Debate about ZZ allowing iron farms??!!

[dogzack123]

Just right away, I am 100% against iron farms if they should affect the economy at all. Iron is a useful currency for new players, and I agree with the others who have said that it would change, likely for the worse. Secondly, iron really isn't that hard to get. You can get a stack in 20 minutes tops as a newbie, and a stack of blocks in an hour or two as an advanced player.

Anyway, I know there has been talk of something like this before, but separating the iron that golems drop from the iron that you mine would solve all my qualms with enabling them. It would make rails and hoppers and pistons and all that much easier to get, while still not impacting the economy. Our shop plugin doesn't accept items with different meta values or NBT data, so if iron golems could drop ingots enchanted with Protection I or something, it would be unusable at any previously established shops. The only link to work out here would be to make sure that the enchanted iron could not be converted to normal blocks by crafting it into blocks and then back to ingots, but I'm sure our lord and savior Zedwick could come up with something if this is the route we decide to take.

[Treiskaideka]

I just wanna clarify one thing that Sneaky said:

" a new rate could be decided,"

There is no offical diamond/iron rate enforced anywhere on Zurvival.
We did discuss this in Zedkins but I think forcing an exchange rate with an official bank (maybe including a little exchange tax by 1i around the rate) is too restricting on the market and has issues and work with maintaining the price at the actual level and could be too much of a monopoly on one item and too much of a control mechanism.

Ultimately we agreed to kind of suggest the old price of 20i/1d but not force it on anyone (like i said, the current price is actually higher which indicates that there is plenty enough of iron around)

other than giant hopper mechanisms (you're limited to 20 per chunk anyway) and the wish to build in iron blocks (especially with the cement i think there are enough alternatives anyway) i don't see too much of an issue for building purposes.
Iron bars aren't that expensive, even compared to some colors of glass pane.
And I may get it for rails, but since we got the regions I don't see too much of an need there either, to be honest. At least compared to LVS.

Personally, I'm usually short on diamond. Never on iron.

[Forseth]

I can't speak for the economy of ZZ, since I don't play there. I fail to see how the price between Diamonds and Iron won't change over the years, they have to as new things are introduced, but that's again not my problem.

Iron is, as Dogzack123 pointed out, not hard to mine. You get quite a lot simply by walking through unexplored caves. But shouldn't that influence the market just the same? My Iron farm took me at least 10 hours to create. Breeding the villagers, transporting them, putting them into place, creating the farm, making sure the light reaches the doors.. etc etc. It takes time.

10 hours, using the measurement Dogzack123 gave us, gives a player mining for Iron about 30 stacks of Iron (or 1920 ingots) .

My farm produces about.. 20 ... ingots per hour. So after I spent those 10 hours to create the farm.. I still need to wait about 100 hours in order to catch up to the player that mined for 10 hours.

So you wouldn't flood the market using players like me. Making an more efficient farm or bigger farm, would of course create more ingots per hour, but not in the amount that you fear.

[SwayLight]

I can't speak for the economy of ZZ, since I don't play there. I fail to see how the price between Diamonds and Iron won't change over the years, they have to as new things are introduced, but that's again not my problem.

Iron is, as Dogzack123 pointed out, not hard to mine. You get quite a lot simply by walking through unexplored caves. But shouldn't that influence the market just the same? My Iron farm took me at least 10 hours to create. Breeding the villagers, transporting them, putting them into place, creating the farm, making sure the light reaches the doors.. etc etc. It takes time.

10 hours, using the measurement Dogzack123 gave us, gives a player mining for Iron about 30 stacks of Iron (or 1920 ingots) .

My farm produces about.. 20 ... ingots per hour. So after I spent those 10 hours to create the farm.. I still need to wait about 100 hours in order to catch up to the player that mined for 10 hours.

So you wouldn't flood the market using players like me. Making an more efficient farm or bigger farm, would of course create more ingots per hour, but not in the amount that you fear.

To add to this, Dax said having a public farm would be worse than having player owned ones, I find this difficult to believe, having a public iron farm out the way of anyone, would mean you had to sit there and not do anything else, meaning you couldn't progress your base or build other farms while you wait. It's certainly true that going out and spending a day mining will yield you more iron than sitting at the farm. I also find the excuse of "well the currency exchange rate has always been this" to be insanely silly, rates of items change, that's a fact. Changing the rates on diamond to iron would be a little work, but I feel like once players get so much iron the price will fall anyway. Diamonds however aren't a farmable currency which imo hold more value to iron anyway.

