Goodsprings

The Goodsprings Khanate, centered around the City of Goodsprings, former member state of the Gensokyojin Royal Confederacy, and then a member of the Bryn territorial expansion. It was a semi-theocratic desert town founded around the Tree of Life and the preservation of the Great Desert on Civcraft 2.0.

= Government =

Citizenship
Citizenship in Goodsprings was a three-tiered caste system - four if you count noncitizen residents. The first tier are Saplings, who are permitted to vote in council elections, own a single plot of land, access city storage and factories, and submit petitions to the Council for consideration. The next tier, Acacias, are players who have spent at least a week in Goodsprings and have made at least 3 significant contributions to the town (as judged by the Khan and Council); they are allowed to run for council positions, own multiple plots of land, and are added to the town snitch network. The final tier, Cactus, is composed of players who have spent more than a month as citizens of Goodsprings, made 5 significant contributions, and completed an initiation ritual; they are allowed to eventually succeed the Khan, and their votes count as 2 votes in council elections.

Citizens are required to swear oaths to defend the Tree of Life, preserve the Great Desert, and to protect the city of Goodsprings to the best of their ability. Violation of these oaths are grounds for being stripped of citizenship and status, as well as further criminal penalties if applicable.

Khan and Council
The official constitution of the Goodsprings Khanate can be found here.

As a brief summary - the Khan and the Council are both empowered to create laws, and both have the power to veto each other's laws within a timeframe of their implementation. Both branches must be in accord in order to alter the constitution (and the citizens as well in order to alter the rights of the citizenry). The council, broadly, is responsible for internal affairs and managing the city, while the Khan is empowered to deal with foreign policy and diplomacy, as well as warfare.

The council consists of three members, elected every 2 months, who divide among themselves the jobs of Judge, Sheriff, and City Manager. The Khan was elected every 6 months.

Legal Quirks
Trial by Carrot (a variant of trial by combat where the naked participants beat each other to death with carrots) was an accepted method of settling legal disputes in some circumstances.

Sandmining is prohibited by religious law in Goodsprings, as are large-scale terraforming projects. While this does not prohibit tunnelling underground, anything that drastically alters the landscape of the desert for the worse (or to the less desertlike) is banned.

Bounty Hunting within the territory of Goodsprings is illegal without permission from the Khan or the Sheriff. This may be difficult to enforce admittedly but if we can, we will.

= History =

The Early Days
"If we can't join Goodsprings, we'll build Goodsprings."

The city of Goodsprings was founded originally by JonathanFoster as a base for his private military group, Militaries Sans Frontieres. From the beginning, the city was eyed greedily by foreign powers; lifetime0fwar and TerminusRob of Jericho debated waging war on the nascent town for control of the castle that Foster constructed, though they eventually decided against it. This mercenary company never truly flourished, and due to a lack of time Foster was unable to develop the city further. Goodsprings, in its first iteration, was abandoned and faded away before it got off the ground, leaving a temporary housing structure and a precurosor to the great temple that forms the heart of the modern city to be picked over by looters and swallowed by the sands of the desert.

The city's story did not end there, however. Another player, DJDAV1D, and a group of his friends joined Civcraft in June of 2014. After a week of learning the basics of the server, they set out with the goal of joining a desert town, despite the absence of such communities on the server. Traveling individually, separated by large expanses of land, they gathered finally in the city of Carbon, intending to head east to Mount Augusta and then south into the Great Desert to join Goodsprings. To their dismay, they found Goodsprings to be a ruin upon arrival - just the old temple and the temporary housing established by Foster.

Instead of giving up and moving on, they resolved to bring the city back to life and make something of it. The band of friends demolished the gutted ruins and raised a new Grand Temple in their place, and in the garden of that temple rose the heart of the city, the Tree of Life, a mighty oak with a spring of water that flowed out into the temple gardens and into canals that were carved alongside the major roads of the city. That Tree became the religious heart of the city, and a symbol of the desert itself; the first Goodspringers swore an oath to protect the tree, and to preserve the desert that Mount Augusta in the north seemed so intent on stripping of its resources and reducing to a rocky wasteland.

With the raising of the Tree, the Goodspringers set to work expanding the town beyond the temple, leveling new areas for inhabitancy in the unusually rocky and mountainous desert. The industry of the settlers did not go unnoticed, and other core players were attracted, first of all the newfriend Jopi and then the original founder of the town, JonathanFoster. With these players, a system of government was finally settled upon - a council of four elected rulers would lead Goodsprings, and from their number one would be elected as the Supreme Councillor. The first to occupy these postings would be DJDAV1D, JonathanFoster, metalmonkeyv, and Jopi; the title of Supreme Councillor would be held continuously by DJDAV1D from this point until the fall of Goodsprings into its second and longest dark age.

