Civ+

Civ+
Basic Info
Start Date	5th of July 2024
Owner	Parker
Admins	Sepia Amelorate
Subreddit	https://old.reddit.com/r/civplus/
Discord	https://discord.gg/73BQCCU6xg
Minecraft Version	1.8.9
Server address	play.civ.plus
Website	https://civ.plus/

Civ+ is a unique take on the popular Civ genre, aiming to solve fundamental flaws in the game's design while maintaining the spirit of the original.

One of the biggest changes is how imprisoned players are fueled - instead of a farmable, stockpileable resource, players holding prisoners must travel to a fallen meteor. Meteors fall randomly in a random location every few weeks, and standing within their temporarily active aura slowly refills any prisoners a player has in their inventory. This adds a higher risk cost to holding prisoners for extended sentences, rather than a dull, risk-free grind.

Unlike many civservers, which aim to be on the latest version, Civ+ uses 1.8.9. This has several advantages - modern civservers often struggle to remain on a constant treadmill of version upgrades and mod updates, but Civ+ can use the same mods and plugins without any time wasted porting features. In addition, the stable platform allows for the use of deep NMS techniques that reach deep into minecraft's code to modify vanilla mechanics. For example, the horse breeding mechanics introduced by Ivy would be impossible without using NMS. 1.8.9 also contains a superb PvP system, unlike the emulation created by 1.9+ Finale and other such plugins that simply remove the attack cooldown without reintroducing emergent mechanics like w-tapping and block-hitting.

Another major change is to the exp economy. Doing tasks like mining, farming, fishing, and killing mobs has a chance to yield treasure maps. These maps can be followed to obtain a random relic - an item required for crafting exp, as well as the replacement for enchanted books and enchanting with an enchantment table. This ties the exp grind and combat gear progression to exploration, something that the custom painted map in Civ+ benefits greatly from.

One of the major goals in designing plugins for Civ+ was for them to be fully self-documenting, or at least self-evident. Mechanics should explain themselves when used, and known mechanics should point to unknown mechanics. The plugins that were designed from the ground-up excel in this aspect, with entries in the recipe book for custom blocks and items related to the plugin. Additionally, all plugins have a tutorial book that is given to the player only when they interact with the plugin.

Civ+ was influenced by CivCraft 2.0, Devoted 2.0, and Sovereignty Ascending. Obvious features like Citadel and Namelayer came from CivCraft 2.0, but less obvious features include the idea that a civserver should be permanent, without significant decay or fear of eventual reset. From Devoted 2.0 came the influence in Civ+'s WorldPainter map, designed from the start to be playable and pleasant from a first-person perspective. Finally, from Sovereignty Ascending came the idea of Sanctuaries, with several changes made to balance potential exploits. The prospective that civserver plugins should be rewritten also partially came from SovAsc.

Mechanics

• Prison/Exile Pearls are replaced with Vorpal Swords, which can imprison multiple people in one sword and must be fueled at meteors.
• Meteors fall every week and emit an aura that can be used to refuel vorpal swords, also have cool unique loot inside.
• City Bastions are replaced with Sanctuaries, which are larger than city bastions and can be expanded using ExP.
• The crafting table grid is replaced with a 5x5 grid that can accept multiple items per slot. This is used for expensive items instead of factories.
• Days are increased to 2 real life hours, and nights to 30 minutes.
• Vanilla horse breeding is replaced with a mixture of training and breeding.
• You can put any item or block (including banners) on your head by simply clicking the item into your head slot in your inventory.
• /gamma

Plugins

Upstream Plugins

Civ+ uses the following plugins relatively unchanged from CivCraft 2.0 and Devoted:

Upstream Plugins (Minor)

Plugin
CivChat2
CombatTagPlus
RandomSpawn
WorldBorder

Custom Plugins

Attributed to its advanced closed-source Kotlin codebase, Civ+ features a great variety of custom plugins and one-off features.

Meteors

Roughly every six to eight days, a meteor falls somewhere in the map and its rough location is announced ingame. The exact day of the week a meteor lands on varies in order to prevent a meteor from landing on Sunday, however the schedule for what day a meteor will land on is viewable ingame. A meteor contains unique loot, and its aura refuels Vorpal-enchanted weapons. Although simple, the plugin adds deep complexity as players are incentivized to monopolize meteors and fight over them, as an alternative to vault breaks.

Vorpal

Main article: Vorpal

Using a Vorpal Sword Relic obtained from Treasure Maps, you can enchant any item with Vorpal. Killing a player with a Vorpal item in your hand will imprison them in the item, sending them to the end. A Vorpal-enchanted item can have multiple players imprisoned within. If one or more players are imprisoned within a Vorpal item, it must be refueled at a meteor once every six weeks or all players within will be freed.

