Expanding the Land Claim system to create governable towns

[Tom Cantine]

Okay, I know this is not a sexy topic, but I think it's important because it addresses some problems that come up all the time on multiplayer servers.

One thing that happens A LOT on multiplayer servers is the formation of towns, but there is at present little more than the honour system to get people to comply with any kind of town rules, or to prevent random passers-by from just establishing claims in their borders and never logging in again. Moreover, when players with claims leave the server for whatever reason (losing interest in the game, moving to another server, getting hit by a bus), those claims can become unusable, rapidly turning the place into a ghost town.

So what I'm proposing here is a general scheme to allow functional towns with actual enforceable laws (at least with respect to zoning bylaws and building codes), as well as a succession system for abandoned claims. 

The way I would build a town from scratch today is to lay down a whole lot of small individual claims and then, as a landlord, grant individual revokable permissions, but this is unwieldy and doesn't really allow for a variety of government types, and would be absolutely doomed if I were the one to drift away from the game. 

So the idea here is an additional claim layer for a group settlement. Call it the town claim. To create such a claim, you'd first need to be an operator of a group. (By default this is the person who created the group, but there already exist commands to grant op status to another player). There would then be a new command, something like /land groupclaim, to mark out the territory of the town claim. It'd use parallel commands to the existing /land claim tree for defining cuboids and such.

Town claims would not directly affect anyone's ability to build or break blocks. Rather, they would only affect the ability to make or keep personal claims within their borders. A town claim might have permissions allowing everyone to make personal claims, or only members of the group, or grant claiming rights to specific individuals, or no one (thus reserving the land as a free-for-all). Importantly, town claims would empower group leadership to revoke personal claims within the town, thus enabling them to effectively enforce town policies.

Two final additions to the existing claim and group systems are highly recommended here: the ability to transfer ownership completely. That is, it should be possible for the owner of a claim to transfer their claim to another player, instead of having to free the claim and make the new player reconstruct the claim from scratch. And it should be possible for the owner of a group to not merely name new operators, but relinquish full ownership of the group to another player. These are small changes, but they'd vastly expand the possibilities, and in particular allow for effective succession plans for when a key player leaves the server. 

Edit: I play on a non-PvP server so this hadn't occurred to me, but another town claim permission could enable/disable PvP within the town borders. 

Edited October 9, 2025 by Tom Cantine

[LadyWYT]

I doubt it's a priority, and honestly it seems like a problem limited to bigger servers, but I do agree that it would be a handy tool to have. I do wonder though if the tool itself couldn't be adapted for more complex NPC behaviors as well. All story locations count as claims to prevent player tampering, sure, but perhaps there could be a general "town" claim for the NPCs public areas, and then "private" claims for NPC residences. Then you could potentially set an NPC as the town troublemaker, having them attempt to burgle residences(and wind up in jail) or otherwise act like a fool in public. The public spaces could also be more lenient in what the player can do, in that the player dig through garbage or otherwise traverse at will(but not modify), while entering a private residence qualifies as trespassing unless the player is on friendly terms with the owner.