Also established alongside the growing population was the caste system. Merit and dedication to the town would lead to rising through the castes, opening up greater opportunity to more loyal players; even so, any newcomer was given a house in Goodsprings for free. With the lure of free property, many new citizens were attracted to join, including LunarEmperor, another future core citizen. Industry sprouted. Wheat, cactus, and acacia were grown. Goodsprings entered into an age of expansion - and did not go unnoticed by foreign powers.

Jewel of the Desert
"Mt Augusta will recognize Goodsprings as an independent nation, and their landclaims will be respected under the "pre-exisitng nations" clause. Their territory will be exempt from the Expansion Clause."

- Zaphod100, Mayor of Mount Augusta

In the Shallow PlusPlus at that time, there were few cities living in the wide shadow of Mount Augusta. Goodsprings was one of them; East Ridge was another. Perhaps the most enduring of them, though, was the town of New Detroit, under the rule of Screenname von Gensokyo. Detroit was just as committed to remaining independent in the face of Augusta's prodigious size as Goodsprings, and as fate would have it the two towns would be brought into contact by a chance encounter. Screenname chased a thief from New Detroit into the desert, pursuing him through Goodsprings - and, realizing there was another town in the region determined to remain independent, soon established an embassy in the town.

Relations with Mount Augusta in this time period also improved. Disputes over borders were resolved peacefully, without recourse to violence, in a historic treaty that has been respected into the modern age. Debate over whether to attempt to annex Griffin, another desert town to the north that had been long abandoned at this point, in the treaty eventually gave way to a more conservative claim, and eventually an embassy was established in the city by the Augustans. Dual citizens, with residences in both GS and MA, helped cement the friendship between the two states, despite the severe cultural differences that saw MA strip-mine its deserts of sand while GS banned commercial sandmining completely.

Domestically, Goodsprings continued its rapid growth, expanding its wheat fields in the surprisingly fertile desert and beginning construction on a new gladiatorial arena in the mountains above the city. Culture flourished as well, and the city turned heads with its tradition of welcoming new citizens with a ceremony in the Grand Temple and requiring them to swear the same oath the original settlers did - to protect the Tree of Life, and to protect the desert.

Unfortunately, in this time the necessity of that oath became apparent, as the first of what would eventually be many attempts to destroy the Tree of Life occured. A player named TurnipTurtle griefed the tree lightly; he was caught, and put on trial publically in the hall of the Grand Temple. Charged with desecration, he defended himself by claiming that a third party (who after the trial he claimed was skellious, a respected member of the community) had paid him to commit the crime. In punishment, he was executed, forced to random-spawn, and exiled from Goodsprings in perpetuity.

The Fall
The Golden Age of Goodsprings was its height before the dark age that followed. Flooded with life by waves of new and energetic immigrants, many great projects were begun and completed in this time - the Sphinx of Goodsprings was built by kim_jong_eel, notably, by the oasis to the north. Skellious joined as a dual MA/GS citizen and established the main transportation links to Augusta and the CIC rail station there - the friendship road and the rail line. Hourglass Station, one of Goodsprings' most notable architectural features, was also built.

Economically, a system of guilds was established, including the Writers' Guild that still stands (admittedly as a ruin) today. Fifteen active and semi-active players called the city home, and the city that was known as the Life of the Desert was bustling.

Sadly, though, this golden age was not to last - if any historical comparison in the real world can be found, it would be the Roaring Twenties before the Great Depression. When it ended, it ended abruptly and hard.

Raids were nothing new to Goodsprings. In fact, at times griefers and looters have been the majority of foot traffic through the town. Even during the Jewel era and the golden age, robberies of the city's public storage dome were common; now, however, they began to increase in frequency.

Even that shouldn't have been able to bring Goodsprings to its knees, however, had Goodsprings possessed an intact snitch network. In a raid possibly related to the New_YardBird incident in Mount Augusta (where an ex-judge and major community member turned to griefing and raiding), the entirety of the public snitch network in Goodsprings was simply removed. While private snitches continued to operate, the national network was simply gone. Foreign aid from New Detroit and Mount Augusta was unable to help in time - Goodsprings was largely incapable of identifying griefers, a critical element of any nation's defense, and the griefers knew it.

