Economics of Minecraft

For example suppose I smash a block of iron ore with a pickaxe. The client tells the server that I used my pickaxe to smash the block of iron ore, the server checks that yes, that pickaxe can smash the iron ore, and adds one chunk of iron ore to my inventory. By duplicating this logic the client can anticipate that I'll get a chunk of ore, but the fact it did that doesn't actually give me ore in the world, it just means my display updates even before the server replies saying "Also now you have ore". I actually think the ore example doens't happen in modern minecraft because a better pick might give more ore, or even auto-smelt it into iron ingots, and the server would decide some of that randomly in some cases - but you get the idea.

Network problems can cause this to de-synchronise. The symptom might be e.g. you dig a block of sand on a new server, your client shows you now have sand, but when you move to where the sand was, your client rubber-bands and the sand re-appears in front of you. But the server is the truth for everybody else, they'll see you lurching about trying to dig sand but failing, and when you fix the problem, you won't have any sand.

Modders are mostly working on the server, although since they add new graphics and other elements the same mods are usually also needed by the client (it just doesn't run the server elements).

Some logic does live purely on the client but it's mostly quality-of-life stuff, e.g. auto-mapping. All the visuals live on the client. So a client can make opaque blocks see-through for example, to some extent, which would be a problem for cheating in combat games, and hit-scanning would be easy to cheat in a client too.

Players have a mechanism to feed their desires into the actual game rules. They also had some sort of indirect democratic control which enabled them to give characters a death sentence, ceding all their property. I think they elect a "Demi-Pharaoh", and the DP gets to give out one death sentence during their "reign", something like that. So it was possible to _really_ screw somebody who caused trouble.

However, Vanilla Minecraft has some labour-saving devices, where you invent some resources to make more without proportional effort, e.g. using stone, and metal from a furnace you can hook up a simple machine that turns wood into charcoal and feeds the furnace, so compared to a beginner you are now using much less wood to make the same resources, and no extra effort. ATITD mostly avoids this, it has a strong click economy, a serious player must spend hours every day clicking on things, machines that reduce the amount of clicking are almost unheard of while of course clients that automate clicking _outside_ the game are common. This can't help but tilt the way the game is played.

ATITD when I played it (many years ago now) was already a very niche game, and I believe it now has even fewer players than it did then and is maintained entirely by fans rather than a third party developer, but the reddit still seems to exist, as does the game's web site.