Hey everyone. I believe that it would be great if Crafty could allow overworld gold farms. They are, essentially, massive obsidian portals that you can use to farm pigmen and acquire gold. If you invest enough time in mining obsidian for them, it's an investment well-spent.

Here's why:

• Useful source of gold and XP. This would make gold more widely available for everyone, as it would circulate through the economy. This would help everyone, from brewers and alchemists to villager barterers, pvpers, and rollercoaster construction workers. (Golden carrots & glistering melons, golden apples, gold blocks -> emeralds, and powered rails)
• Alternative to having an end grinder. End grinders are probably the best source of XP, but having one of these majestic monstrosities at your base will provide you alternative means of leveling up fast. This would probably half the players in the end at any one time, which is something that we all with end grinders would love :)
• For people who are willing to put in the time and effort to build one, it will reward them greatly, and perhaps even entice redstone magicians and obsidian miners to join CM if they were allowed!

So, this being prohibited and all, I figure you guys have good reasoning behind outlawing them. Here are a few points that show that this wouldn't affect the server negatively.

- It wouldn't cause lag. Since we of Crafty's nation adhere to the 100 entity limit, at maximum, there would be 99 zombie pigmen + 1 player. Now, this "lag" is almost nothing, considering that at most times, there are about 1500-3800 entities in total handled by the server at any time on most days (depends on player count) - many of them endermen in end grinders performing much of the same AI as by angry pigmen (the pigmen don't have any additional lag that they cause).

- In the rules, you mentioned that they can corrupt the save file. However, I think it's possible to do something so that they don't do this. Another server allows it, so perhaps staff and Crafty could talk with the owner of (I don't want to say the server name in fear of advertising it, so I'll just say that it's the 2nd server on vanilla MCSL so that Crafty will know who to talk with) to see how he is handling the gold farms? Btw their map is 1 million by 1 million, so I don't think map size has anything to do with it.

- Very time consuming to build - it's not like anyone can whip one up in a mere week or two, but rather, the cumulative efforts of mining obsidian over a long time. That being said, because of this, it's unlikely that there will be many of them - probably, only one built by SC, one by Team Eye, a couple more at the most? This means that if lag is caused by them, it will be minimal.

- Oh, lastly, I would like to mention that "portal lag," or frame drops when you have lots of portals, is completely client side and occurs because of particles and animated blocks. This lag doesn't affect the server, nor the other players on it.

Anyway, I hope that I have convinced you that gold farms would be beneficial to the players of CraftyMynes. I'm open to any discussion on how we can do something like this, but if Crafty you decide not to, that's fine too. Please state your opinion of this! :)