Towny is a plugin for a Bukkit modded Minecraft server. The plugin itself is a manager for a Resident-Town-Nation hierarchy, as well as a block permission manager for a grid-like protection system. Each town has a mayor, while a nation has a king. They both have their own assistants to help run their respective people. Players can also purchase land from the town, as well as an optional daily tax set by the mayor. The player can allow his friends from out of town to build on his land when even his very own town's people can't build if he so wishes.

The bases of protection follows under how the world is separated into chunks. For those unaware, minecraft servers are broken up into 16x16x128 sections of blocks. The 128 being the height from the adimantium floor to the clouds in the sky. The protection ignores the height an focuses on the x and z planes. The default size for grid squares is 16x16, similar to the chunk size (configurable when you start using towny). So claiming a townblock (a grid square) allows that section of land to follow your town's or the plot owner's permissions.

Each town can claim up to a certain amount of townblocks, a set ratio or amount configured in the setting that is relative to the amount of players taking residence in that town. Residents themselves have no limit on how many they claim, however the daily tax (when using alongside iConomy) will take a bite out of their resources. The money is tunneled to the town's bank account that only the mayor can withdraw from, except if the town belongs to a nation. Any town belonging to a nation may be required to pay the nation a daily upkeep as well.

The gods of the land (admins) have the ability to start and end wartime mode. During war, most commands are frozen in order to focus on the event. Whilst at war, block permissions are ignored and any town that is in a nation is completely unprotected to the other nations residents. Also, each cell, or townblock, is given a certain amount of health. When a non-allied player enters the townblock, the townblock's health decreases. The town's residents have to force the player's out while still attacking others. When the health reaches zero, the town loses claim over that townblock. The focus is to defeat the each town's home block where the town's people spawn from.

Oh well then. Three whole people agree.

All sorted...

When I first joined a Server with Towny I didn't understand how it worked, I still don't. When I asked how it worked or any other question to do with it i was left unanswered. I then left. I think as long as it was implemented with a basic explanation at spawn it'd be okay.
But yeah, i've not had a good experience with the plugin .

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One thing to consider about Towny: I do NOT like the idea of Guests being able to set up their own towns. That means that either they have to team up with other players or they end up with no protections. Could be tricky.

Why not just put it in the temp server and see how it gets on. ???

Fair point. I'll run a local test first tomorrow when I have finished moving builds around on the final map. If anyone is up for helping out test the plugins then give me a yell when you see me on IRC

Ok initial tests of Towny were very good. It looks like it is the plugins for us. Right now though I am still being held back by other issues. None of Sk8's plugins are updated, AcceptRules died and - well the list goes on. The next day or so will be spent fiddling with economy plugins (yeah - they all died too) and balancing mob bounties against the cost of Towns in Towny. We need to ensure that people are able to survive on what they can reasonably earn.

In a nutshell though, its looking good. Towny fixes a whole host of issues and we are just left to iron out some details.

The temp server is going well, personally i would rather we iron out as much as possible so we end up with a good server, glad everything is going well.

I would love to help build anything for the new server. i have an idea for homeworld, but i haven't finished making the plans yet.

Spawn seems to be already built if I'm not wrong.