Spawn Layout, Ideas & Suggestions

[MawringFox]

There is already an emergency exit leading out of the city. Right below the CC/Spawn. gonna post pictures later. At college atm.

EDIT:




other than that. you can just walk onto the wall (access over towers) and jump down.

[Chittebengo]

Just inspected the jail and am thinking we could do something a little better. A room with a view of the void on the underside of the belly would do nicely. Can put it in the OP area easily.

[MawringFox]

Well. normal people are not meant to be in the jail. only OPs and prisoners.

[Pink_Luigi]

[Chittebengo]

Hm, good point. I was thinking about the prev jail. It was at least kind of interesting, standing over the lava lake and viewable from the outside.

[Pink_Luigi]

[MawringFox]

[griffin]

Going by what I saw on Mawr's mapping tool.
Ideally the central spawn should have bridges to all four corners of the world, not just one. Otherwise it'd be a drag for most people to walk back the length of the spawn and then some if they've decided to build behind it.
As for the bridges themselves I fancy more the hanging (arcing) drawbridges then magically stiff straight as a plank ones currently used.

[Pink_Luigi]

[griffin]

1: Seriously, do something about this forum. I have lost my post once, and nearly lost it the second time because it keeps logging me out when I post, and when I do log it, it doesn't post what I originally tried redirecting to the frontpage instead.
2: God damn it, I had a huge post written up and then for whatever reason pressed CTRL+R. Damn it all to hell D:
Maybe I'll express those thoughts in a more organized, condensed way now.

Looked at the map on Mawr's latest render.

A second bridge was added, good. The chains are an interesting new addition which I believe offers us a theme choice: "levitating due to magic/maglev forces" or "hangs on chains attached to anchor points on the ground".
The island is hovering above the abyss. By what forces? It's not clear. What's with the ring around the base? Magnetic levitation? Then what keeps the ring itself floating? Magic? That's mixing themes right there

Let's look at this from another perspective. What is the naturally occurring block for which "hovering in the air" is as valid placement for a map generator? Glow stone. And it's grouped in clusters; which take the shape of crystals. The island could float on either several glowstone crystal "engines" or one big glowstone crystal "bed" - with chains attaching it to the mainland being leashes that prevent it from drifting and eventually crashing into the side of the crate.
The ring around the base would then have to go, or be converted to an observation area/shrine-to-the-gods of the abyss.
That's the magic theme.

The mechanical theme would have the island hang on the chains anchored at the mainland, mandating that the island, like all heavy things, would sag below the level of the ground by 10-20 blocks due to it's weight and gravity. No more stiff bridges and chains.
The ring around the base, again, could either go or stay and if stay, become anchored to the island itself. Same purpose - observation area/shrine/suicide booth.
Mainland anchor points/guard houses would have to be moved deeper into the mainland and made bulkier; otherwise they wouldn't have been able to hold the weight. Some area beneath anchor points converted to cobble/whatever to serve as the 'concrete anchor base'.

--
Next thing is the design of the island itself.

I strongly believe the structures build there should first and foremost be geared towards utility first, aesthetics second. That means No grinders save for the pork chop, and only because food is a necessary requirement. Grinders themselves better be moved to a separate area and made to accommodate both a larger demand and variety, as well as concurrent use by several players at once.
What the island needs, IMO, is the following:
A bank: one chest per person. place to store your things either as a resupply stash after death, or a quick dump of your inv. seeing as how it's both the primary spawn and a central transportation station, it would see a lot of traffic and would be the easiest-to-reach place, much easier then your own home.
A pub/diner: technically, a place to get food. has pork chop generators working, serving food directly to several tables which people can just pick up and go.
A community center: place for a bulletin board. basically a motherload of signs - and i mean it when i say a motherload. separated into sections:
* help on the server,
* help on console commands,
* news/notifications from admins,
* "looking for help on a project" for recruiting people for large scale projects with a similar board constructed by each of the project's architect on-site, for offline communication and effort coordination
* "need resources plz" for requesting things others might share.
* Q&A
* general randomness, akin to what was going on on the roof of the Ark on the old map
Share Center: An area for people to dump the stuff they don't need or have too much of.
The gate assembly: the nether gate is the most prominent feature of the island and the reason why it exists. there should be facilities dedicated to it's "upkeep"
Everything else should be dedicated to parks and various beautitication stuffs.

--
Now the purpose for the island's existence.

Currently there is none. From a roleplay perspective, what was the reason for expelling an extraordinary amount of effort to erect the thing in the first place, and why keep maintaining it right now? Surely not for the meager pub and a get-together place that's built on top of it, which could might as well have been built 200 miles away and on solid mainland.
That purpose might be an object, or a place - or both. The current theme is that this object is the Alpha Nether gate, discovery of which by the people on the land made distant travel possible. The gate should be the primary, prominent feature of the island and the only reason for it's existence despite the expenses required. Everything else there are just utility buildings.

This theme can blend nicely with the location.
Nether gates are like dark magic voodoo stuff, portals to hell and all that. Nobody knows how they work or where they came from. One day they just appeared. And as they did, the land warped around them creating chasms and craters in their wake, terminator orb warp-from-the-future style. Many gates appeared throughout the land, but none of them altered the lansdcape as much as the master gate did. The blast of magic was so strong that not only did it leave massive cavern centered around the gate but even altered space time itself leaving a portal to absolute void at the bottom. Many a time local villagers thew a cow or a chicken down there, but never did they hear a splat.
Anyway. Nether portals create fields around them that push things away, thus creating a spherical empty space around them. The importance of the gate determines the force of that field and thus, the size of the sphere. If that theme is to be applied to all surface nether gates, it could perhaps look cool. For ocean based gates, water blocks are to be removed to form said sphere under the gate.

Best place for the alpha gate would be under the island, a bit above bedrock level. It is best if it was shaped more sophisticated then your average door frame. Thinking Oblivion gates here.
Position would explain why the void under the island exists and why it hasn't been covered yet as an obvious threat to the population, and justify the existence of the island itself and the cavern it floats above in the first place. Also the late ring around the base of the island, the newly refurbished observation area, would have something to observe from.