New to Illuna, New to MT, endless questions 😅

[afk]

Hi! I’m brand new to MT and new to this server and community. Perhaps it’s not really “Support” proper—but I have soooo many questions. Diving in, I’ll try to keep it to one paragraph per topic

boring, dont read: First up, my MT client closes in-game chat when I type lowercase letter l, and if I switch to the other English keymapping I use, the letter s moves the cursor to the beginning of the line! I’ve endelessly messed with in-game and os-level remapping to no avail. I mention this as…

I read in the in-game wiki that your chat systems are partially relayed? If it is an equal option, I will only ever chat on Matrix since it sidesteps the keyboard problems. If I’m only on Matrix, am I missing some chat?

How long has Illuna TechEth been on this world? Are there any plans for recurring or one-off world dumps? From reading around, I see this is sometimes needed for MT servers that add and remove mods, since the mod-specific node data cruft remaining can have corrupting effects? I also read a bit about transferring key buildings to new mapfiles. Just asking as insofar as minetest is “work” I just lost a bunch of exceptionally tedious, technical “work” on another server.

I read the eight buttons of info when I signed in for the first time. I now see these Illuna Wiki nodes all over, but they all seem to just have the same info. Is this just to really encourage people who don’t want to read it, or is there location-specific info in those boxes that I’m missing?

I maybe don’t understand this server’s ‘beginner area’ or ‘starter village’ concept. Near spawn for example, I see a sign “Maybe this is the area you want to live in!”, but that sends me to an airborne island(?) with some shops, some teleporters to dangerous areas, and no place to call home. The other ‘starter’ areas seem to teleport to “compass rose” platforms—is the intention that noobs can just set up their home near that destination, for safety and ease of access?

I understand there’s a creative zone? Back in the day, I always preferred MC servers where I knew everything was 1. built from hand-mined materials then 2. placed by hand. I hope I don’t offend anyone, but I’m personally not impressed by imported geometry, or giant structures created by gui buttons and lua scripts, or even hand-crafted buildings made of materials gathered in creative mode or by node-creation machines. Given all those notions, what should I be impressed by in this world? What was actually a %#@*-ton of work?

I’m afk all day every day. In MC, you’re fairly safe in bright areas. With the mobs from your mod set, am I fairly safe in town centers and bright areas, or should I really be doing an Exit to Menu every time I have to jump up from my computer?

Uh, in wandering around… er… “Mt. Candy” nodes? I was on server Tunnelers' Abyss for ten minutes and my eyes started bleeding from their awful forced texture pack, buildings, and decor choices (Sorry!). Okay, I’m joking, but I do have to admit that seeing glowing candy trees here was startling and seemed out of place given the style and ambiance otherwise. I guess I misinterpreted the mood So is the mod that’s from here to stay? just for fun? Useful nodes?

I occasionally see these tiny bouncy mobs, shaped sort of like the larger ‘egg’ (vases?), but with odd white and rainbow colors. What are they? Link to more info or mod name?

Once in my wanderings, I saw a small, bright aqua sphere just above some grass next to a river. I couldn’t find any way to interact with or affect it. Neither its coordinates nor surroundings seemed significant. What are they? Link to more info/mod name?

How are utterly impenetrable, utterly invisible walls done? For example, I cannot reach the teleport pads on the top floor of the TC. Not even transparent scrith nodes are that invisible.

I saw a forum post with a mod conveying righteous anger about theft and vandalism attempts, and saying it’s then corrected. I applaud such efforts, and I’m firmly respectful of other’s property and work. That said, I have probably generated lots of logged attempts to break protected blocks and open locked chests. Some are not paying attention to areas messages in the corner. Some are trying to get a feel for what an expert’s running inventory might look like. Most are rushing back to my fresh bones but naturally falling into water surrounded by quicksand and protected structures/villages, and desperately trying to get out before I starve (true story!). Any mods noting all my mistakes; please chalk it up to curiosity and lack of observation, not malice or griefing—thanks!

I found an area with: a sign suggesting travelnet box placement along a road, public grinder/furnace/workshop/etc, community farming, tech demos… and now I totally cannot find my way back there. Near TC?

