Talk:LOTR Mod Official Server/@comment-33763020-20181120094808

Just joined the official server yesterday. My first time ever on a server. Well, an interesting experience.. Never thought the Shire would look like a construction site with every house robbed from item and windows, with occasional crafting tables and beds in the green, but what can we do, tells a lot about some kids. The hourly server restart seemed a bother at first, but it's a matter of getting used to and some stretching every hour is not a bad thing :). The server lag is a pain though, when blocks take 3-5 seconds to break sometimes and moving even on boar-back can be a dangerous experience around crevasses.

A few things are not clear to me however:

1. Trader spawners: I mined in a Blue Mountain cave for HOURS and only for about a quarter of the time did I meet any dwarves, towards the second hour, only close to the exit. Not a single miner trader however! Is this a matter of spawner settings and can it happen that no traders spawn at all in a huge mine? In singleplayer sometimes up to three traders spawn in a small area, buying booze and making for a healthy economy. Now I am starting to get desperate on how to make money when there are no buyers of goods in places that hardly anyone visits. I first thought it may be that the more the mine is looted, the less dwarves and indeed a big part of the mine was looted/mined, but lack of patience of visitors was clear as progressively more ores were still there and I even found a chest with a mithril ingot in my first mine, next to two stack of iron ore and plenty of jewels, so it was a "half-looted" mine only. So I am wondering how the admins are setting the spawners. I would like to do some trade and right now it's a sad prospect if it makes no sense to brew up drinks to sell. Especially the dwarven smithies I am curious about, since they are crucial for highest-tier modifiers.

2. Closely related: trader "cool-down" timers. One of the travelling traders had salt among items he is buying, but there was a cool-down timer on it, meaning someone else had just bought from him. Clearly, trader cool-down is not player related therefore. My question is: does the SAME trader travel over areas or does every trader spawn mean that the timer starts from zero? Also, does the cool-down timer count down real-time, or only when any active players are nearby? Considering the only item worth selling to him was blanked-out, I could imagine that other players' active trading can result in a travelling trader being blanked-out indefinitely for valuable items. This basically makes them obsolete, which makes it even harder for newer players to build an economy, since those longer on the server could have appropriated anything of value.

3. Can regular (trading) structures be occupied by players, like taverns, farmhouses, etc.? I have my first base at the very edge of the Shire and the closest tavern cannot be accessed as it is banner protected. I thought server rules do not allow for trader-building occupation? Point 8 in the "Builds" rules seems to be a bit vague on what is "valuable", but since it's about hoarding, it seems to me it is a faux-pas. If this is the way the server works, it leads to a lot of friction obviously, as rightfully nobody should own half the Shire by simply having entered the server earlier.

4. Reading the kindergarten level chat stream, I get a sense that protecting my base from frustrated kids will be crucial, so I did place a player-specific banner. My question is on what is protected: my farmhand? The crops my farmhand puts in the chest? The crops chest itself cannot be opened either? What about water/lava/gravel dropped from above on my terrain, does it do damage? Grievers could easily just drop lava-streams, it seems to me. What about exploding termites, can these still demolish protected buildings, based on the wiki info?

5. Last but not least: on single-player I turn off weather. There was a storm raging yesterday in the Blue Mountains and the thunderclaps were extremely loud and constant. Setting the weather sound volume or environment sounds did not make a difference. Is this server-side, or does the setting change require to disconnect first and reconnect again to activate these?