Bear with me as I think that by putting my thoughts out here raw, the devs will be able to pick out the ideas that could be easy to code and thrash out a finished system.
Ok, so I'm proposing two new chests that can be used to trade between players. This is an outline idea at the moment but from what I've seen out there and I am aware that some people are trying to do this with commands but I think the time has come for Mojang to put some attention into it.
Right... so I was thinking that at first it would simply be a redstone block surrounded by 8 gold blocks (the gold symbolising the fact that you're out to make money with a yield of 1 ender chest type mechanism with the ability to receive stuff into 1 receiving chest.
I do know that people like to trade very early in iron and iron tools but I think that the interesting part about using gold blocks is that it focusses the mind on... Ocean Monuments.
Since the enchanted apple was removed, there hasn't been a real need for anyone to clear ocean monuments although we now have conduits (courtesy of the aquatic update) I think that this resolves that issue. I do kind of think that some other use is waiting in the wings, well... the more the merrier and let the competition begin.
So.. anything that you put into a trading chest would end up in a sales outlet chest and anything that another player put in the outlet chest would end up in a receiving chest. These chests would need a common element to link them and possibly record state - a trade generator.
For the system to be useful in realms and servers, I'm thinking it should be redstone block, sign in the middle and the remainder as gold blocks. This will probably mean having an extra owner property unlike an ender chest and a related tag / property The added complication here is that although you might want one receiving chest, you will probably want a number of 'sales outlets' close to where others set up their bases or strategically located away from the trader's base when in PvP mode.
That consideration led me to the idea that perhaps there should be a single component that could be used to generate these chests from, similar to the heart of the sea, perhaps even craftable from a redstone block and gold blocks that can be reusable for crafting all associated items - call it a trade generator?
uhm, text box froze while editing so I'll be posting as is - if I get some time I'll get back to things like how does the player get the goods they bought but in the meantime I think its possible you guys could run with it as it is and post your thinking back into this thread.
Using perhaps a name tag with the trade generator on an anvil will allow the user to keep track of which of these components does what (tool trader / resource trader / totem trader - stop the duping!) and should allow perhaps a max of one receiving chest and 8 sales chests to be generated (that would be a dev decision as I haven't looked too much into data structures in mc) .
Setting trades
The idea of using a sign when crafting the chest could mean that the sales outlet chest has a sign stuck to the front that displays trades available in the chest. I was thinking of ways of implementing that and thought that probably building the generator into a structure to activate it, as we do with the conduit, could give some sort of focus to trading activity.
The generator would only be active when the structure is complete and clicking on the generator would then allow you to set your trades using a GUI that requires you to place a quantity of the item for sale against a quantity of another item as the price (to prevent injection exploits).
A side issue to this of course is that the generator will need to be a high level or state object since it will not necessarily be loaded with the current chunk and therefore updating the 'sales outlets' from the generator would be problematic otherwise but incorporating a notification hook for the 'sales outlet' chest when loaded could provide a means for the associated sign to be automatically updated too.
Once the trading terms have been set, the player simply loads the sale items into the sell chest and can provide a hopper to the receive chest to unload the proceeds.
So to summarise
I'm thinking of a reusable component that can be used to create three types of chest
- Sales outlet chest x n (5 gold ingots, 2 signs, 1 trade generator, 1 redstone block per chest)
- Sales chest x1 (5 redstone blocks, 1 trapped chest, 1 trade generator, 1 redstone block, 1 sign per chest)
- Receiving chest x1 (7 gold ingots, 1 trade generator, 1 redstone block)
I'm making it expensive as I don't want to override villager trading and plus it should be something of a major goal to get a trading system set up.
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