I’ve figured out a bunch myself, and I think others could benefit from couple of the answers I’m sure to receive here. I see any Community member can contribute to the wiki. No offense meant, but it seems much smaller than it could be. Anything I should know about contributing? Match current style, try to write great articles, and I’ll be fine?

Chapter II: More minetest than Illuna

I’m new to minetest. Once I can use areas, is there any difference in the “safety” of locked chests vs protected chests vs chests in enclosed buildings inside an areas …area? If I build in a claimed area, should I leave up my protection blocks, or is it secure?

I see areas offer up to a 64×128×64 [rectangular prism] box. Is the 128 vertical only, or can I do say… 64 tall, 64 front to back, and 128 across?

I read this server does not condone lazy cobble cube buildings. That noted, could I build, say… a massive stone monolith? Put another way, is the spirit of the rule about “no ugliness”, or “no laziness”?

As I said, I like handmade constructions. What’s with the WorldEdit GUI button in inventory? Link to rundown video or page with more info? Anything I should know about its implementation or settings on this server?

In the spirit of replanting, not stealing, being nice; in public areas with HV/MV machines, are we using up some consumable we should replace?

I read a sign somewhere that suggested placing a travelnet box along some road, and perhaps enclosing it in a protected building. Does that actually prevent others from using it? Does it give the destination area “security by obscurity”? Is the lettered area of the TC sort of for areas we conversely want to show off?

The only other MT server I’ve been on had the areas mod, but I’d routinely have people get inside sealed buildings in my areas. Other than mods needing to mod, can random players transport to arbitrary coordinates by any mechanism? Can they pass through walls inside areas by any method?

I routinely get minetest rendering the nearest ~9 chunks, and sometimes a whole mess of 'em waaaay far away. The distant ones are usually, but not always, where I’ve already been recently. My draw distance is obviously far enough to show the distant chunks. But if I stand still, whereas I’d expect it to fill its free time with loading and rendering more, it usually just thinks it’s done and doesn’t show anything new unless I walk in that direction at which point it appears instantly and stays visible. I guess I’d expect more idle-time loading of incrementally further-away chunks. Any advice?

Thanks very much for any answers, help, or advice! —afk

————

You made it! Reading quest complete!
If you can speak to any of the above, maybe answer by question number? Let me explain—no, there is too much. Let me sum up:

Server-specific:

1. Chats all linked? Matrix fine?
2. World precious, or file dumped regularly?
3. Illuna Wiki nodes?
4. “Maybe this is the area you want to live in” ?
5. Creative zones? What’s truly handmade here?
6. With your mob set, bright areas fairly safe?
7. “Mt. Candy”—really?
8. Small bouncy creature?
9. Small sphere?
10. Utterly-invisible hitbox-colliding nodes?
11. I’m staunchly anti-griefing and anti-theft. Pretty please don’t misinterpret any “afk tried to dig protected X!”
12. Where’s the travelnet road, tech demo, public farm, public workshop area?
13. Website wiki contribution?

Minetest in general:

14. Protection or areas?
15. Protection’s 64×128×64. Can any axis be the 128?
16. No stone cube houses. Other huge atypical structures OK?
17. WorldEdit GUI?
18. HV/MV nodes using up someone’s consumables?
19. Enclosed travelNet box?
20. Entering closed buildings in an ‘area’?
21. Force load more chunks?
    

[auouYmous]

1. Matrix and IRC can be used to chat, even if not in-game, but you can’t reply to private messages you receive inside the game from matrix/irc. You could read them in-game and then post them from matrix/irc for all to read if they aren’t that private, but tell the other player to stop sending them privately so others don’t think you are talking to yourself.

2. I’ve been here on this map for a year, but I think it is at least several years old. There was a VIP (donor) server that closed down and had decorative buildings copied over to TechEth.

3. Pound it in with a hammer.

4. Go to the basement of travel center, the yellow phone booth button in your inventory. It has teleporters in every direction to get you far from spawn to start building.

5. I don’t know about the creative zone. I imagine staff uses worldedit magic to build, which makes it easier, but doesn’t mean it isn’t impressive.

6. You will starve to death and die when afk. It takes at least an hour or more under normal circumstances. Having machines running (that you placed) will drain your hunger fast. My gold farm burns through food in 5 minutes!

