WORLD & EXPLORATION

QuantumRift takes place on a single, hand-built arid/desert survival map. Nothing about the terrain is randomly generated by the plugin — it’s a custom WorldPainter map, and the plugin’s job is to lay points of interest, teleporters, and resource nodes on top of it. The map is medium-sized on purpose: bases are far enough apart that travel matters, but not so far that it becomes tedious. And water — deliberately — is the scarcest resource on the whole map.

This page covers the rules of the world itself, the points of interest worth traveling to, how gathering works, and how you get around.

The Rules of the World

Build envelope

You can only place or break blocks in a window relative to the ground beneath you:

• 10 blocks above the local ground level
• 6 blocks below the local ground level

That “ground level” tracks each column live as you build or dig — building up doesn’t raise your allowed floor, and digging down doesn’t extend your allowed depth. In practice, this means no skybases and no infinite underground bunkers. Bases are meant to be compact, surface, and defensible.

If a placement or a dig just silently refuses, this is almost always why — it’s not a bug.

Run /world info any time to see your current build envelope, the survival world’s name, the POI count, and whether it’s raining.

Deepslate is the floor

Deepslate and Cobbled Deepslate cannot be mined by hand — swinging a pickaxe at it just gives you nothing. Deepslate starts roughly 7 blocks below the surface, and the intended way through it is the Quarry, an automation-system machine. If you hit a layer that refuses to break no matter what you swing, that’s deepslate doing its job.

Staff and admins can bypass both the build envelope and the deepslate ban with quantumrift.world.bypass.

Water is scarce, on purpose

This is an arid world, and water behaves accordingly:

• No infinite water. The server-wide water-source-conversion rule is disabled — placing two buckets a block apart will not generate a third source between them. If you want to relocate a water source, you drain it, you don’t duplicate it.
• Hand-placed water evaporates. Any water source block you place dries up automatically after 15 seconds. Treat it as a brief tactical tool — for putting out fires, cooling lava, whatever — not a way to terraform or build a permanent pool.
• Ice still works. Breaking ice drops a water bucket, so stockpiling ice is a legitimate way to bank water for later.
• Rain events refill the world. A storm rolls through randomly every 2–6 hours (120–360 minutes) and lasts 10 minutes. Everyone on the server gets a broadcast: “Storm front approaching — rain has begun. Refill your buckets!” /world info tells you whether it’s raining right now (with time remaining) or how many minutes until the next one. Rain is also meant to refill river beds inside POIs — see Rivers & Rain Refill below for the current status of that. The rain is real everywhere on the map — desert, savanna and badlands included — so while a storm is on, cauldrons left under open sky fill with water, crops get the rain growth bonus, and zombies and skeletons stop burning in daylight.

Farming note

Harvesting a fully-grown crop automatically tills the dirt back to farmland underneath it — you don’t need to re-till before replanting.

Points of Interest

POIs are the game’s main destinations for serious gathering — and for PvP, since they’re big, resource-dense, and hard for any one team to lock down completely. They’re described as the main targets for mid-to-late-game progression, and their size is a deliberate anti-gank design: there’s always another corner of the POI to work.

The six POI types

A quirk worth knowing: a Mining Outpost also counts as a “Cave” for any quest, mission, or mob-spawn check that’s looking for CAVES — including the cave hostile-mob spawn boost. The reverse isn’t true; a plain cave doesn’t count as a Mining Outpost.

Where they are

The map ships 11 authored POIs, laid out in a symmetric grid roughly 500–900 blocks out from spawn in each compass direction, plus one hidden tutorial cave near spawn.

That’s 2 of each archetype (Volcano Heart, Mining Outpost, Oasis, Farming Zone, Bandit Camp) symmetric across the map, plus the hidden tutorial cave. Every POI is discoverable on sight except the two Volcano Hearts, which stay hidden until you reach gate tier 5.

Useful commands (any player, quantumrift.world.use):

• /world poi list — every registered POI with type, center coordinates, radius, visibility, and tier lock.
• /world poi info <id> — full detail on a single POI.

