Rooms and server economies

TARDIS has the potential to disturb the fragile balance of a server’s economy, by allowing the cheap growing of rooms which can potentially be harvested for their blocks.

TARDIS has a configuration option — rooms_require_blocks — that enables server owners to balance the cost of a room against their server economies. When set to true, it only allows a room to be grown if the player has collected and condensed the blocks needed to grow it.

The following table illustrates the actual cost of the default TARDIS room based on the lookup tables currently used to convert blocks to Artron Energy if you were to put them in the TARDIS energy condenser chest.

Room	Actual cost to grow	Default cost in config
Antigravity	15379	625
Arboretum	8680	325
Baker	7392	350
Bedroom	8915	475
Empty	8403	250
Farm	7435	350
Gravity	17192	625
Greenhouse	7790	450
Harmony	8963	450
Kitchen	8562	450
Lazarus	8537	750
Library	12318	550
Mushroom	5147	350
Passage	4979	200
Pool	8796	450
Renderer	16572	550
Stable	8215	350
Trenzalore	9969	550
Vault	8557	350
Village	6641	550
Wood	3758	350
Workshop	11508	400
Zero	6506	650

A choice

Server admins can either adjust, the config values for room costs, based on the table above (or by using the /tardisroom blocks save command to generate per room text files that list the required blocks and the actual room cost — good if you have custom rooms). This makes things better, but Artron Energy can still be gained for free using a recharge beacon.

A better choice

On SURVIVAL servers, the better choice is to use the rooms_require_blocks: true option. Rather than using just the Artron Energy cost, this makes sure that players have gathered the resources they need first. This can be balanced with the rooms_condenser_percent option. Setting this to less than 100% means that players need only gather a portion of the required blocks, and the rest can be made up of Artron Energy. There is plenty of flexibility to get the balance just right :)