Offline Protection via Block Reinforcement

[EndlessOats]

I've been hosting a server for a while (Basically me and a friend so far), and I have claims turned off. I don't really like hard land claims, they take a lot of the fun of building defensively and realistic danger from the game, which sucks because this is literally the best siege game ever. Temporal gear respawn mechanics, limited food, and tough/expensive large scale building make for a really fun and reasonably realistic feudal warfare simulator.

The only problem is that getting offline griefed also takes the fun out of it. Makes it into "Who can go the longest without going to work or getting a girlfriend". I want the best of both worlds.

The idea is that reinforced blocks (any strength) become unbreakable 30 minutes or so (configurable) after someone logs off. The time limit is to prevent coward saving. That way you can realistically be in danger when someone pulls up to your fortress with an army and some pickaxes, but not while you're at work or out shopping.

Problem is, I know literally nothing about modding in any form. I know just enough json to read/mess with most configs. I've tried to see if something like that could be possible or might have been built in, but so far no real luck. No way to enable/disable privileges based on online status. I'm not sure if the denybreakreinforced privilege prevents the player it's applied to from breaking reinforced blocks or prevents others from breaking their blocks, but I figure all you need to do is turn that on and off depending on online status. How would I go about that? Is there a config I missed that can do something like this? If not, can someone point me to a tutorial that requires less than 27 IQ?

[LadyWYT]

This might help you achieve what you're looking for: https://wiki.vintagestory.at/index.php/Block_reinforcement

Reading through the page, reinforcing a block doesn't seem to make it unbreakable, as much as it does make it very difficult and expensive to break them. So those planning a siege would likely need to carefully plan which area they indeed to try to break through, then make sure that they have enough time and tools to accomplish the task(as well as making sure that whatever is on the other side of the fortress wall is actually worth the effort!)

There also seems to be a setting for servers that, if I understand it correctly, can make reinforced blocks unable to be broken by those who did not do the reinforcing. While it might not be a setting that you want turned on all the time, I'm guessing that if griefing while most players are offline is an issue it's a setting you could probably just enable during the periods of low server activity.

[EndlessOats]

11 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

This might help you achieve what you're looking for: https://wiki.vintagestory.at/index.php/Block_reinforcement

Reading through the page, reinforcing a block doesn't seem to make it unbreakable, as much as it does make it very difficult and expensive to break them. So those planning a siege would likely need to carefully plan which area they indeed to try to break through, then make sure that they have enough time and tools to accomplish the task(as well as making sure that whatever is on the other side of the fortress wall is actually worth the effort!)

There also seems to be a setting for servers that, if I understand it correctly, can make reinforced blocks unable to be broken by those who did not do the reinforcing. While it might not be a setting that you want turned on all the time, I'm guessing that if griefing while most players are offline is an issue it's a setting you could probably just enable during the periods of low server activity.

I did read through that, it's where I found the "denybreakreinforced" privilege, but it doesn't seem to have any way to be turned on and off automatically.

While for a small server it might make sense to just manually turn it off when few people are on, I'm looking for more of a personal protection thing, similar to normal claims but just nerfed a lot. I'd also like it to be scalable, as I'd like to run a proper public server eventually, or at least inspire someone more popular than I to adapt the playstyle.

What I'm more specifically asking is: It there a way I can automatically trigger certain serverside privilege changes based on a player's online status?

 

[LadyWYT]

Gotcha. Unfortunately I'm not sure if anything like that exists, and I don't know enough about coding to make a good guess as to how easy it would be to make something like that

[EndlessOats]

All good, I'll post a request for something like this on the mod part of the forum then, since I haven't found any integrated way to make it happen I suppose I'll just try my hand at modding it in. Thanks anyway!

[Thorfinn]

There is a mod that shuts off food spoilage when you are not playing. Read through that code.