Zone protection

Each POI has a protection rectangle around it that restricts what you can break to that zone’s specific allow-list — for example, inside a Mining Outpost you can only break the authored ore types (coal, copper, iron, gold, redstone, lapis, diamond, emerald, and their deepslate variants), not arbitrary terrain. You also can’t place a Claim inside a POI’s zone. Staff can bypass this with quantumrift.world.poizone.bypass.

Volcano Heart heat damage

Standing inside a Volcano Heart POI hurts. Every 3 seconds you take heat damage:

• Base damage: 1.0, plus 0.1 for every nearby lava block within 3 blocks.
• Mitigation: heat-resistant “diamond” tier gear (tier 6 of 7) reduces damage 15% per piece worn, or a flat 75% if you’re wearing the full 4-piece set. Mining/Gathering-trim gear at “iron” tier (tier 4) adds another 10% per piece on top of that.
• Cap: total mitigation can never exceed 90%, no matter how you stack it.
• Roughly every 15 seconds while you’re taking heat (and don’t have a GUI open), you’ll see an action-bar warning: “🔥 The heat is unbearable.” The damage lands either way — the warning is just suppressed when a GUI is open so it doesn’t visually clash.

Gear up before you go. This isn’t a place to wander into unprepared.

Loot chests

Each POI type restocks its lootable chests on its own timer — some number of previously-emptied chests roll back to full every interval:

Because the rate is capped rather than the total, a quiet POI slowly fills back up toward fully stocked, while a heavily-farmed one stays mostly empty.

What’s actually in the chests, by POI type:

• Mining Outpost (3–5 items rolled from 13 possibilities): coal, raw iron, raw copper, raw gold, redstone, lapis lazuli, torches, iron ingots, diamond, an iron pickaxe, rarer T1 gear pieces (helmet/boots), and even a Coal Generator automation block.
• Volcano Heart (3–6 of 12) — the richest table on the map, matching its role as the Netherite source: magma block, blackstone, basalt, gold ingots, obsidian, diamond, ancient debris, netherite scrap, a portable battery, and rare T4/T5 gear (chestplate, helmet, boots).
• Bandit Settlement (2–5 of 12): arrows, string, leather, gunpowder, gold nuggets, rotten flesh, TNT, a stimpack, emeralds, cannonballs, T2 leggings, a bow.
• Oasis (2–4 of 10): sugar cane, melon slices, clay balls, bamboo, cod, sand, water buckets, cactus, lily pads, emeralds.
• Farming Zone (2–4 of 11): wheat, carrots, potatoes, beetroot, hay blocks, bone meal, wheat seeds, bread, a composter, eggs, emeralds.
• Caves (2–4 of 9): coal, raw iron, raw copper, torches, string, cobwebs, mossy cobblestone, lapis lazuli, diamond.

Heads up: this world is balanced low on purpose, so stack sizes stay small, and emerald/diamond drops are deliberately thin.

Resource Nodes & Gathering

There are two separate gathering systems in play: ambient nodes scattered across the open world, and denser ore-banded nodes inside POIs.

Open-world nodes (the “safety net”)

These are scattered ore spots outside of any POI — low-tier, sparse, and intentionally not rewarding enough to be worth farming as a team. They exist for solo or casual players who want a few resources without heading into contested POI territory.

• A spawner check runs every 120 seconds, keeping up to 50 nodes active server-wide, always spawned within 256 blocks of a player.
• A harvested node respawns after 600 seconds; an untouched node despawns after 1800 seconds; there’s a 300-second AFK timeout to discourage idle-farming.
• The palette is coal ore, copper ore, and iron ore, in veins of 2–5 blocks, with a 40% chance the vein extends below the surface.

Cave nodes

Inside CAVES-type POIs, ore is banded by depth:

Nodes spawn every 60 seconds, up to 8 per chunk and 300 active server-wide, respawning 600 seconds after harvest. Caves POIs also boost hostile mob spawn rates generally — zombies, skeletons, creepers, spiders, cave spiders, witches, husks, strays, drowned, and zombie villagers are all eligible for the boost (anything not on that list spawns at the normal rate).

Mining Outpost nodes

The workhorse ore site — the most generous ore palette on the map, but deliberately no Netherite here (that belongs to the Volcano Heart).