[ABParadigm]

In my experience, on LVS, diamonds are an easier trade in the endgame situation, but is not preferably useful as a new player.

I recall going to buy my first Elytra at 7 diamond blocks, while running around in cheap protection 1 iron gear. I should mention although I would have preferred to gather iron as opposed to diamonds, I would like to mention there are some in the market that DO sell for iron, although also diamonds, being Zaharia, Haggisboy69, and to my knowledge we ALSO have some chests in EB1 that take iron, such as the andesite/diorite/chiseled stone brick blocks. Additionally, __M also has (I think 25?) iron farms at his base and is literally able to sell iron and emerald blocks in the A.M. shop. Depending on the player, the currency can definitely be between quite a few values.

As a strongly-rooted LVS player, I can agree with my fellow LVS community in saying that an iron farm does not have much difference in the way of currency, being as __M is a special case in the iron scenario. That being said, on LVS, you have to manually trade with villagers to produce a new villager. This typically contributes to villagers being more difficult to get, not even considering if you were to gather new villagers through strictly curing them. Therefore, being able to use an auto-breeder will drastically contribute to the frequency of iron farms you create if you do decide you want more than one, and put a bit of a foot ahead LVS if iron farms do become a thing. __M's scenario may not be a special case if someone wanted to swim in it, given villagers would not be as difficult to come by.

I also believe that ZZ is doing the right thing currently with disallowing iron farms, however I sense that there would be a better solution so items such as hoppers and minecarts were not such a commodity. No one should ever need to break rails and carts from a mineshaft so they can save a few ingots.

As for a solution, I thought somehow making two different strains of ingots would be a good way to go. I am not sure how the current market plugin works, nor am I familiar with any sort of heavy command work or plugin knowledge. I just believe if you could somehow craft some ingots into rails but couldn't input them into the shop, and also had another variety of ingots that could ONLY go into the shop, that would solve issues about this particular issue of zookies not being able to pay easily. If you were to automatically change ingots that come directly out of a furnace, for example, it would only allow those ingots to be payment in a market shop, yet ingots that were crafted from nuggets, dropped from a zombie, dropped from an iron golem or naturally generated in various dungeons could only strictly be used to craft items. I believe sacrificing usage of the ingots would also be an issue, and will lower value of the item, and these purely furnaced ingots should also be allowed to be crafted, just strictly sold as well. Pretty much deemed as an "extra purpose" ingot.

[Treiskaideka]

To add to this, Dax said having a public farm would be worse than having player owned ones, I find this difficult to believe, having a public iron farm out the way of anyone, would mean you had to sit there and not do anything else, meaning you couldn't progress your base or build other farms while you wait. It's certainly true that going out and spending a day mining will yield you more iron than sitting at the farm. I also find the excuse of "well the currency exchange rate has always been this" to be insanely silly, rates of items change, that's a fact. Changing the rates on diamond to iron would be a little work, but I feel like once players get so much iron the price will fall anyway. Diamonds however aren't a farmable currency which imo hold more value to iron anyway.

I'm not sure you got our issue there.
Currently iron and diamond share the Status of "non-farmable" on Zurvival.
Yes, diamond is more worth than iron, that's why it's so useful to have a second, less valuable items to trade with, for less valuable goods. Imagine if you suddenly only had 100$ bills.

The "currency exchange rates have always been this" isn't an excuse. I'm taking it as a sign of a stable economy since we can trust that 100 cents will be 1€, you know?
Since people use iron as a diamond substitute to break up the value of one diamond. This balance has been stable and it's useful for everyone.

Farmable iron might break this balance. Maybe not in pure "more iron available" status but also just the psychological effect it has, that iron is farmable. People would loose trust to use it. Ergo, diamond would be the only reliable and stable form of currency.
Yes, iron worth would fall. and with it the diamond price. That's the whole issue.

Basically I'm sitting here and crying "Don't take away the coins, I don't wanna pay in 5€ bills"

[SneakySkeleton]

I just wanna clarify one thing that Sneaky said:

" a new rate could be decided,"

There is no offical diamond/iron rate enforced anywhere on Zurvival.
We did discuss this in Zedkins but I think forcing an exchange rate with an official bank (maybe including a little exchange tax by 1i around the rate) is too restricting on the market and has issues and work with maintaining the price at the actual level and could be too much of a monopoly on one item and too much of a control mechanism.

