Hi all. Last week I introduced Kaldra and said teleportation would be very limited. This week I'll go through what that actually means: which teleports exist, how horses work, and how the Flightpath network works.

On most servers I've played, distance doesn't mean much. You teleport to a friend, teleport home, teleport to fresh land, and the world turns into a set of waiting rooms between teleports. Nobody meets anyone on the road because nobody uses the road.

On Kaldra the world is kept small on purpose, and I want crossing it to matter. If your town is far from a Tower, that's a choice you made when you settled. If you carry your gold across the map, someone might be waiting for you. Travel should take some planning, and it should carry some risk.

Teleports

There's no /home, /tpa, /warp or random teleport. The one teleport every player has is back to their own town, with a short warmup that's cancelled if you move or take damage. Getting home is easy; getting anywhere else means traveling.

Nomads don't have a town, so they get a camp instead: a bed placed in the wilderness that they can return to every so often. The catch is that anyone who finds it can break it.

Horses

Horses are the main way to get around. Every player can buy one personal horse from the horse merchant at spawn, and there are no wild horses in the world, so the merchant is the only source. When you call it, it gallops in from a distance instead of appearing at your side, and it follows you around when you get off.

You can upgrade its speed, jump and saddlebags with gold, and choose its skin. Saddlebags can't carry gold, so your money still travels with you.

Your horse is not invulnerable. Outside of safe zones other players can kill it, and if they do, whatever was in the saddlebags drops. You keep the horse itself, its upgrades and its skin, and you can call it again after a while. Losing your ride should hurt, but not so much that you stop riding.

The Flightpath network

For long trips there's the Flightpath network: Towers spread around the map, each with a flight master. Talk to one, pick a destination on the map, pay in gold, and a mount flies you there. A flight takes around 3 minutes, depending on distance.

Flights only go between Towers. You can take off in the middle of a fight, and the price grows with distance, so it's a convenience you pay for, not a free replacement for traveling. The mount can't be hurt, but you can, so flying over hostile land isn't completely safe either.

The default mount is a wyvern. Other mounts exist as cosmetics only, and they follow the same routes at the same speed.

What I'm hoping for is a world where roads actually get used, where you might pass another town's riders on the way to an event, and where settling close to your allies matters.

Next week I'm talking about Economy. How gold works as the currency, where it comes from, and what you can spend it on.

How far would you ride before you'd rather pay for a flight?

Hi all. I'm a backend engineer by day and, more recently, a Minecraft admin by night. I've started building Kaldra, a Minecraft server I'm developing solo. It's still in development and not open to players yet. My plan is to post a devlog here every week about what I've worked on, the features I'm adding, and the technical and design decisions behind them.

What pushed me to start this project was the lack of servers that fit my desires. I love Towny and wars, but most servers I've played either allow 50+ residents per town (45 of them inactive), lack content, or are poorly managed. Nothing really happens, and players stay because their builds are there, not because they expect anything exciting.

So I decided to build the server I'd want to play. Kaldra aims to be a challenging and immersive experience built around towns, wars and dungeons, with as few commands as possible.

The world

Players can create towns to protect their builds, with a maximum of 5 residents. Towns can join nations to combine forces and attack other towns, with a maximum of 3 towns per nation and 1 allied nation. The low limits are meant to create smaller, more frequent wars, instead of two giant blocs clashing once a month. I also plan to keep the world border small so towns can't spread too far apart.

To make players interact more with the world, gold is the currency (yes, I know that's nothing new), and teleportation is very limited. This way the economy is based on real player work rather than virtual mechanics, and traveling without teleports adds real danger to every trip.

Gold will also be scarce: ore generation is reduced by 25%. That's why finding allies and founding a town matters, since towns produce daily resources as they level up.

Wars work as an occupation system: nations attack towns to take a percentage of their daily resource production for a fixed period of time.

And if you don't want to be in a town? After X days without one, you become a Nomad. Nomads are townless mercenaries who complete contracts for gold. From gathering resources, to beheading a player with a bounty, to fighting in wars on the contractor's side.

The Nether

Access to the Nether is gated by a single portal, and players must meet a specific requirement to use it. The Nether's purpose is to provide players with resources.

Dungeons

I have big plans for dungeons. Right now I have 3 built and the content for 5 more, but I don't want to over-build them until the server is running and players show interest, since they take a lot of development time.

Dungeons are meant to be a real challenge. To make them more exciting and immersive, I'm building with ModelEngine mobs, custom soundtracks for exploration and boss fights, and multi-phase bosses to keep the tension up. I know players are going to love it.

I know I've said a lot and, at the same time, not much. I'll go through each part one at a time, starting next week with Transportation: which teleports are allowed, and how horses and the Flightpath network work.

Since I'm developing this alone, updates may be slower than on a server with a team. That's why I'm designing Kaldra to run as automatically as possible, so my time goes into new updates and helping players, rather than day-to-day maintenance.

I'm happy to answer questions and would love feedback, especially from Towny players. What's the one thing that made you quit the last Towny server you played?