I think I'm not alone on having a love/hate relationship with open world games. It stimulates creativity but when I start lacking it too much the game becomes incredibly boring and I end up stop playing for months until I feel like playing again.

Now, what you opened this post for: Minecraft Settlements

I was thinking of giving all first-join players one certain block (let's say bedrock). The players start out in adventure mode and wander around to find a nice spot to build their settlement.

When the players find their paradise, they place the bedrock block which a (set of) command block(s) turns into a small "temple" which serves as their town center, and allows them to build around it in a certain radius. This limitation makes players think carefully about where to start their base, and forces players to trade with each other.

Cool things this means:

• People need to trade.
• Stealing/griefing is much harder.
• People can still build together if their build radius overlapses.

Additional/optional ideas:

• Allow players to pay the temple one way or another, allowing their build radius to increase.
• Allow spawn buildable for everyone, to make some kind of hub, a market place for example.

The reason I'm posting this here is hoping that one of you redstone wizards read this and like the idea and manage to code it into a couple of command blocks for us to use. I could probably do it myself but it would cost me my weekend and if someone else could do it for me sooner (and probably better), that would be awesome!

edit: I wrote "major game idea" as opposite to a mini game idea. Not to the idea having a big impact on the game.