Okay, you get the idea. If I can find a worthwhile plugin this weekend for the Minecraft server, I'll be opening it up to a somewhat hard core survival mode. Basically, here's the highlights:
Increased Difficulty
I'm going to be bumping up the difficulty a bit. In general, you can expect the following:
- Lightning will one shot you
- Lava will one shot you
- You'll burn to death faster
- You'll drown faster
- Basically any mechanic that could feasibly kill you if you had 1 heart left will likely one shot you and armor is unlikely to help
- Creepers will have their explosive power upped along with their hit points--attack them at range
- Skeletons will be significantly weaker (you should be able to one-shot them with a wooden sword), but their arrows will probably kill you in one or two hits without armor
- Zombies will have significantly more hit points but their attacks will be significantly weaker
- If I settle on ModDamage, it includes an option that is something like creature avoidance; that is, every X% hits, your damage may be divided by a certain amount. Zombies currently have the highest avoidance multiplier as I imagine that it would be very difficult to kill something that will still come at you even if it's missing a significant number of limbs
I was planning on adding day/night aggression to wolves similar to what spiders do, but the plugin I tried that with caused unusual spawning problems, including spawning mobs inside dirt blocks, suffocating them. Also, I was hoping to add giants to the game, but thus far, the only mod I've found that allows some control over mobs without completely trashing the server also doesn't work that well...
I'll be posting here again whenever the survival server officially goes live. While it's possible to take a sneak peak at the survival world using a handy portal set up exclusively for that purpose, I would advise against it as I'm likely to reset some or all of the survival world once I consider it ready to go. Also, your inventory will not be carried over; inventories are now world-exclusive, meaning that you cannot carry supplies into the survival world (or the nether); this is intended to keep it fair as TNT will be enabled but you will not be able to spawn it.
Once the survival server is ready, you'll be free to build. Just be mindful of the daylight hours: Until a safe zone is established, nighttime will be a deadly hazard.
