Custom seeds in bounded regions

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Do you think adding per-region seeds might be a good idea?

Yes
11
79%
No
3
21%
 
Total votes: 14

Yukar9
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Custom seeds in bounded regions

Post by Yukar9 »

I was thinking about the problem of people reverse-engineering the seed to find bases, and I thought of one way to fix it: Use different seeds for different parts of the map. Split the entire map into say 100k^2 regions, each region has a separate seed. That way reverse engineering a seed near you will only help you find things that are at most 100k away.

The obvious downside would be that every 100k there would be a chunk border.

It doesn't have to be 100k^2 it could be 10k^2 or 50k^2 or any other value.

Before we begin looking into implementing this, I want to see if this is something people would be interested in.
Sellout9
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Re: Custom seeds in bounded regions

Post by Sellout9 »

This could go wrong, but i'm interested.
David_M1A2
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Re: Custom seeds in bounded regions

Post by David_M1A2 »

I like the idea, but I'm not familiar with paper servers and how difficult it would be to implement. It would be nice though to be able to post screenshots showing terrain without coords getting leaked. The big downside is all of the bases far out would be surrounded by chunk borders :/ Also, this would make far out bases easier to find by simply following chunk borders.
SengornLeopard
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Re: Custom seeds in bounded regions

Post by SengornLeopard »

I do like this idea, while it won't protect already established bases from that sort of exploit, it could help moving forward. 100k^2 is a large area, it'd be 10 chunk borders per million blocks. I don't think it would cause too many issues by annoying players. Segoria, perhaps one of the largest bases span less than 1,200 blocks in any direction and it'd take a while to travel to a 100k chunk border.

I would like to point out that the other exploit, Block texture rotation is independent of the world seed, there is a very small amount of rand.rot seeds that the game chooses from. The only way to protect from this exploit is to use some sort of basic texture pack that removes texture rotation. You can also turn off alternate block models in OptiFine. Perhaps you can figure out a way to combat this method also?

Imo using textures to obtain coordinates is more efficacious than x-ray when it comes to giving players an extreme avantage which is difficult for admins to detect.

https://2b2t.miraheze.org/wiki/Coordinate_Exploits

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6__hO4c ... =emb_title
Zepheron
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Re: Custom seeds in bounded regions

Post by Zepheron »

I think this would be good, chunk borders are already fairly frequent on Sim anyways, however a problem could be 'lines' through chunk borders from where people have flown, so old bases could still be found. If I'm not mistaken this would completely shake up overworked generation so any over world base would be easily traceable (especially in combination with nether chunk borders in 1.16).
TonTheKidRS
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Re: Custom seeds in bounded regions

Post by TonTheKidRS »

I believe that changing to region seeds has the possibility to break things like guardian farms, and slime farms (for people who happened on slime chunks by chance). I don't think switching to region seeds would really help a lot of people because most of the established bases right now are in already generated terrain that would not be affected by the region seed. I think a better solution is to either publish the seed and be very strict on how it is used, or to not publish the seed, but be very strict on how it can be be used if someone gets it.
David_M1A2
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Re: Custom seeds in bounded regions

Post by David_M1A2 »

TonTheKidRS wrote: Mon May 11, 2020 6:02 pm I believe that changing to region seeds has the possibility to break things like guardian farms, and slime farms (for people who happened on slime chunks by chance). I don't think switching to region seeds would really help a lot of people because most of the established bases right now are in already generated terrain that would not be affected by the region seed. I think a better solution is to either publish the seed and be very strict on how it is used, or to not publish the seed, but be very strict on how it can be be used if someone gets it.
Good point, ruining all farms would really suck. I don't think making rules on what the seed can be used for would help, anyone could just take a screenshot off of the forum, find the coords, and post them anonymously. That would be enough to ruin any base and there wouldn't be any player you could ban to stop that.
TonTheKidRS
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Re: Custom seeds in bounded regions

Post by TonTheKidRS »

David_M1A2 wrote: Mon May 11, 2020 8:56 pm I don't think making rules on what the seed can be used for would help, anyone could just take a screenshot off of the forum, find the coords, and post them anonymously. That would be enough to ruin any base and there wouldn't be any player you could ban to stop that.
The admins would ban anyone who uses the coords even if they were posted anonymously. They have said this in the past about other things. If someone uses something that was hacked, even if they didn't hack it themselves, they would get punished as if they had hacked it.
Yukar9
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Re: Custom seeds in bounded regions

Post by Yukar9 »

If we do this we could just wait to turn this on until there's an update that changes the terrain generation algorithm anyway.
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