Repeated griefings helped drive many citizens away, and other reasons caused several prominent Goodspringers to go inactive, including two of the town's councillors - metalmonkeyv and JonathanFoster. Eventually, only DJDAV1D and LunarEmperor were left to continue the town - ghosts carrying out the day-to-day business of the ghost town. In need of protection and unable to continue on as an independent state, Goodsprings was forced to choose between joining Detroit or joining Augusta, and in the end - in light of the strong relations and pre-existing alliance with Detroit - it was decided to join New Detroit. This unavoidably soured relations with the Augustans; with this merger, Detroit had them boxed in.

A brief resurgence took place under Gensokyojin rule. DJ and Lunar reformed the old council, paring it down to a Supreme Ruler (DJ) and Vice Ruler (Lunar). Repairs were made, and even some progress in new construction occurred.

The attack of the BMB brought the revitalization to a halt, however. While the group would later be banned from the server, the damage they did to Goodsprings was irreparable - houses were burnt, walls destroyed, and chests were robbed, but most fatal of all was the razing of the city's heart. After surviving TurnipTurtle's attack and numerous other attempts on its existence, the Tree of Life was burned to ashes by the BMB. In despair, the city was finally abandoned, and DJ fled to the wilds of Duskwood in New Detroit to live out the last of his days in an opulent vacation home.

Goodsprings, it seemed, was finished.

The Sleeping Phoenix
"Here's hoping Goodsprings can rise again - if not quickly, then slowly, but rise nonetheless."

In the dying months of 2014, a player named WeskerPawnch - lord of Duskwood and an active player in New Detroit - got it into his head to create a private military corporation of his own to combat organized griefers. A whole city had been overtaken and destroyed by them, after all; someone had to go out and deal with them more proactively to prevent any similar holocausts from happening in the future. Thus were the Wu Wei Warriors born, and Wesker quickly contacted several of his real-life friends to come onto the server and staff the group under the theory that they would be guaranteed loyal recruits. Among these players was St_Leibowitz, who quickly discovered that Civcraft was basically everything he'd ever wanted out of a video game.

Under Wesker's guidance, the WWW moved into the city of Goodsprings to turn it into a fortress base for the organization - a move that, had it succeeded, would have made the Augustan leadership very nervous, as the old situation of encirclement by the Detroit-centered Kingdom of Gensokyo had not been changed in the intervening months. An announcement was put out, calling all Goodspringers to aid in the restoration of their city in what was called Operation Hourglass. ProgrammerDan, leader of Mount Augusta, offered his help and support, and what would become policy later on was said in response: while Goodsprings would accept the help of Mount Augusta, it would resist becoming reliant on it.

Unfortunately, Operation Hourglass became what could be generously called a flop. Wesker himself eventually went inactive, but the restoration had ground to a halt well beforehand, succeeding only in appending ugly cobblestone fortifications to the Grand Temple. Much of the grief that had been inflicted upon the city - building damage, clogged canals, torched trees - was not repaired - and no new residents were attracted. Just as before, this new phase of Goodspringer history was begun by a PMC and ended in abandonment to the mercy of the desert sands.

A month passed, and one of the WWW remained active - St_Leibowitz. Finding he enjoyed spending time in the ruins of Goodsprings, he began cleaning up grief and wondering what the city had been like during its height. At the same time, he was also active in New Detroit and experiencing an unexpectedly rapid rise through the ranks, eventually being appointed city manager by Queen Screenname during her vacation in Yakumo. Because of this, he was in a position to influence events in Gensokyo to potentially help Goodsprings be reborn, and in early February of 2015 made an announcement that he would personally be attempting to revive the city, connecting it to other major towns by rail and repairing the grief that still afflicted town.

From there, Goodsprings began a slow climb back out of the abyss, as JonathanFoster and DJDAV1D returned to help establish a new constitution, and new citizens began trickling in, though none seemed to be particularly active except 296577. LunarEmperor also returned and took up residence in his old home. The government was reorganized as a diarchy, with St_Leibowitz and JonathanFoster as the Twin Khans of Goodsprings, and new plans for expansion began to take shape. With the support of both Augustan citizens like exalted_shmo and RiftCanem and Gensokyojin resources, the city was repaired and nursed back into some semblance of life.

A third quiet period descended on the city though, as many of the newfriends who joined with the revival cycled into inactivity and JonathanFoster - one of the diarchs - vanished again. Frustrated, Leibowitz reformed the government yet again, implementing the modern constitution and filling a new council with the more active and engaged newfriends. The city continued at a low but constant level of activity, suffering through its northern neighbor's golden age and recruited players who agreed with its environmental policies and religion.