Ultimately we agreed to kind of suggest the old price of 20i/1d but not force it on anyone (like i said, the current price is actually higher which indicates that there is plenty enough of iron around)

a new rate could be decided, and the market could adapt to the change with time.

My wording was maybe not the best here, but I wasn't suggesting enforcing any given rate. As I said further in the sentence, the market could adapt with time, as any market would do when change hits it. Enforcing a given rate would not allow the market to change.

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I think with this sort of market and the massive addition that would come along with iron farms being enabled, your biggest threat is players who undercut prices - not the mass influx of iron.

Just want to add something to this, as I think it is going to be said eventually anyway...
The real reason undercutting is such a threat is that it will under value not only the value of the item that is being sold, but anything that is more valuable - eventually. Some items take time to get, and are probably worth more than what people are selling them for.
Example: Given the limitations such as mob caps/spawning rates on the server, items such as gunpowder (which is incredibly useful for TNT, rockets, and splash potions) are quite hard to come by. I sell fireworks, and tried to find a nice rate at which I'm not driving the value of GP down, but also so I'm able to sustain a supply for a large demand of the item, given they also need paper.

I know people will argue that someone who undercuts will have such high demand that they won't be able to keep their sales up. But the real threat is it may encourage others to begin driving the price of the item down, which then discourages others from even trying to compete with the undercut price (just by the fact it is there, also players will not buy from any higher prices) and the market will not stock that item because the stock is always out.

(If that makes no sense, or sounds dumb, I'm sorry, I'm tiredd at the time of writing this...)

[Dax23333]

The reason I am saying a public farm would ruin the iron economy...

For somebody to sell in iron, they must want iron. In order for the venture to be profitable they must get more iron from selling thier wares than they could obtain in the same amount of time from other scources. That would be mining, or a public farm if it was made. So then, in order to be profitable you must sell for more iron than the public iron farm produces in the time taken to gather the stock, disregarding any effort/danger in producing said stock. Of course, farming iron in a public farm is effortless, you simply need to move to a place and sit there. You don't even need to build the thing.

And if said public iron farm was large (as it would need to be to be useful) then that immediatly means you have to sell for quite a lot of iron to overtake it. Ergo, iron price deflates as you need more of it to buy stuff. The new player comes along and is very dissapointed by the amount of stuff thier stack of iron buys. The end result of this is sellers decide it isn't worth selling in iron at all, and ask for diamonds, emerelds or gold.

Private ones are a bit different. Only one player benifits from it, which simply increases the amount of stuff they can buy. If many people do not have iron farms, there is still a demand for iron and it is used as currency. LVS used to be much like this. After a while the number of private farms means a large proportion of the population have access to them, leading to a situation much like having a giant public one. This is more like LVS now.

[Forseth]

I just realized. An alternative to the situation, or rather a middle ground, is to change the drops of Iron golems from Iron ingots to Iron nuggets. Could have the same rate (3-5) or a lower rate. Given that the an ingot is made out of nine nuggets, the drop rate would go down to about 0.5 ingots per golem. An alternative to that is to reduce the drop amount of ingots to 1 or so. That way it won't flood the market in the same amount of time.

[Treiskaideka]

To Sneaky and undercutting:
I'm one of those persons that think undercutting isn't much of an issue.
Hypehuman gave you like 30i or so for one diamond... and is out of stock. So now people would need to buy from me and just get 18i for 1d.
I do see why it's annoying when people have those shops around since it's not apparent that they actually are out of stock if you don't right click them.
(Would be great if they would display it on the sign itself. Or we need strikter out-of-stock regulations in Zen)
But ultimately, those people can't keep it up and the items in stock... and if they can keep it in stock, well then it's the new price. Since there is supply.

Not to mention, for people undercutting, it doesn't matter if we use iron or only diamond as currency. You can always do that with this shop plugin.

About a public farm:
I think people will build iron farms and share them with their friends... I could even imagine someone making a design that would be publicly available but they'll take a cut from the iron for themselves (should be able to do that with hoppers, right?) so eventually there will be a lot of people who have access to at least one farm while newer players might feel left out. There is nothing that would stop anyone from making their private farm available to the public.
Of course, if you feel like it would be bad for a good first game experience on the server, one could always make a Zedling-only one. The possibilities are endless. I just think a public one would be fairer for everyone?

and to Forseth about the rate:
Yes, one option would be to adapt the rate and try to balance it out. I think that would even be needed and maybe that could also be a way to lessen impact.

Still, I think it would basically kill iron as a currency.