EternalTD alpha 3!

Hello everyone!

Today I am pleased to announce the third closed alpha release of EternalTD, a tower defense game for Minecraft!

This release is actually very close to becoming a public release! The main thing we want to nail down for the public release is adding a set of proper tutorial levels and an additional (and potentially premium) map.

It has been such a long time since the last release and we have changed so much that I will list the features that this have instead.

Currently ETD has one map, the one in the screenshot. Enemies spawn from the green area and walk towards the red area. Towers block the path! You can't fully block the path, and enemies can't attack the towers. This basically means that you can put together a maze of pain for the enemies to traverse.

Additionally, there is a very cool support tower system. Only basic towers deal damage, but there are several support towers you can place around them. The support towers can do simple things, like increase the attack speed, or do really cool things, like change the type of attacks the basic towers does into beam attacks.

Mob waves themselves are also not made the same! You have horde waves, boss waves, air waves, fast waves, treasure waves and more!

Currently, the objective of the game is just to see how far into the game you can survive. The game gets harder as you play, and some new mechanics get introduced. At level 10, mobs start gaining armor, which needs to be broken or bypassed. At level 20, mobs start spawning splitterlings, which are mobs that spawn from dead mobs (bloons fans will be familiar with this one!).

Finally, the last thing this update introduces is elemental attunements and elemental weaknesses / resistances. Support towers can have attunements, and mobs can also have attunements. There are 4 elements - fire, water, air, earth. Fire and water are opposites and earth and air are opposites. Towers always deal critical damage to opposites. However, they only deal half damage to mobs of the same elemental attunement as the tower. Towers can also fuse up to two attunements, making them crit against two types but also deal half damage against two types. You can't fuse opposite attunements, so there is no fusion of water and fire, and you can't fuse more than two attunements, as that reverts the tower to an unattuned tower. If this seems like a lot, don't worry - this is an advanced mechanic which is mostly important for people experienced with the game and who are looking to get server highscores - new players don't need to worry about this.

Now, for the server details:

This is a full-on game built inside of Minecraft. Right now it operates under the assumption that it has a server dedicated to running it as a standalone minigame.

It uses instancing to create worlds, so any amount of players can play at the same time. At this time, there is no official spectator mode support, but players can come see other players without causing any issues. Also, there is no coop or pvp mode yet, but I have some very interesting ideas that could make that possible and I have already begun making changes to the codebase to allow that.

For the installation:

Unzip the contents in attachment and drag and drop them to your plugins folder.

I would really appreciate it if you guys could let me know what you think of this minigame. We've been having a blast playtesting it, and I will be making a number of videos covering the making of the plugin, an installation guide and potentially a gameplay guide on top of the tutorial I plan to make.

We believe that this has the potential to be a very solid minigame for any server to have, and there is enough depth and mechanics to spend a very long time figuring out the best strategies.

This will probably be the last closed alpha update for ETD, as we expect the next one to be the public release. We will be releasing a premium map alongside the premium release!

Happy tower defending,

- MagmaGuy