Nether Higway

Our server needs better infrastructure. Right now, there is nothing connecting the towns together. The spawn city has beautiful, wide avenues that don't actually go anywhere except to other places in spawn city.

Although it would be nice, at first, to have roads in the surface world, the several kilometers of distance spanning the world from edge to edge would make the task daunting even with the ability to spawn materials at will. And even then, actually using those roads to traverse these enormous distances would be quite the hassle. And since they'd be in the public world, either they themselves would be griefed, or the dirt under and around them would be griefed.

I think the solution would be to build it in the nether. The nether catapults ones' movements, as eight blocks of the surface world are represented by each single block in the Nether. This results in requiring less materials to cross the same distance. The fact that it is in a different "space", in effect, means that the entire system can be protected from grief--only a specialist team of builders need to be able to perform road maintenance. Or even if you limit it to those who achieve builder rank. It will be no great loss to the general user populace, as there isn't a whole lot to be gained from the nether regardless.

I think many of us have been to this line of thought: Why build a nether base? Nether bases are cumbersome, inefficient, and unsustainable. You can't recoup lost resources in the nether--you have to keep coming back to the surface world. But roads... Roads in the nether are extremely efficient. The most valuable commodity in the nether is the roads. Not even glowstone can compare next to the ability to facilitate trade and communication between the separate townships. And I hypothesize that the level of convenience they offer will ensure that they will actually be used.

I would like to begin setting up nether gates in or near all towns, then systematically linking them to a single contiguous, well marked, attractively built, protected highway system.

Let me know how you feel about it.

This seems like a really neat idea. The only problem I see is that someone with OP permissions would have to maintain the road every time a new town was made. Also, I think the server already has teleporters to make travel easy.

It's a very good and interesting idea, but as Ghyrt said, nether portals are rather obsolete due to the sewer portals which you can get for just a small price and don't require a new road to be built.

This is exactly what the Labyrinth gates are for. They cost 1000 coins and take a player directly to the town they are linked with. They can be found in the sewers near the entrance in the back of the mountain.