Make village waystones shatter instead of dropping as items

[BlayTheNinth]

The plan is have generated village waystones no longer drop as items when broken. Instead they will "shatter into pieces", leaving you only a cracked stone brick and some warp dust.

• Villages and village waystones are so easy to find that it's become the main means of farming waystones
• This counteracts the removal of xp costs for teleportation, shifting the balance™️ to acquisition costs since people will actually have to start crafting waystones (or run into the harder to find wild ones, if enabled).
• The generatedWaystonesUnbreakable config option will be removed
• There will likely be two new options villageWaystonesShatterOnBreak and wildWaystonesShatterOnBreak to control this behaviour

[chocolatechipcats]

Thought: This would make it difficult to relocate badly-placed village waystones, which I've had to done after one spawned halfway up an inaccessible hilltop.

My thought around this would be a 'waystone pickup' tool, similar to the various chest movers that increase slowness/exhaustion and can't be switched away until the player puts it down. This would allow relocation but make it less feasible to outright steal them. Extra points if it could also move an activated waystone.

I can put this in a separate issue if you'd prefer. Thank you :)

[BlayTheNinth]

Most likely silk touch will allow breaking the village waystone without shattering it. Maybe there will be another option that makes village waystones un-renameable (default: on) to encourage crafting your own instead of just running through villages with a silk touch pickaxe.

[chocolatechipcats]

If that is done, perhaps also allow the user to 'set' the name of a custom waystone. I moved my home waypoint a few times and it got a bit tiring to keep naming it.

[BlayTheNinth]

Some more ideas:

• Some form of shimmer/protective visual effect while breaking village waystones to indicate the difference to a regular waystone
• Instead of dropping a cracked stone brick and some warp dust, they could drop a Fractured Warp Stone, a Shattered Waystone block (possibly a single space block that is just the head of the waystone leaning on its side), and some warp dust.
• The Fractured Warp Stone and Shattered Waystone would be attuned to each other, allowing the player to teleport only to wherever the Shattered Waystone is placed
• The Fractured Warp Stone / Shattered Waystone would get a random colored name assigned similar to warp plates, so you could in theory set up multiple of them and carry multiple fractured warp stones
• The Fractured Warp Stone can not be repaired, and its Shattered Waystone counterpart becomes useless once the Fractured Warp Stone breaks
• It would essentially be an early game way of teleporting without the flexibility and comfort that proper crafted waystones provide
• In return, silk-touching would not prevent the warp stones from shattering anymore. Relocating a village waystone would require crafting a fresh one.

[chocolatechipcats]

Do you have any thoughts on having shattered waystones spawn in the abandoned cobweb villages? It would likely be just for decoration since there's no associated warp-stone.

I think it might also make sense to have shattered waystones work like portstones, where you can teleport away but not back. This would make the abandoned village thing a touch less useless.

[Jack-McKalling]

The fractured/shattered idea sounds interesting, but also quite unintuitive from the existing waystones. If you break a custom waystone, it just drops it, and one might assume that silk touch could affect the state of the dropped item. But the generated ones dropping a different block altogether, is then something you need to teach players beforehand, or give them a clear indication so they don't accidentally do something irreversible. Some people even only break it just to see what kind of thing it is, for the purpose of literally placing it back right after.

I like the idea of some kind of render overlay that would show when you attempt to break a village waystone, but then again, I think it would be better to just make them look different from the start. A slightly different shape still recognizable as some form of waystone, such as a larger capstone, with a very different symbol pattern as the activation identifier. Maybe instead of the beautifully ornamented pattern just a simplified single large symbol, maybe resembling a village house or something representing the village. Then, if it already looks like a slightly different block, it'll make more sense if it then drops other stuff.

[voidsong-dragonfly]

Some config to ensure the player can never relocate a waystone would be a must for me. At one point, I was using the configs to make generated waystones unbreakable & removing the recipes for normal waystones to make point-to-point fast travel be something the player needs to think about, not something they can easily accomplish.

It encouraged questions like "do I settle near a village for the waystone, even if I might cause raids or zombie attacks?" With the new un-renamable waystones, it also encourages stuff like "Do I keep track of which - not named by me, so hard to decipher - village my last exploration in a direction was? (using a written book or such)"

If village waystones can still be used in any capacity after being broken, it allows the player to move the teleport points.

Outside of that, I agree that changing the model(s) of Village waystones would be a good way to distinguish them - maybe have a fancy engraving a la chiseled stones (the wither on red standstone, etc)? I also quite like the idea of having a shimmer across the waystone come up as you try to break it, signifying you shouldn't break it.

[Adirelle]

IMO all waystones (wild, village and player-created) should follow the same behavior, otherwise this would be counter-intuitive.

Maybe a configuration option with several options could be a good thing, to allow server admins to configure the mod to their liking:

• basic (defautl): waystones drop to bits unless using a diamond+ pickaxe (there is obsidian in its recipe, after all),
• silk touch: waystones drop to bits unless using a diamond+ pickaxe with silk touch,
• not removable: waystones always drop to bits.