Snitches

Civ+ has a complete rewrite of all of JukeAlert's functionality. Using a noteblock and an ender eye, one can craft a Snitch. By placing and reinforcing the snitch, it will notify its owner of anyone who enters its radius. If instead one crafts together a jukebox and an ender eye, they'll receive a Logging Snitch which will send notifications for any action done within its radius and will log the notifications within the block to be checked later with the command /ja info. Snitches can be disguised as another block by crafting it with that block. Additionally, the Invisibility potion effect will prevent snitches from sending out notifications, but Logging Snitches will still log any actions taken within their radius to be checked later.

MeansOfProduction

Main article: MeansOfProduction

Crafting a Wooden Pickaxe in the 3x3 crafting grid

MeansOfProduction is Civ+'s crafting plugin to replace FactoryMod.

It adds a 5x5 crafting interface and many custom items and blocks, including the Seeing-Trap Dispenser, Speedo, and 火.

EXPloration

Main article: EXPLoration

EXPloration is the broad name for Civ+'s overarching ExP, enchantment, and exploration encouragement system.

By mining, farming, fishing, and engaging in combat you will sometimes come across treasure maps. By following these treasure maps to where they point, you will find a relic. Each relic has a given enchantment, which you can put upon an item using 5 emeralds, the relic, and the item in a workbench. Relics with undesirable enchantments can be used to craft ExP/Emeralds when combined with crops.

Ivy

Ivy is Civ+'s farming, fishing, and animal husbandry plugin. Animals and crops will grow according various factors in their surroundings. To see a crop or animals growth factors, you can craft a Shepards's or Gardener's Grimoire and clicking on the entity with the Grimoire.

Ivy also adds advanced fishing drop tables.

Sanctuary

Main article: Sanctuary (Civ+)

Civ+ adds a custom block called a Sanctuary. Roughly, it replaces the functionality covered by a City Bastion. A single sanctuary is designed to cover a radius of hundreds of blocks.

A sanctuary protects against reinforcing blocks, and man-made blocks will be automatically reinforced requiring the block to be broken 20 times before it will actually break.

Sanctuaries are fueled with ExP. 1 ExP bottle expands the area of the sanctuary by 10 blocks. Because fuel affects the area instead of the radius, it is always more efficient to expand your existing Sanctuary, instead of placing multiple overlapping ones.

When you enter or leave a Sanctuary, its name is displayed on the screen.

The Sanctuary plugin also implements Vault Bastions.

Stickers

Renaming a dye item in an anvil turns it into a sticker. When you right click a block, the sticker is added to the block. Clicking on the block will display any stickers on the block. If the block is a pressure plate or redstone ore, walking over it will display the sticker. Breaking the block will drop the block with all stickers on it, and placing the dropped block will relocate the stickers. To remove a sticker, you can click it with a Sticker Scraper, crafted using MeansOfProduction.

TutorTales

Civ+ has built-in tutorial books. In order to prevent players from becoming overwhelmed from getting several books when they join the server, the plugin instead gives the player a book when they do an action related to a specific mechanic. For example, if a player logs in after their chests have been raided, they'll be given a tutorial book about snitches.

Iterations

Civ

Civ, also known as it's working title Re:Civ that launched on the 31st of May, 2019 and ended 1st of August. Civ ran on a copy of the Devoted 2.0 SOTW map and aimed to relaunch the mechanics central to Devoted 2.0. The server was on 1.15, and was the first Civ server to update to the version.

Civ+ (2020)

This iteration was on 1.15 and lasted for 2 days, the 15th to the 17th of July, 2020 although it was kept running after this for an in group of people for several months.

Civ+ Blitz: Season 1

Intended as a beta server to precede a later Civ+ server, it was open for 9 days, between the 15th and 24th of Decemeber 2020.

Meteors fell upon the map twice a day, and each meteor had a star inside of it. The player who collected the most stars was awarded a $20 prize.

This iteration started Civ+'s streak of running on Minecraft 1.8.9 exclusively, and explicitly avoiding new Minecraft updates.

Civ+ (2022)

Civ+ Claims Map on April 4th, 2022

This iteration launched on the 1st of January 2022, originally launched in secret away from the Civ community.. It again mostly featured an in group of people, and was where many of the main big features and plugins of Civ+ was developed. On April 1st, 2023 the iteration went into maintenance mode as the ability of the admin team to develop the server decreased, and it ended some months afterwards when the server costs stopped being paid. The last backup of the server is from April, however it wasn't posted publicly.

Civ+ (2024)

Civ+'s current iteration launched on July 5th, 2024.. The server featured a beta which was a continuation of Civ+ (2022) with an expanded map and revamped plugins, and ended on July 2nd, 2024.