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  1. #1
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    [FreebieTFC] Gamebreaking duplication bug due to server plugin

    Dear HappyDiggers team,

    when I tried to make a full-automatic rhyolite cobblestone generator on the Freebie TFC server today, I noticed that on some occasions, flowing water and lava produce cobblestone. To protect the public roads out of cobblestone, glowstone and quartz blocks I presume, you have implemented a plugin that made it impossible to break certain vanilla blocks. When trying to break them, the message "Some vanilla blocks are indestructable!" appears. In the case of cobblestone that alone creates a major issue when accidentally acquiring cobblestone blocks and placing them in the own base, as these blocks cannot be removed then.

    But there also is an explosion protection and this is the cause for the duplication exploit.

    In an attempt to find out how to destroy the accidentally attained cobblestone in my base, I decided to create another cobblestone block at my outpost, where I also tried to find out how to exactly make my cobblestone generator. When I got attacked by multiple mobs becauseI was outside in the nightly and dark acacia forest, I got an idea. I lured a creeper to a cobblestone I created and let it explode. It was blown up and even dropped. At first I rejoiced because I could do the same in my base, but suddenly everything around the cobblestone block reappeared, including the dirt that was dropped in the explosion.

    It was duplicated.

    Then I thought to myself that this is annoying and that this plugin needs to be removed so I tried out bunch of other things to prove how fatal this plugin is for this server. At first I placed an ingot stack next to a cobblestone and lured in a creeper to blow it up. It did not reappear. Then I tried it with a few pistons, they are quite valuable to me due to the redstone, so I let a creeper blow them up and they dropped as items and reappeared together with the cobblestone. Then I tried a golden sheet I had left over. It was not blown up. So I went into singleplayer and tried to blow up a few valuable items. Anvils and bloomeries are not blown up. I remembered that there are a few quite rare berry bushes so I tried to blew those up. They are blown up easily and drop with a high chance. When trying to prepare the next test, I remembered that oil lamps also exist. Oil lamps can be made from gold, platinum, rose gold, silver, sterling silver, or blue steel. More importantly, they can also be remolten into their respective metals via a forge or a crucible. So I took a spare blue steel oil lamp I had at my base and a blackberry bush and put it next to a cobblestone and lured a creeper towards it. Both the blackberry bush and the oil lamp were both dropped and reappeared in and after the explosion. As a very last test, I tried a filled acacia chest. It blew up and dropped, but without the items, and a oak chest reappeared. As you can verify with the chat logs, as with everything said here, It has to do with the block ID of the acacia chest. The block ID of the acacia chest is 480:16 while that of the oak chest is 480:0 or more simplified 480. Your plugin only saves the simplyfied version of the block ID, at least in this case. Acting on this logic, there might be other blocks that get "transformed" if they get destroyed near a protected cobblestone by an explosion. I have not observed this phenomenon with dirt or the berry bush though.

    In conclusion, these items can be duplicated:
    • Berry bushes, among those, cloudberry bushes, which are very, very rare. (I paid multiple barrels of rich iron ore for 25 of those.)
    • Oil lamps out of the different kinds of metals I mentioned, among them, blue steel. They can be remolten back into ingots and used or traded away.
    • Redstone blocks, redstone is only found by grinding rare cryolite and cinnabar.
    • Crucibles and Firebricks, required for progression and consist of kaolinite and graphite, two very rare materials.
    • Bellows, made out of leather, a material with a quite lengthy crafting process.
    • Pumpkins and jack o'lanterns, pumpkins are a limited commodity as they cannot be grown.
    • and many more, those are the most valuable I could think of.



    I of course threw my duplicated blue oil lamp, the berry bush and the pistons (as well as my red steel pickaxe, you can read that in the chat logs, but thats just a little tragedy) into the lava I used to create the cobblestone in the first place. I do not know how much dirt I have duplicated accidentally, so I did not throw any away, but I think that is forgiveable.

    How to replicate in survival mode
    • Find or acquire a cobblestone or any other block protected by this plugin, either by going to a nearby cobblestone road or by creating it with lava and water. (Therefore, any player could do it without needing to get to blue and red steel buckets first.)
    • Place the block you want to duplicate next to the cobblestone. (Only those that blow up in the explosion and not rely on TileEntity data work, so no ingot piles or the insides of a chest, only the block itself)
    • Lure a creeper towards it and let it explode or use a barrel filled with gunpowder, seal it and give it a redstone signal to let it explode.
    • Quickly pick up the dropped items and get out of the explosion radius (I havent tested what happened if you stayed inside, but I think you can be suffocated in the next step)
    • Wait for the exploded blocks to reappear and repeat or mine them (I am not sure if this is true, but if the exploiter were aware of the fact that Prism only stores block information up to a certain time, they could even do it without being able to be proven guilty by Prism)


    I hope you will find another way to protect your public roads and remove this plugin as it severely impacts my gameplay in trying to make a rhyolite cobblestone generator and the gameplay of everyone, if someone decided to flood the market with items duplicated with this exploit. Because cobblestone is acquirable via a cobblestone generator, just like obsidian, it should not be on a blacklist in the first place. I advise you act quickly, as I was not able to find a subforum that is visible to only the server team, so this exploit is as public as it gets as long as the issues described here are not resolved. So excuse me for this and maybe also make such a forum in the future.

