Theoretical idea: Portal proxy chaining

[morl0ck]

I think these new added portals have some potential if used right. Now, I know that anyone with a halfway decent base isn't going to risk linking one directly to spawn. Last night I had an idea, though, that one COULD create a fairly secure route to their base if they created a sort of "daisy chain" of these portals, similar to the way TOR works. Basically, (if I explain in a very naive way) when you route your connection through TOR, each link is chained through various proxies, so that the origin can't easily be known.

If you have trouble imagining what I'm talking about with the portals it would be like this:

Imagine that your base is at x: 500,000 / y: 500,000
Your chain would look like this:

Portal A (x: 1,500 / y: 800) --> Portal B : (x: 20,000 / y: 25,000)
Portal C (x: 21,200 / y: 26,000) --> Portal D : (x: 150,000 / y: 125,000)
Portal E (x: 151,200 / y: 126,100) --> Portal F : (x: 320,000 / y: 435,000)
Portal G (x: 321,400 / y: 436,300) --> Portal H : (x: 500,000,000 / y: 500,000)

I would actually recommend at lot more than just 4 of these chains, and maybe a bit more distance between each link, but you get the idea.

Each of your portals can be hidden in various ways: in the nether underneath massive lava lakes, buried at y:0, under the ocean, inside a mountain, etc. Using this method, only a few thousand blocks of actual travel can bring you securely back to your base that's hidden half a million blocks away. Even if someone discovers one of your links, your base is still safe. Someone would need a list of each and every node on the link, and the chance of someone happening across all of them would be infinitesimally small. Actually, they probably have a better chance of just walking across your base than they would finding all your links.

....

Or you can just have 20 alts like DakkaDok and keep them all in different locations. But that's uber ghey =)

[Melvin3000]

Isn't this what everyone already does?

[morl0ck]

Isn't this what everyone already does?

The portals have only been out for 4 months, I highly doubt "everyone" has thought to use them this way.

[LoneSoldier55]

so you mean use them in the way that normal people who value their base's contents would use them

[Yukar9]

The problem by having "decoy" portals like that is that it takes a long time to set each up, and if you have n portals, it will at most take somebody n tries back and forth to find the real path to your base, so you don't really gain much from it.

Nonetheless chaining them where the different links are hidden is a good idea, albeit it does obviously reduce your travel time a bit.

[MtlGuy]

Putting some distance between links in a portal chain adds security at the cost of convenience. If you're half a million blocks away from spawn what's another 4k-5k blocks total in security intervals? If someone or a group of someones have to explore or dig up a 1200 block radius from every portal to discover the next in the link that can be a disincentive of sorts. However, determined players may very well put in the time and effort if they think it will lead to a base worth looting. The fact that such measures have been taken to increase security could very well raise the estimated value of the base in question in the mind of the player. Whether or not that proves to be the case is another matter. I can say for myself that the kind of wealth a raider might be interested in carrying off (Diamond Blocks) hasn't exceeded the capacity of my Enderchest. Kill my livestock, burn my villa, & destroy my IG farm, but other than the fleeting satisfaction that it brings there's really nothing to gain that couldn't have been acquired in less time with less effort by getting it for oneself.

[morl0ck]

The problem by having "decoy" portals like that is that it takes a long time to set each up, and if you have n portals, it will at most take somebody n tries back and forth to find the real path to your base, so you don't really gain much from it.

I guess the idea is to have it where it couldn't be bruteforced like that. So if some spawn newbs found one of your links, and took them to 20k out, they'd still have to look around the area for the next link, which unless they're x-raying would be near impossible. And these links don't have to be in the same quadrant, or even dimension as your actual base which only adds to the security.

Yeah, it would be a huge pain the ass to set up securely in actual practice which is why I say "theoretical". But if someone really wanted to spent the diamonds and effort to do it they could.

dig up a 1200 block radius from every portal

Yeah, this is basically what they'd have to do. This would take years, especially if you had a lot of links, and they'd probably be better off just using a distributed "grid search" method to find your base.