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

Out in the wilderness (anywhere outside the Imperial City, the points of interest and other teams’ claims) you can place and break any block. There is one height rule:

• You can build up to 10 blocks above the local ground level. That “ground level” tracks each column, and building up doesn’t raise it, so there are no skybases.
• There is no depth limit any more: you can dig and build as far down as you like. The only thing that stops you underground is deepslate, which can’t be mined by hand (see below).

Crops, saplings and every other plant can be planted anywhere in the wilderness, and they grow there on their own, along with trees, grass and vines. Growth in the wilderness is much faster than in vanilla Minecraft. Inside the City and the points of interest nothing grows or decays by itself: those places only change through their own respawning resources.

If a placement silently refuses high above the ground, the height rule is 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.
• Placed water stays. A water source you place from a bucket no longer evaporates: it stays until someone takes it back. It still never multiplies, so every pool costs as many buckets as it has source blocks.
• 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 also refills the water pools inside POIs, and that water is yours to take — see Rivers & Rain Refill below. 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 crop turns the farmland under it back to dirt, so till it again with a hoe before you replant. Crops can be planted on your claimed land and anywhere in the wilderness.

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

The Mines are the caves. Any quest, mission, or mob-spawn rule about caves means the Mines, including the cave hostile-mob spawn boost. There is no separate Caves site any more.

Where they are

The map ships 10 authored POIs, laid out in a symmetric grid roughly 500–900 blocks out from spawn in each compass direction, except the NW Mine, which sits about 4,300 blocks to the north. The two Deserted Wastelands (north-east and south-west, beside the farms) join them once they are placed on the map.

That’s 2 of each archetype (Volcano Heart, Mines, Oasis, Farmlands, Bandit Camp), symmetric across the map apart from the NW Mine. Every POI is discoverable on sight except the two Volcano Hearts, which stay hidden until the Empire reaches tier 5. The server announces it when they open.

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

• /world poi list — every POI you can find on the PDA, with type, center coordinates, radius, visibility, and tier lock. Hidden and locked POIs are left out (staff see them all).
• /world poi info <id> — full detail on a single POI, including whether it is on the PDA right now.

Zone protection

Each POI has a protection rectangle that limits what you can break to that site’s resources: the ores in the Mines (coal, copper, iron, gold, redstone, lapis and emerald, plus their deepslate variants, and no diamonds) and the cobblestone there, the crops and hay bales in the Farmlands, the plants and clay at an Oasis, the plants in a Deserted Wasteland. Nothing at all can be broken in a Bandit Camp. You can’t place a Claim inside a POI’s zone. Staff can bypass this with quantumrift.world.poizone.bypass.

Doors and signs are off limits. In every POI, in the Imperial City and on teleporter stations you can’t open or close a door, trapdoor or fence gate, and you can’t edit, dye, glow or wax a sign. A room behind a closed door stays closed. In the City, buttons, levers, NPCs and the transit portal still work, and a POI’s loot chests still open. Staff can bypass this.

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 gear (diamond tier 6 or better) reduces damage 15% per piece, or 75% for a 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

Supply chests appear on their own at every Oasis, Deserted Wasteland and Volcano Heart. The Mines, the Farmlands and the Bandit Camps have none.

• Where: each site has a set of hand-picked chest spots, and a chest always appears on one of them, picked at random. Learn a site’s spots and you know where to look.
• How many: each site holds 6 chests, plus 2 for every player online, up to 30, and never more than it has spots.
• How to spot one: every chest has a red Loot crate label floating above it, readable from up to 128 blocks away when nothing blocks your view.
• When one goes: a chest disappears (and its label with it) the moment someone opens it. Whatever you leave inside drops on the ground. A chest nobody opens for 45 minutes simply moves to another spot, so a site is never left empty.
• When the next one comes: after someone opens a chest, its spot stays empty for a cooldown that depends on how busy the site is: 20 minutes with nobody inside, down to 5 minutes with 10 or more players inside. The replacement appears on another free spot.
• Volcano Hearts only get chests once the Empire reaches tier 5.

What’s in them:

• Volcano Heart (1–3 different items a chest) — the richest table on the map, matching its role as the Netherite source: magma blocks, blackstone, basalt, magma cream, obsidian, blaze powder and blaze rods, gilded blackstone, gold nuggets and ingots, quartz, diamonds, portable batteries, and very rarely netherite scrap or ancient debris.
• Oasis (1–2 different items): sugar cane, bamboo, sand, cactus, clay balls, melon slices, lily pads, cod, kelp, emeralds.
• Deserted Wasteland (1–2 different items): bones, sand, rotten flesh, sandstone, string, spider eyes, gunpowder, iron and gold ingots, emeralds, diamonds.

Every site also has an ultra-rare jackpot: a piece of gear (tier 2–3 at an Oasis, tier 5 in a Wasteland, tier 5–7 in a Volcano Heart) or one of the plugin’s resource spawners.

A chest holds a handful of each item rather than a full stack, but it is worth opening: a lucky one can hold a few gold ingots or a couple of diamonds, and most of what you find sells at the Imperial Market.

Resource Nodes & Gathering

There are three separate gathering systems in play: ambient nodes scattered across the open world, hidden veins in the rock layers underground, and each POI’s own resources.

Open-world nodes (the “safety net”)

These are scattered ore spots in the wilderness — 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.

• They only ever grow in the wilderness: never in the Imperial City or the ring around it, never inside a POI, never on a team’s claimed land, and never on a teleporter station. Every block of a vein is checked, so a vein never pokes into any of those either.
• 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.

Hidden veins in the rock layers

Under the soil there are three layers of cobblestone (sandstone in the desert, red sandstone in the badlands) before you reach deepslate. The world has no ore of its own down there, but mining those layers can uncover some.