    Loke
    ~Loke

  2. #2
    Thank you for taking the time to investigate and write up what you found. That's really nice of you

    What you've experienced are two plugins at work. The first is one made by DOM which protects a selection of Vanilla blocks. This helps prevent a lot of grief on the servers' roads. The second plugin is Towny which reverts explosions after a while. This is enabled so the server doesn't look like a crater landscape after two days of play.

    As for the exploit, this has been known for years and is public knowledge. There are several other known exploits as well which we can't do much about other than detect and ban. I personally love the one that uses chests full of Minecraft books that have tons of poorly compressible characters in them which prevent chunks from being saved. (We can detect when this is done through an automated that checks the Prism logs daily).

    For now I've increased the time before Towny regenerates destroyed blocks from 20 seconds to 5 minutes. You can still dupe items, it'll just be slower or take a more elaborate setup which increases the chances of being discovered. Also when we see players with an unrealistic amount of materials, it's never very hard to figure out where they got them. We've had a few players dupe items before, but in general it hasn't been too much of a problem.

    As for the cobblestone generator, I think we may have to find a solution for that. Perhaps setup something that provides near free blocks of some kind to build with. Then again. A cobblestone generator, while a Vanilla Minecraft feature, doesn't really fit in the grind fest that is TFC. Everything is meant to take a lot of effort. I'll leave this open for suggestions for now. So if anyone has any ideas about this, please share.

  3. #3
    I would leave the cobble stone gen as it is, if someone wants to make one then they have to deal with what can happen. It only makes 2 types of the tfc stone otherwise, not to useful unless you really like the color of the 2. You also need the red steel and blue steel buckets, either by making them, trading for them, borrowing them, etc. Also no way to automictically store what comes off, you have to be there to pick it up.

  4. #4
    New Spawned
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    Lower Saxony, Germany
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    Oh alright, it seems that the exploit did not have to do anything with the cobblestone protection after all, well, I did not test for that.

    Well it is true, a cobblestone generator is a lot quicker than mining normally, especially if you could completely automize it somehow. However, there is a catch. The cobblestone generator would only produce rhyolite cobblestone. I would agree with you if I found a vanilla way that makes every material attainable in a grindless, effortless way. But a cobblestone generator, keep in mind blue and red steel technology unless you live next to a lava pool, is something you have to earn. You have to develop it, its technique, its fuctionality.
    What is the reward?

    Cobblestone in a brownish colour that neither is particularly special, does not look like vanilla cobblestone like andesite, not as black as basalt or as white as marble. I personally would not use this stone very often. Infact, the background of this cobblestone generator was to get the cobblestone for a few droppers. I would say that if I had a lot of it, it would merely act as a filler, maybe for big roads, maybe for solid blocks for a lot of things, for a railbed. It would take the role of asbestos in real life, a cheap but ugly building material for building as cheap as possible. This would give other stones a more noble value, think of what you think if you see a clay brick wall in vanilla minecraft instead of a cobblestone wall. But it would also devalue every block you could craft out of it. Think of a piece of furniture, chances are, from inside, it is going to look like this. Back then, it would have looked like the inside of a cut tree stem, massive. This here is the same. With a cobblestone generator, the only expensive part about a dropper is going to be the redstone. With modern technology, the expensive (?) part of a wooden plank is going to be the coating. It is a discount of a piece of commodity in exchange for having the adequate technology, in this case, having mastered to built a cobblestone generator with red and blue steel buckets.

    Also, there are new building materials enabled by this technology aswell, namely, vanilla cobblestone and cobblestone walls. I would compare it to concrete (even more so if you changed the recipe for cleanstone, it looks more or less like concrete, to cobblestone being heated in the forge, but that is another story). It is a pretty artificial building material, it is very easy to build with (easy to mine), produced with water and then pretty quickly. It is in my opinion also another worthy reward for having reached the highest technological age in the game. Along with masses of rhyolite cobble, as I said, probably generated automatically, there will also be vanilla cobblestone which has to be mined by hand, therefore it will still require standing infront of this generator for possibly hours to build anything meaningful with it and therefore still has a good value, showing everyone you will have built something out of a material that you can acquire only in the endgame, but then in vast masses.

    I think that we should be able to get the real life equivalent of chipboard and concrete once we acquire blue and red steel technology and therefore have cobblestone removed from DOM's plugin and protect the public roads with something else. I'd suggest tracking every prism log concerning cobblestone everyday and filtering out the cobblestone logs that appears somewhere where there is not a road. Or find another way. Those are my ideas concercing this issue.

    So yeah, leave the cobblestone generator as it is, but remove the protection of vanilla cobblestone in favor of something else.
    ~Loke

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