gold Farm, and I couldn't be bothered to spend more time collecting a full inventory of cobblestone just to find a couple of more iron and other ores.

Minecraft would be pretty boring by now if it was only about mining, and I wouldn't come back to it every now and then.

 

[Artlav]

Another thought - there might be a circle involved.

Playing the same game the same way for a while is bound to get boring.
So, people play one way - mine,mine,mine, then they start building, and all the mining becomes tiresome - enter cobblestone generator in a spare room.

Later on, building becomes tiresome, so you get into a boat, and go around one of the unexplored continents, fighting mobs and defusing temples.

After that, settle back and get mining again.
Full circle.

We have a server with different people at different stages of the gameplay-type circle, some moving around, some staying with their preferred type - maybe design the server to keep that in mind?

In the theme of our community, how about colonization-style expansions?
Not just a resource world, but several smaller worlds with the nothing-in, anything-out, no-explicit-farms rules.

You want to play survival? Pick a planet.
You want to build big? Stay on the settled homeworld.

 

[Hielor]

My concern with that sort of thing is that it results in a large fragmentation of the player base, to the point where people might as well be playing single player.

We already have some of that in just one 5km x 5km world with people living off distant from everyone else, and I don't think it would get better if everyone had their own "planet"...

As for one-way inventories, I don't think there's a direct way to do this using addons, but a workaround would be that the "receiving area" for the incoming portal to the world could have a command block repeatedly clearing any nearby players' inventories. There would probably be ways to circumvent it, though.

---------- Post added at 11:58 ---------- Previous post was at 11:51 ----------

Actually, a closer reading of the Multiverse-Inventories plugin suggests that one-way inventories may be possible. I'd have to investigate further.

 

[Artlav]

No need for a planet for everyone, just one or two small-ish ones.
Thus:
-the homeworld
-the mining planet (resource world)
-the colony world (or two)

How much worse the fragmentation would be with only 3-4 worlds?
Don't forget that if they are 1x1 or 2x2 sized, then you're only adding a little bit of area.

About inventories - there is no need for partial-allowed list, i think. You make your own weapons, tools, etc on the colony and resource worlds, so nothing at all goes in.

About circumventions - same as with xray mods.

---------- Post added at 23:07 ---------- Previous post was at 23:05 ----------

Actually, there might be a problem of one-planet-per-everyone, since the small worlds would eventually erode and get full, so more would have to be added after a while to keep it interesting.

 

[Evil_Onyx]

- On a somewhat related note (w.r.t. server resources), I don't think anyone uses the old world anymore, ever, but there's a lot of cool stuff we built there. It was suggested in #mc last night that I could offline the old world forever, and share a zip file somewhere of the world and the nether, so if someone wants to explore the server's history they can. What do people think of that?

Plus 1 for archiving it, and uploading it somewhere.

 

[Eccentrus]

well, I know that many of the comments now are pointed to the builders part of the community, well my answer is this. I don't like building in creative mode, this might come out as weird for a person who's more on the edge of building rather than mining, or even redstoning. For me the creative mode is useful only and only for designing buildings, and nothing more, to smooth out the concepts I made in my head, and unlike many creative builders, I only fly to experiment the build, and then I work around and walk and develop building techniques that I'll later can use for survival, rather than continuously flying, I even device scaffolding etc, and jump around to see the usability of the scaffolding and other stuffs, in short, building like the way I am now, building in survival. The restraints on building things in survival makes me conceptualize structures as usable buildings, not as sculptures which resembles a building, that is two different contrast of design philosophies there. You hate having unlimited resources? I do as well, what is the fun of building a large-scale without realizing the scale and the hardship involved in acquiring the materials as well? The farms actually only have minimal impact on my building style, go check out what Leeuwenhoek is made of. And the cobblestone generator, if you don't know is actually a lot of hassle, you have to stand by because every two minutes, your pickaxe break, and so you have to either scroll or punch a number to get working again.

I actually also scorn the idea of the iron farming (from the developers, not Gerdih) especially because it takes a lot less of a hassle than it does to produce stone bricks, I mean hello? Stone are dead cheap, many people throw them away, heck when I was building the first Leeuwenhoek people gave them freely because they are as cheap as dirt, and then farming and processing them still takes a lot of hassle and I was once online for 6 hours non-stop in front of the laptop because I can't go completely AFK, I'm AFK only because I am not allowed to touch the keyboard except to change the pickaxe. Such an important and ludicrous resource as iron should be way harder to produce, and incurs much more of a hassle than stone farming, but the developers simply give us, well, that. An iron farm is absolutely harder to build, but right now, it is absolutely maintenance-free, it is the absolutely most easy mechanism of farming available in the game because it is just a mob-farm, even farming cows is harder than that! And we can't really blame players who want to build those kind of farms, I mean if we don't have iron golems and witches we still do build farms for food and some materials (wood and cobbles), but once the devs decided to put in mobs which drops loots which is supposed to be rare, and actually highly useful, it is inevitable that somebody will try to build a farm for that, well actually, once the devs introduce a mob that drops diamond, the game is, for all purposes, broken, nuffsaid.

I would love if all farms have to have mechanisms such that is required by shootingiron's cow and steak farm. You have to punch buttons, retract levers, go to the cows and mate them, etc. etc. and feels like doing actual work in a factory rather than sitting around doing nothing and wait for the mobs to spawn and die for you. But the devs only gave limitations to mob-farms as the size, and only that, and nothing else, what do you expect these kind of farms will look and work like?

You don't like these kind of farms? there's only limited options that you have: 1. ignoring it 2. use only those versions that don't have these high-price-loot mobs 3. make a no-farm rule, which is quite hard to argue for because they don't utilize bugs.

On another note, because emerald can be easily obtained from farmable materials, how about having a rule where no villagers who sell diamond or diamond-based items should ever be let to live? I think this is a serious game breaker, and will bankrupt pretty much everyone if they're let to live and somebody trades with them.