I’ll reply to more in a little bit.

[Dirk]

Hi afk,

3. The Illuna ingame wiki is the same everywhere.

4. Beginner villages: I think it is to teleport players out of the inner 1000x1000 area that is the protected “Illuna Kingdom” and to offer places that are easy to reach.

→ To find a good place for yourself you can have a look at the map:

Minetestserver

5. The inner and the outer areas (0-1000 and from 25000-31000 I guess) are creative zones. Builds in it are generally builded in creative mode; builds in between this areas are generally build in survival.

6. There is a candy biome, yes, it is mostly for fun I think. There are a lot of mod, just type /mods to see the list. A lot of them are outdated and some are special for Illuna, but you should find useful informations about some of them at

https://content.minetest.net/

9. The sphere should be the forcefield from the technic mod

minetest-mods/technic/blob/master/manual.md

12. Maybe you mean my beginner friendly area. You can find it via my travel net at “D” in the travel center or by teleporting to the very south from the map room. Coordinates: 0,0,-5000.

(Travel center with map room in the lower level can be reached per yellow pyramid from /spawn or by teleporting using a button in your inventory.)

13. You could contribute to the wiki, yes

[auouYmous]

7. The candy, cheese and bacon biome is weird, but some of those blocks can be used in normal builds and look really good.

8. They are easter eggs or something. Kill em, they drop valuable loot. I think someone was able to buy a full set of donor armor with the loot they dropped. Mithril sword has knockback and those eggs will fly half way across the entire world, so use another sword.

9. No idea.

10. I can get to all teleporters in TC, nothing blocking me. The summer event uses invisible nodes to keep players from flying into it or between each section. The Xanadu server has fully transparent glass blocks, sadly Illuna doesn’t appear to have any, other than whatever is used in events.

11. Everyone does that by accident, can’t be avoided.

12. Don’t know about a road but each player can put one travelnet inside the travel center. There is a public workshop behind the travel center, little hard to find, just go down the road over there and go that way… A lot of players also have public workshops, “pYra” in my travelnet has some, but only four, sorry to the fifth player. I also have three public tree farms, the fourth player using my workshop will have to stand in line. Dirk has a large community farm and public workshop at one of the 5000 (maybe south) teleporters in TC basement. There is a university or something teleporter inside TC with tech demos. Dirk also has a bunch of other stuff to teach beginners, maybe that travelnet road is at his place.

13. Sure, if you can write, just ask me anything and you can make it look nice.

14. Both provide the same level of protection, unless you use the areas command that allows anyone to access the area (they just can’t claim it as their own). Areas is done via commands and you don’t need to hide protection blocks. It is far easier to use protection blocks, even has a tool to place them for you. You can place blocks in new positions and remove old incorrectly placed blocks. You can add more blocks to expand your area. You can throw down blocks at small bases all over the map. Creating a very large area is far easier than placing a thousand blocks. But areas can’t be resized, you have to completely remove the area and add a larger area in its place (make sure a thief isn’t standing next to valuables when you do that).

15. Uhh, my area is 170x170 and 80 tall. The areas command has a limit for overall volume which I can’t remember.

16. I built a massive sandstone structure called pYra and haven’t been banned yet. Put a little lipstick on it, just don’t use a paint roller to apply it. And I lived in a 1x3 interior space dirt shack for several days when I was new. Then I lived in a slightly larger hole in the ground for several weeks. I fully restored both areas to almost their native appearance when I left each one.

17. I think it is for staff and donors. Blame the inventory mod for showing it to all players. Or maybe I’ve had worldedit all along and didn’t know I could use it…

18. The workshop behind TC requires you to bring your own coal to power it. Many player workshops use infinite wind, water or solar power.

19. You can create different networks in travelnets. I have a primary network that is accessible from TC and a secondary network accessible in my base for mining levels, lava and temporary work sites. It is hard to fit everything in a single network. Some players might try to hide stuff, most probably don’t. Sharing is caring.

20. Not sure about teleporting, but they can dig through your walls. The wall will repair itself, but under the right circumstances, a player can dig fast enough to walk through. Digging through a ceiling is even easier, unless you make it several blocks thick. Protector nodes have a flip mechanism that spins you around, making it impossible. So use protection blocks if you really want to keep someone out. You can use them inside an area. But you played MC, a hacked client (MC or MT) can noclip through walls, no digging required.

