Introducing Home Soil, a Minecraft PVP concept for vanilla clients! This is a Bukkit plugin for servers, from the Brothers Johnson, and it runs on 1.6.4.

Spawn in with a permanent stack of snowballs with your name on it (click lower right spot on inventory to start) and a Home Soil chunk!

Your named snowball will lead you to your Home Soil. It flies through the air, on fire, a beacon leading you on. If it’s far away it’ll go fast, if it’s near it may be quite slow. If you die, that’s where you respawn: your nearest Home Soil. It’s your base in a hostile world full of enemies and crazy stuff happening. Keep it safe.

Your Home Soil is protected from the Lava Pillar Of Regen. This pillar wanders across loaded chunks, regenerating them: if it hits your Home Soil, it skips that chunk. This regenerating can cause things to look funky, but that’s part of the game and shows you what chunks have been loaded for a while.

Check for the clicks to see if you’re in the chunk. Entering and leaving ANY home soil chunk produces a clicking noise: higher-pitched for entering, lower for leaving. That happens even for home soil chunks that you don’t know whose they are. If the chunk is yours, you get something else too…

When you enter your home chunk, you (and everybody else) get a server message saying you’ve entered your home chunk (1 of 1). If you have more than one home chunk it’ll say which one it was, and how many in total you have. That’s your win condition. But how do you get additional home chunks to build out into mini-bases? (you can build outside the home chunk but it will eventually get hit with regen)

You get more chunks by taking over the chunks of other players.

Throw a player’s snowball (snowball with their name on it) in their chunk, and you take it. (yes, you can use an anvil to name regular snowballs, and yes you can use your infinite-snowballs to make infinite snow blocks. They might be a bit of a give-away, but you will have lots of snow and can always have blocks for that reason)

You have to use their snowballs to take their chunk. One way to do that is to kill them: they’ll drop at least a stack of named snowballs when you do. You can use those to find their base, and to take it. When you do, you get a firework display of creeper troll faces that goes on longer, the more chunks you own. This shows any onlookers your victory, how good you are… and where you live!

If you throw your OWN snowball in your OWN chunk, you relinquish it. It stops being a Home Soil chunk anymore, and the spot can be regenerated and probably will, in time. If you had lots of chunks, you just lowered the count by one. If it was your last one, then the snowball will immediately head off to your new home.

You can follow it and journey to the new chunk if you’re carrying valuable things, or if you’ve only just spawned and you have nothing, you can /kill repeatedly and cycle through chunks really fast that way. If you don’t like where you ended up, throw your snowball to give up the chunk and then /kill and respawn in your new home right away.

If you’re wandering around and you see crazy half-trees and such, it means the Lava Pillar of Regen was nearby. That means the chunk was loaded, which means players were nearby too. There’s another side-effect of this: when chunks regenerate, nearby chunks end up still lit by the lava that used to be there. Spooky glitch lighting is a dead giveaway there’s a Home Soil chunk nearby, and someone has been spending time there (perhaps hiding). This is especially the case far from spawn, where chunks aren’t loaded unless someone’s in there somewhere. That’s why we’re keeping the glitchy lighting (so long as Minecraft lets us!)