Up to 4 nodes per chunk, 60 active server-wide, spawner check every 120 seconds, respawn 600 seconds after harvest.

Volcano Heart nodes

The scarcest gathering table in the game, on purpose — this is the only source of Netherite anywhere on the map.

Only 1 node per chunk per spawn pass, capped at 8 active server-wide, respawn cooldown a full 1800 seconds (30 minutes), spawner check every 600 seconds (10 minutes). The low spawn-boost multipliers (0.04–0.06, versus 0.08 for Mining Outposts) are the actual scarcity mechanism — expect Netherite to be genuinely rare and worth fighting over.

Oasis nodes (ore-free)

Farming Zone nodes (ore-free)

Bandit Settlement nodes

Looted materials, not ore — running from the settlement surface down into the ground beneath it.

Up to 2 nodes per chunk, 20 active max, respawn 900 seconds (15 minutes) after harvest.

Renewable resource zones

Separate from the procedural spawners above, admins can hand-register specific ore or crop patches inside a POI as permanently renewable — the exact block respawns after you harvest it, rather than being gone for good. Respawn times vary by material and are tracked independently per block, so a mined-out site refills gradually rather than all at once:

Ancient Debris is the slowest respawn on the list by a wide margin, and while it’s on cooldown, the hole left behind fills with Basalt rather than air, so a farmed-out vein doesn’t leave a visible tunnel through the structure.

If a POI has even one of these hand-registered renewable zones, that area stops receiving the random procedural ore spawner — authored, hand-placed sites don’t get random ore layered on top of their designed loot.

Rivers & Rain Refill

The river-refill system is built and ready, but on the current map, no river segments have been authored yet — rivers only exist inside specifically-built POI boxes, and none have been placed on this map so far. Rain events still fire on schedule, still get broadcast, and still count down on /world info — they just don’t have any river beds to refill right now.

When river segments are authored, here’s how the refill works at the end of a rain event: each registered river-bed box has a 50% chance to refill at all, and where it does refill, water fills 85% of the box, up to a cap of 5,000 blocks per segment.

The design intent is for rain to be a genuine server-wide event — in a world this dry, a storm should feel like something worth dropping what you’re doing for.

Getting Around: Teleporters

For the full picture on transport, see the Transport page — here’s the exploration angle.

• 8 wilderness teleporter stations exist on the map at any given time, nicknamed Beacon Alpha through Beacon Theta (the Greek letters). Their positions re-roll once a day, each placed at a random angle and a random distance of 800–4000 blocks from world spawn.
• Each station is a small structure: a 5×5 polished-deepslate foundation, a 3×3 netherite-block base, topped with a Beacon and a Lightning Rod (the activation trigger).
• To activate one, right-click the beacon or trigger, or just stand within 1.5 blocks of the trigger for a moment after arriving on foot. Either way starts a 3-second charge-up (an action-bar progress bar with a rising chime); walking away cancels it.
• Once charged, the destination menu offers three free options, no cost and no unlock requirement: Imperial City, The Ship (spawn), and Team Base Core.
• The PDA compass can point you toward the nearest teleporter as one of its trackable targets.
• Teleporter stations are protected structures — no breaking, building into, exploding, or pistoning them. The only way around that is admin permission plus a special bypass item.

Things That Will Trip You Up

A few notes worth knowing before you head out:

• Can’t punch through deepslate. If you hit that hard floor roughly 6 blocks down and it won’t break, that’s intended — you need the Quarry machine, not a better pickaxe.
• Building refuses silently outside the envelope. Too high or too low relative to the ground just won’t place — that’s the +10/-6 rule, not a bug.
• Water disappears after 15 seconds. A placed bucket isn’t a permanent water source — plan around evaporation, or build proper storage once you have Claims/Automation set up.
• Netherite is genuinely late-game. Volcano Hearts are the only reliable source, and they’re locked until tier 5. Don’t expect to farm Netherite early.
• Not every POI has ore. Oasis, Farming Zone, and Bandit Camp are deliberately ore-free — head to a Mining Outpost, a Cave, or a Volcano Heart if you’re after ore.