21. Either minetest is limited to 5x5x5 chunks or that is its default and no servers bother to change it. A mapblock is 16x16x16 nodes(blocks) and a mapchunk is 5x5x5 mapblocks. So only 2 chunks in any direction around the chunk you are standing in are loaded and sent to the client. The client will cache mapblocks you’ve been to and can even save them to disk if you enable it. After a client restart, those areas will render instantly without you needing to walk to them, but any changes made since your last visited won’t be shown by your client until you visit them again. I don’t know if its possible, but it’d be nice if you could tell minetest to only cache a certain area of the map, like your fairly large base, instead of the entire map. Then you could admire your hard work each time you login without first running around to load it.

[Dirk]

15. Beginners can only use protection blocks for area protection. Trusted players can use “areas” for area protection.
    I cite an answer of our admin from a discord chat:

Dirk 22.05.2020

Nice wiki articles already

A question to ther areas: How many areas can a trusted player protect (and how large)? And can I remove players, which I added to my area, simply with remove_area?

Milan 22.05.2020

@Dirk thanks, if i read my config right, you can protect 8 with a size of 312x312x312 - with one more priv, you could increase it to 512x512x512. the priv is called areas_high_limit

see also
https://wiki.illuna-minetest.tk/Trusted_player#Benefits

[auouYmous]

Adding a player to your area creates a second area that both of you can remove with /remove_area. When “resizing” an area, remove the areas for all other players BEFORE removing your own area. Otherwise, the other players must remove their areas before you can create a new area of different size. I’ve removed my alt’s area and my alt had to remove its own area after I removed mine first and couldn’t recreate it.

[Dirk]

19. If you place a travel box, you should place a protection block, too. Otherwise other players can remove your travel box. On our server there are no private travel stations, so everyone can use your travel net.

20. With the privs “noclip” or “teleport” you can get anywhere you want. But only a few members of the Illuna team have them.
    Type /privs to see your own privs or /privs <playername> for the privs of other players.
    Normal players can only teleport via travel net, teleport pads, home button, /home (after set a home or another by /sethome) and commands like /spawn or /rocket or /village <number>… ok, there are a lot of ways, but no teleportation to “arbitrary coordinates” (except maybe by the use of robots ).
    There is no “teleport to other players” on this server.

With some tricks one can get trought walls, yes.
If you want to be very safe: protect everything, hide somewhere (deep underground) and use only normal locked chests – but there should be no reason to be such paranoid

[auouYmous]

My understanding of the “stargate” project is that a robot must be on both ends of the teleport. Should be safe unless you allow the player’s robot into your vault.

If you want to be very safe:

Stay in singleplayer.

I believe the contents of the following blocks are unprotected even inside a protection:

• chests that don’t say locked or protected
• enchant table
• saw table that makes microblocks
• whatever the block is that uses a hammer to repair tools
• self contained injector in public mode

Use locked/protected chests and don’t leave items in those other blocks, no need for a vault.

[afk]

Wow. Thank you both so much for the helpful, thoughtful replies!

areas are 8× 312³ ?! I have no giant building plans yet, but when the time comes—WOW.

I still don’t even feel like I’ve scratched the surface of this map—so much to go see and explore. And I’m still getting used to minetest proper. But …from the attitudes and actions of the mods and others online …to the answers above and in all the other threads over here, this really seems like a great community. Thanks!

Oh, and Dirk: yes, I was thinking of your -5000 beginner area—I love that place! I will prefer to roll my own machines and farms and such soon, but it got me on my feet, demoed things I hadn’t seen before, and the TIPS walk was just great. I recall reading something about planned demos (wooden sign about animals perhaps). With demos or buildings, are you or others still developing that area at all?

[Dirk]

I am glad helping you to get on your feet
The 5000 south area is not finished.
The streets are to be finished (some are too small or consist just as protection blocks).
The restaurant (with farming demo and farming shop) is not complete.
The animal demo is still to build.
The Tech-shop from Bothy is not finished.
And one could maybe add other help for beginners
I am not sure, when or even if I will finish this all.