• Every cobblestone, sandstone or red sandstone block you break with a pickaxe has a 5% chance to form a vein nearby.
• A vein is 1 to 5 blocks of one ore. From most to least common: coal, copper, iron, silver, titanium, redstone, tungsten, lapis and platinum. The four new ores are the Companies’ metals (Companies): silver and titanium are mined like iron ore, tungsten and platinum like diamond ore (an iron pickaxe or better), and each drops its raw ore.
• It forms 2 to 4 blocks into the rock around you, fully buried, so you won’t see it. You’ll hear a low rumble coming from where it formed. Dig toward the sound to find it.
• It only happens in the wilderness or on your own team’s land. Never in the Imperial City, a POI, or another team’s claim.
• Blocks you placed yourself and blocks made by a cobblestone generator never form a vein.
• A vein nobody mines turns back into rock after 30 minutes.
• You can have up to 10 unmined veins at a time. Mine some out to get new ones.
• The vanilla ores drop exactly as in vanilla, and the usual pickaxe rules apply (redstone needs an iron pickaxe, the rest need stone or better). Fortune works on the new ores the same way it does on iron and diamond ore.

Mines

The Mines’ ores sit on the floors of the tunnels and low on their walls (up to three blocks above the floor), where you can see them: coal, copper, iron, gold, redstone, lapis and emerald. There are no diamonds anywhere in the Mines.

When a mined iron or gold ore comes back somewhere else, it sometimes comes back as one of the Companies’ new ores: an iron ore as silver or titanium, a gold ore as tungsten or platinum (which look and mine like diamond ore). A new ore that nobody mines turns back into the ore it was after a week.

When you mine an ore, the spot turns to stone (or deepslate) and stays that way. After a cooldown the ore comes back somewhere else in the same Mine, on another tunnel floor or low on a wall, never on a ceiling, so the total stays about the same but you can’t farm one path over and over:

The Mines also hold cobblestone you can mine. It works differently from the ores: a mined block leaves a gap and comes back in the same spot after 30 seconds to 2 minutes.

The Mines are caves, so they carry the cave hostile-mob boost. Underground, a natural spawn of a zombie, skeleton, creeper, spider, cave spider, witch, husk, stray, drowned or zombie villager has a 50% chance of a twin between Y -15 and 9, and a guaranteed twin between Y -37 and -16, where 5% of those spawns come up as a Wither Skeleton or Piglin Brute instead.

Mobs at the points of interest

Every point of interest has hostile mobs, day and night, and they come in waves. A wave starts when you walk into a site that is open to you and lasts 15 minutes. It sends 12 mobs at you, 10 to 24 blocks away: one at 0:15, 0:30, 0:45 and 1:00, then one every 30 seconds until 5:00. After the twelfth you are left alone in that site until the 15 minutes are over, then the next wave starts. Each site keeps its own wave for each player. The clock keeps running if you leave, and a mob that was due while you were away never spawns. A mob waits while 6 are already near you.

There are no baby zombies or baby husks anywhere on the server, and no chicken jockeys: every zombie, husk, drowned and zombie villager is an adult.

Creepers are rare. At most about one hostile mob in ten is a creeper, in the open world and in every point of interest wave.

Mobs carry no random gear. No hostile mob wears armor, and zombies, husks and drowned are always bare-handed (no swords, shovels or tridents). They do not pick up items you drop either. Skeletons and strays keep their bows, pillagers their crossbows, vindicators their axes and wither skeletons their swords.

Farmlands

The fields are wheat, carrots, potatoes and beetroot, with hay bales around them and melon patches along the edge of both Farmlands. A melon breaks into slices like any melon. Harvest a crop or break a bale and it grows back in the same spot, fully grown, after 5–10 minutes. The soil itself can’t be dug up.

Oasis and Deserted Wasteland

These are water sites. Their plants (sugar cane, cactus, bamboo, melons, and an Oasis’s clay) come back in the same spot 5–10 minutes after you take them; a whole stalk of cane or cactus comes back together. There is no ore at either. The water is covered below under Rivers & Rain Refill.

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). Elite mobs only appear in the Mines, never in a Volcano Heart. The low spawn-boost multipliers (0.04–0.06, versus 0.08 for Mines) are the actual scarcity mechanism — expect Netherite to be genuinely rare and worth fighting over. Nodes only grow inside the Heart itself: never past its edge, on claimed land or in the Imperial City.

Rivers & Rain Refill

The water at the Oases and Deserted Wastelands is lootable: you can scoop it up with a bucket. Everywhere else in a protected POI the water stays put.

What you take stays gone until the next storm. When a storm ends, every spot of water that was taken from an Oasis or a Deserted Wasteland comes back, every time: the pools and rivers are full again after each rain.

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 two free options, no cost and no unlock requirement: Imperial City 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. A door or sign on a station can’t be used or edited either.

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 high above the ground. More than 10 blocks above ground level just won’t place. There is no limit going down.
• The wrong pickaxe breaks ore but drops nothing. As in vanilla, iron, copper and lapis ore need a stone pickaxe or better, and gold, redstone, emerald and diamond ore need an iron one. The block still breaks, and the server tells you which pickaxe you needed.
• Water never multiplies. Placed water stays where you put it, but two sources never make a third, so water is still something you carry in by the bucket.
• Netherite is genuinely late-game. Volcano Hearts are the only reliable source, and they’re locked until the Empire reaches tier 5. Until then they’re off the PDA, grow no ore, get no chests and the bandits won’t send you there (the heat still hurts if you walk in). Don’t expect to farm Netherite early.
• Not every POI has ore. Only the Mines and the Volcano Hearts do. And there are no diamonds in the Mines.