Garden mazes

Surely not a new idea here, as I and a few others have posted about this but buried in other threads. I thought it should deserve its own post to promote awareness and further discussion.

It would be great if we can decorate our lots with garden mazes. There could be several designs of hedges and bushes that we can place anywhere on our lot. This could enable us to create all different kinds of mazes for a fun gameplay experience.

Since we can hop over fences now, multiple adjacent lot owners can even work together to create one giant connected maze!

Would be great for festivals, player run mini-games and other RP experiences!

 

Kind of a neat idea. I like the idea of guild events (like maze runs) and the like. Even a large public maze somewhere that changes once a month would be cool.

 

I do hope that a hedge mazes makes in game. So much so that I created one during the last Scene Jam. Feel free to take it for a test drive:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/26423499/Adventure of the Avatar by Thoreandan.html

I used 2x6 meter and 2x8 meter Prefabs for the Hedges so Portalarium could take those and create their own mazes without much trouble (planning on graph paper does help though).

 

While it would drive me crazy personally, I don't hate the idea. You'd probably have to remove your house entirely to get enough room to do anything though.

 

What is the minimum distance needed between 2 hedges so that a character can easily navigate through the maze?

You probably need a lot of prefab sizes, mainly to keep the item count down in a given area. You could make the entire maze out of small square hedges, but that means a lot more items in that area. Of course we'd need a topiary skill tree to grow and craft them.

I think mostly there will be long rows of single plots, but maybe a few rows with back to back plots. Can't imagine too many adjacent sets of city plots used for a hedge maze, but someone can always surprise me.

Wonder if you can have entrances to basements hidden somewhere in the hedge maze on a plot with no house.

 

A city plot is 40x60 meters or four 20x30 village plots. Although I don't know if that is inside the wall, or includes some or part of the wall.

A village plot can be filled with 150 2x2 hedges, although maybe about half of those removed for the players to actually move through. A 2x2 grid of city or town plots might make for a nice hedge maze. Otherwise you'll end up with maybe 120x30 meter hedge mazes from 5 adjacent village plots, or 150x40 from town plots.

 

Yep, this was an idea I had in a previous thread. Glad to see others are thinking about doing really neat things with something like this!

 

To further extend this idea, it should go beyond player-owned lots since those sizes can be rather limiting, which I argued to be increased here, btw

A public space should be created where players can rent out and design garden mazes for festivals and RP and other events. We know we're already getting public Theater buildings that can be rented, so why not have a blank lot for creating huge garden mazes for a variety of events! This could also play into my rentable lots idea.

 

When I was running a free shard there was a plant system that we put in, in it we had players plant 100 hedge seeds in any way they wanted, was great fun. Maybe if we can grow plants, something like that would be an option since the plants can die after a bit of time

Spoiler

 

Great idea...

In addition to lot decoration...I'd enjoy seeing things like "gardens" being conjoined with neighbor lots to give a more organic feel to towns. For example, if you both you and your neighbor had garden mazes, it would be less clear where your lot and their lot began and ended. I think that would look much better than the cookie cutter walls lined up next to each other in squares.

 

Its been awhile since I built it but I think there was a 2 meter separation for the character to pass through. I create several different 2x6 and 2x8 version and rotated them 90/180/270 for variety (so it didn't look like the same sequence of leaves repeated over and over).

 

I think the term would be public fairgrounds. If we have a theater, why not a fairgrounds. It would be even easier than a city plaza, as it could be outside the walls of the city (or town or village) and basically be an empty open space. Obviously a garden maze would be cool in the space, but there are other things people might want to rent out the space for. Guild 'garage sales', open RP market, jousting (if we get mounted combat) and a variety things I am not creative enough to think of right now. Great notion.