Landgrab

Landgrab is a game mode that starts you confined to a single chunk. Everything outside it is walled off behind an electric haze. Sell what you gather through a phone in your inventory, and buy your way outward one chunk at a time.

It is off by default. Tick Landgrab on the Game tab when you create a world, and that world plays by these rules. Every other world is untouched.

Your chunk

You start owning the chunk you spawn in and nothing else. You cannot walk, build or mine into land you do not own, and touching the boundary hurts and throws you back into your own ground.

Locked chunks still load, so mobs walk about in them and you can make out the first block or so. Past that the haze hides everything.

The phone

A button beside the recipe book in your inventory opens a phone, and it has three apps.

Map shows the chunks around you. The ones you own are green, the ones you can buy are gold and priced. Only land touching your own is for sale, so your territory grows as one connected shape. Chunks get dearer the more you own.

Trade is where you sell. Drag stacks onto the counter, see the total, then sell the lot or take it back. Nothing is committed until you press Sell, and anything left on the counter comes back to you.

Messages keeps what has happened, newest first, with unread ones marked.

Money

Every item in the game has a price, and none of them are hand written. When a world loads, Landgrab reads its recipes and works out what things are worth. Anything craftable is priced at the cheapest way of making it, so crafting never turns a profit, and nothing that multiplies when processed pays more than it came from. Raw materials that no recipe reaches carry a set price, and whatever is left is read off the item itself. A data pack that changes crafting changes the prices with it.

Prices go down to a quarter of a coin, so even cheap things are worth selling. A part used tool is worth the part of it that is left, and enchantments add to the price, weighted by how rare the game makes them. Hovering any stack anywhere shows what the phone would pay.

Advancements pay out as well, graded by the game's own difficulty rating, which matters early on when one chunk gives you very little to sell.

The Nether and the End

Each holds its own separate territory, bought separately. The chunk you first arrive in is free. A portal that would drop you on land you do not own will not fire, and the phone tells you which chunk it would have used.

On a server

Land and money belong to the world rather than to each player, so everyone spends from the same balance and walks the same borders.

Requirements

Install it on both the client and the server.

Creative and spectator ignore all of it, so you can fly out and look at a world you are building or repairing.

Commands

Source code and issue tracker: https://github.com/oliver-richman/landgrab