Factions Tutorial

Hey Minetimers! I got this idea when I noticed @Gineley was having some trouble understanding factions. He got some help, but for future players who are new, I decided to make a full tutorial about all the things you can do and everything that follows up from there. Enjoy.

Welcome to factions! The place where you can PvP, mine, fight, build, and just roam freely. But in order to survive, you need to join or build a faction. So, you can sit there AFK staring into space, or you can get started and have some fun! In this tutorial, I will show you how to build a faction from the ground up. Begin by getting to know the command /F. This is your base command for managing your faction. It is an alias for "faction", however, unlike most alias commands, /Faction does not actually work. We're going to create a faction now with /F Create <FactionName>. Go out into the wild and find a good spot. People can raid your faction even if you protect it, so choose one of three options that are the most reliable. Before we explain that though, let's look at security.

Protection
Once you've built your base, you can help prevent it being raided or griefed by using /F Claim. If you have a sufficient amount of power (30-50), claim as you please. If you have any less, be wary of what you do. You will run out of claims eventually as they are limited depending on your power. You or your faction total must have at least 10 power to claim anything. To get more power and more claims, upgrade it by recruiting members that have and can keep up a power of 10. If that person is having trouble, just make sure they have at least zero. Anything negative up to -10 can actually decrease power in the faction. The maxpower is not limited at all. If you have one person in your faction (you), it will be ten. For two people, 20. For 100 people, 1,000. And so on. Each player that becomes a member brings the oppourtunity to have more power as long as most of the players have theirs above zero. You can view your power with /F Power and your faction total with /F Who. This also shows your faction description and some other things, but we'll get to that later. In the spot that says "Land/Power/Maxpower" is exactly how it sounds (x/y/z). "x" is the number of land claims you have made, "y" is your power, and "z" is the maxpower. Why is this so important and what does it have to do with protection? Well, as I said before, the more power you have, the more land you can conquer. Not only that, but people can also overclaim their base if they have more power or claims than you. You can prevent this by getting as much power as you can so they won't be able to overclaim you and get into the land that is protected. Also make sure you use your claims wisely. One claim covers 1 chunk or 16x16x256 blocks. That may seem like a lot; and in a way it is, but most of the 256 portion is from the ground to the air. Apart from that, it is a 16x16 square and everything contained in there from the ground up. Lastly, be wary of who you invite. Players can easily raid your faction, leave, kill and enemy you. The /F Enemy feature means you must enemy a faction to be able to attack them in your own territory.

Let's look at some types of bases you can build:

Skybasing
1. Pillar up, set your home temporarily on a platform in the sky located around y250 and cover up your tracks and other structures nearby in the air. This is a sky base. If someone is on render distance far, they can see your base, but it is hard to get up to. Still, especially if you are not online to guard it, they can still get up. Try to further prevent this by covering your base with water or obsidian or even both. Use gutters to prevent the water from making a swim up path to get to your base. If they try to get in or blow up chests/valuables via a TNT cannon, it will not blow up as both obsidian and water stop TNT explosions. However, if they can overclaim it, the only solution is to upgrade your power. Here is an example of a good skybase. It can be as big as you want and you can do as many layers of this as you want:


Underground Base
This is your traditional secret hidden super-high tech whatever you want to call it underground home. The best level to build your single floor is around y6 or y7; putting you just above the highest bedrock (y5). Seal up any holes you dug to get there. To make it even less detectable, seal the top off with dirt or grass and seal the rest of the tunnel and even the ores you mine with stone. It will look natural in case someone tries to dig there. Set up a little home wherever you see fit in the space you have made (it should be at least 10x10), and make sure to /F Claim it. Once you have done that, go ahead and place chests because you will need a lot of storage for your items which will start to pile up, especially once you get the hang of raiding. Finally, use /F SetHome so that you and your friend(s) can access the base. Do not /F SetHome if you wich for your recruits to build their own. Instead, just use one of your sethomes (/SetHome <HomeName> ; donors get more than one). You can also cover the floors with string to prevent people from teleporting to homes set in your base (it will teleport them on top or outside). Make sure to use the same obsidian/water trick outside. Here is an example of a good underground base (normally this would be covered up):

Do-It-Yourself Base
Ahh, this is my personal favorite. Where you can just have fun and build your fortress as you please (in this next pic, I built a structure taken from a castle). To do this, just find a spot above ground and build to your desires. You will be much more detectable and subject to raids, but if you have enough power and are confident that you can stay safe, go ahead and build. I still recommend putting obsidian and water and other means of protection, but you can do it a bit more freely and focus more on making it look nicer. There are some pretty powerful factions out there, so build your maxpower up! You can even hang up a sign to laugh in their face! The one in this picture says: My faction has: 100/100 power! Good luck raiding it nubs! Here is an example of a do-it-yourself base:

Decorating
Here, I've gone and decorated and customized the interior of the bases a bit more. Just note that until you grow strong enough to maintain order, you may get raided a lot, so be patient and focus more on power for now. But here are some ideas:

Click here for part 2!

 

Look at part two. I have quite a few layers and base types covered.

 

EDIT: MAKE SURE YOU LOOK AT PART TWO, YOU NEED TO READ THE ENTIRE THING FOR IT TO MAKE SENSE.

 

That isn't true. Yes, you need only 1 power, but you can only claim one space of land from what I know of. So it is just safer to have a 10/10. Also, I am not a noob and I only joined about 2-3 months ago before "factions fell apart". If I was there to witness it, I did not do anything to cause it. Don't blame random people. I don't know you and you don't know me. I agree with you on the PvP arena. Although you are obviously not a reasonable person to talk to because your statement is plain rude. Please try to be nicer about it and if you have nothing positive to say, just stop right there.

- TAc

 

Actually, it took about 6. I spent a lot of time researching and quite some more making the builds I screenshotted.

 

I mostly play on prison. I might do a tutorial there next.

 

Possibly. It did get the mosts votes. We'll see at the end of the poll.