Idea: Energy -> Money

Plugins Plugin Discussion
1

I’ve been having the idea to write a mod that adds a block which you can pipe energy into to generate money.
I plan on making this mod available for everyone and free to use (OpenSource too).

With this thread I’d like to talk about the idea, explain my vision and hear your feedback and suggestions, so the mod/plugin can become useful to the community.

So the idea is simple. The mod adds a block that accepts energy. And that energy gets converted into money that the owner receives.
To balance it I was thinking about using that formular:
money = basevalue * (log_base(energy) + 1)
Where

  • energy is the amount of energy received over the last second (last 20 server ticks to be technically correct) in all blocks owned by the user
  • basevalue is a factor that allows you to adjust how much 1 energy per second is worth
  • base is the logarithmic base. Meaning if that value is 10 you need to provide 10 times as much energy to get basevalue amount of money more

A crude example with basevalue = 0.10 and base = 10 would result in this table (values are per second)

Energy Money
0 0,00
1 0.10
10 0.20
100 0.30
1,000 0.40
1,000,000 0.70
1,000,000,000 1.00

I think that provides a solid mathematical base to prevent people going utterly nuts, just to earn more money.
And having 2 values you can finetune the curve to your liking.
(If someone has an alternative curve that would be suitable in that kind situation, let me know. I would be happy to have more than just one curve. But keep in mind that it needs to be adjustable with at least two variables like in my example)

The idea behind accumilating all energy per player instead of a per block basis is to prevent players from making multiple of these blocks and splitting their energy supply, which could effectively evade the log curve. (2 log(x) >> log(2x))

Additionally I think it’s pretty pointless to rate limit that block, as the players would need thousands of these blocks at a certain point if it was limited and that’s just pointless.

That is the what part of this idea.
Now comes the why part.

I came up with the idea when I was thinking about how I could get past the problem that players can just farm items to absurd amounts and if the players were to earn their money from selling items, they could easily earn obscene amounts of fortune that would just break the economic system. I was then thinking that I could apply a correction curve on the money they get, based on how much they sold already. But that runs into the issue that they could farm several different items and still get a lot more that way. Also to many that could seem very unfair and intransparent and would be pretty hard to communicate to the players.
I liked the idea of the correction curve, so I thought about only having one item to be sellable, but that would favor some players and have a whole host of different issues. Then it struck me. Most farms require energy. So to farm stuff, you need energy. And I could just skip the farming step and directly accept energy. Applying the correction curve there would certainly work and if the block GUI showed transparently how much you earn, it would be a lot easier to understand.

So in short it’s my solution to how to let players earn money on a modded server where auto farms are allowed.

I’d be really interested in your opinions about that, the usefulness of it, suggestions on how to improve the concept, and your feedback in general.

And I already started working on it. Progress can be seen here: https://github.com/AuraDevelopmentTeam/PowerMoney

You're good with textures?

Btw, I could need a guy that makes a handul of textures for it, as I absolutely suck at making textures. Different textures for bottom and top and maybe even connected textures would be incredible! Maybe even a custom model. But if you decide to help, a single 16x16 texture, that looks good, is all I really need at this point.
I made a texture already and that’s as good as I’ll get it:
screenshot
So if you feel like helping me texture that bad boy, hit me up. Or heck, just make a PR on GitHub: https://github.com/AuraDevelopmentTeam/PowerMoney
You’ll naturally be added to the contributors

2 Likes
2

Yes, this is good.

The importing of energy for a constant rate is simple and should work good. It’ll attract players toward a economic goal with energy while providing another source of income. Although, below are some features I have thought about.

Allow exporting of imported energy at a dynamic rate.

Energy would need a Default Initial Price. The Default Initial Price would be the price per energy unit, as you’ve laid out.

Importing 100 energy units/sec gets me 0.30 money.
Exporting 100 energy units/sec costs me 0.30 money.

There are many ways to make those two scale together and work in a relationship but each relationship has it’s own pros and cons.

One way would be tracking import rates, for every x% on imports over current exports. The lower the import rate goes. You would also apply this for exports but in reverse. This allows for many economic strategic games.

So, if imports are importing 1% more than exports, import price would fall for whatever each percentage point is worth in energy units. export rate vs import rates and balance both real-time.

The same would go for exports. If exports are 1% above import rates, export price would increase for whatever each percentage point is worth in energy units.

Imports vs exports rates could be checked every x amount of time. This scales off active import/exports that are within x set amount of time. Then once check percentages/changes to rates take affect then updated to the player, x being 60 seconds as an example.

This really forces the server to work together like in a socialist economy to achieve better conditions.

Another Approach

Each player can set their own export/import rates and people can export and import from whomever they choose. No dynamics required and no Default Initial Price, the exporter/importer would deal with that.

This method would be need a tax to control each listed exporter. The ideal method would be to track their income and tax bracket that income into set percentages.

Income was 1,000 in the last 24 hours you would be charged 5% tax on that 24h income. Then the 24h session restarts.

0-1,000 / 5% / 24h
1,001-2,000 / 7% / 24h

Although, this should really be another plugin and tracks all income across all accounts.

In essence, these two approaches are two different economic ideologies, one is socialist/communist and one is free and competitive.

Also went in-depth on dynamic scaling with Carrotshop.

I would love to help you on this.

3

I do like your extension of the idea. But for now selling energy at constant rate is all I’m striving for.

4

Well, I’m getting close to releasing the first beta version!

Will be posting this on Ore and Curseforge (so it can be easily included in modpacks).

5

And here we go: