Setup: Gens

A gens server is a tycoon game. Each player gets their own plot, places generators on it, sells what the generators make, buys better ones and upgrades them tier by tier. When they reach the top tier they can prestige: start the ladder again with lasting bonuses. Next to the idle side there is a hands-on side: a farm, a mine and a lake that pay XP, money and Essence, the second currency.

We built this setup on what the biggest gens servers do, and wrote our own gens plugin for it, because the good gens plugins elsewhere are paid. Like all our setup plugins it only runs on our network. See Premade setups.

Plots are always safe: there are no raids, and players cannot hurt each other anywhere in the plot world.

The first 15 minutes of a player

1. Join. New players arrive at the spawn plaza of the plot world.
2. /start. They get their own 48 x 48 plot with a border, and a starter pack: 5 tier 1 generators, a sell wand, a hoe, a pickaxe and a fishing rod. Players start with $100.
3. Place generators on their plot. A generator makes one drop every 5 seconds and keeps up to 100 drops; a full one stops until it is sold. A floating item and a count show above it.
4. Sell. Right-click a generator to sell what it holds. Right-click any generator with the sell wand to sell the whole plot at once. /gsell does the same.
5. Buy and upgrade. /genshop sells generators (click for 1, right-click for 5, shift-click for 10, shift-right-click for as many as you can afford) and extra slots. Players who see the menus as Panes click to buy 1 and type /genshop buy <tier> <amount> (or max) for more. Sneak and right-click a generator, or look at it and pick Upgrades in /gens, to see its upgrade: the menu shows the price and what it earns before you pay.
6. Stack. Right-click a generator with another of the same tier to put up to 8 on one block. Each still uses a slot.
7. The farm. /farm goes to the farm. Break grown crops for XP, money and a chance of Essence.
8. First prestige after about half an hour of play.

Players can always open /gens, the main menu, with a "How to play" checklist.

Generators

There are 24 tiers, from wheat to dragon egg. Each tier costs twice as much as the one before and earns 1.6 times as much, so early upgrades come quickly and late ones are a goal.

Upgrading a generator to the next tier costs 0.8 times the price of a new one of that tier. Players start with 10 generator slots, get 2 more at every prestige, and can buy up to 10 extra slots with money ($1,000 for the first, each one double the last).

Offline earnings: a player who comes back gets 20% of their normal income for the time away, up to 24 hours. Generators only run while their owner is online, which keeps the server fast.

Prestige

/prestige shows a checklist:

• every slot holds a generator of the player's highest tier (tier 8 at first),
• farm or mine level 5 (it goes up by 5 each prestige, up to 40),
• money: 5 times the price of one generator of the next tier ($32,000 the first time).

Prestiging resets money, generators and bought slots. That includes generator items the player still holds: items handed to them before the prestige stop working, wherever they are (their inventory, /collect, a chest, or a friend they gave them to), so nobody can stock up on spare generators and place them straight after. Each generator item says so on it. Essence, tools, activity levels and titles stay.

Two things a prestige does not reset: money a player sent to someone else with /pay before prestiging, and generators a friend has already placed on their own plot. Both can come back afterwards. The gain is small (a friend can only place tiers they have reached, and every move is in the logs), so this setup does not block it; tell your staff to look at big gifts just before a prestige if it becomes a problem. Players who buy generator items (tier 12 and below) from someone else should place them soon: if the player those items were first handed to prestiges first, unplaced items stop working. In return: +25% to everything they sell, for good; 2 more slots; 2 more tiers (tier 10 after the first prestige); a prestige crate key; and a title. Plots grow at prestige 3, 6 and 9 (to 64, 80 and 96 blocks). A copy of the player's progress is saved before every prestige.

Farm, mine and lake

The farm, mine and lake are in the hub around spawn. Each crop or ore regrows for each player on their own after 20 seconds, so players never fight over a field. Leaving and joining again does not make anything regrow sooner.

Each activity has levels 1 to 40, and every level adds half a percent to everything a player sells.

Essence is earned only by playing (never bought). /tools spends it on:

• Sell wands: x1.5 (1,500 Essence), x2.5 (15,000) and x4 (150,000) when selling with the wand.
• Auto-collector (5,000, from prestige 1): sells every generator once a minute.
• Enchants for the hoe, pickaxe and rod: Doubler (2% per level to double a harvest), Essence finder (+1% Essence chance per level), and an area enchant (a plus shape at level 5, 3 x 3 at level 10). Each level costs 100 Essence times the level.
• Plot expansion: 16 more blocks of side for 10,000 Essence (twice).

Plots

/plot opens the plot menu. Commands:

• /plot home, /plot visit <player>
• /plot trust <player> and untrust: friends who can build (only the owner touches generators)
• /plot visitors on|off, /plot deny <player> and allow, /plot kick <player>
• /plot expand, /plot info

Owners and trusted friends can build anything on a plot. Everyone else cannot build, break, pour or scoop up water or lava, open chests and other containers, use doors, buttons, levers and signs, or touch item frames, paintings, armour stands, carts, boats and animals there. The hub around spawn belongs to staff: players can only open its doors and gates. Explosions, fire, liquids and pistons never cross a plot's edge or harm generators, and nobody can break someone else's generator.

When an owner turns visitors off or denies a player, that player cannot teleport, walk or fly onto the plot; a player already on it is sent back to spawn.

Events and seasons

The setup comes with these timed events (you can change them on the settings page):

The top three earners each week win event crate keys. Seasons only end when you end one or set a length (/shevents season end). A backup is always saved first. At a season's end, money, generators, prestige, slots, Essence, tools and levels reset; titles stay, and everyone who played gets a legacy bonus of +5% sell value per season (up to +25%).

Crates

Three crates, opened with keys earned by playing: the daily crate (votes and the daily reward), the event crate (weekly leaderboards and events) and the prestige crate (one key each prestige, also after a season or a staff reset). The prestige key counts toward the crates' daily key limit (5 a day unless you change it), so a player who already got 5 keys that day does not get it. Prizes are money, Essence and generators up to tier 6. Keys are never sold for real money and the odds are always shown.

Leaderboards and the sidebar

/top and hologram boards show gens income, prestige, best generator and farm, mine and lake levels, for the week, the season and all time, in game only. The sidebar shows money, income per second, Essence, prestige, slots and the running event. Players can turn the sidebar, floating counts, sounds and messages off in /gens settings.

Settings

Everything below is on the setup's settings page. Your AI can change the settings marked "AI"; the ones marked "AI asks" need your OK first (unless you changed that).

Money, the shop, the auction house, daily and vote rewards, crates, events and seasons have their own settings on the same page (see Money and trading, Crates and Events and seasons). This setup starts players with $100.

The files behind the settings are plugins/sh-gens/config.yml, tiers.yml and activities.yml. A tier table that breaks a rule (prices must rise tier by tier, each tier needs its own block, a block must be solid and must not fall or be a carved pumpkin, and no generator may pay for itself in under 10 seconds) is not used: the last good table stays and the console says why. /shgens check checks everything.

Owner commands

Fair play and safety

• No pay-to-win and no gambling: slots, the auto-collector, wands and keys are earned only. Nothing in this setup can be bought with real money. Cash prizes for in-game ranks are not supported; they are risky with a young audience.
• No copies: every generator item carries a batch number. Placing more generators from a batch than were handed out is refused, and staff are told. Generator items from an old season, or from before the prestige of the player they were handed to, no longer place, and staff are told (at most once a minute per player). The list of handed-out batches is cleared for a player at each of their prestiges and for everyone at each season's end, so it never grows without end.
• Backups: a copy of a player's progress is saved before every prestige and staff reset, in plugins/sh-gens/backups. The newest 10 copies of each player are kept; older ones are removed.
• Crash safe: buys, upgrades, slots, prestige and pick-ups are saved at once, and everything else within 5 seconds. A sale made again after a crash is not paid twice.
• No lag: drops are counted, not dropped on the ground; generators only run while their owner is online; a full generator stops.
• Macros: harvesting faster than 20 crops or ores a second does not count, and staff get a plain flag. Nobody is banned automatically.
• Anti-cheat: Grim, set to alert staff only. It never kicks or bans.
• Generators above tier 12 stay with the player who bought them; they cannot be traded or sold on the auction house.
• Players are stored by their Minecraft ID only; no names, chat or addresses are kept by the gens plugin.

For add-on makers

Our gens plugin has its own add-on kit (version 1.0.0), on top of the shared add-on kit. Add depend: [sh-core, sh-api, sh-gens] to your plugin.

• Action: give_generator with tier (1 to 12) and amount (1 to 16), for any reward file.
• Service: GensService.get(): income per second, slots (addSlots), prestige, tier cap, activity levels and XP (addXp), enchant levels, and plots (plots().plotOf(player), ownerAt(location), canBuild(player, location)).
• Registries: add or replace a generator tier (checked with the same rules as the file), add a named sell multiplier shown in every sale summary, add an activity with its own levels, add a tool enchant sold in /tools, and add a prestige reward.
• Events before a change (cancel or change them): GeneratorPlaceEvent, GeneratorDropEvent (count and value of a batch of drops), GeneratorUpgradeEvent, GenSellEvent (named multipliers), PrestigeEvent, ActivityHarvestEvent (XP, money and Essence).
• Events after a change: GeneratorPlacedEvent, GeneratorUpgradedEvent, PrestigedEvent, OfflineEarningsGrantedEvent, SeasonEndedEvent.
• Booster slots for your own timed events: sell, gens_drops, gens_speed, gens_tier, gens_mixed.

Everything an add-on registers is removed when it is turned off. Multipliers are capped at 10 each and 50 in total.

Free or paid

TBD, and the price in credits.