The Hub & Social Spaces
Canon
One Hub island (D-WORLD-SYSTEM-01: safe, combat-disabled, always accessible), organized as five districts — every social surface the V1 docs wanted, placed on the one island so foot traffic feeds foot traffic:
- Spawn Plaza — arrival point, the guided beginning's landing (hfonboarding), orientation signage, the door to everything else.
- Market District — the markets canon physicalized: the bazaar (Grand Exchange) house, the market-tent grounds, the rotating NPC shop ring, featured-shop displays.
- The Portal Rings — one ring per island tier plus the personal, guild, and events-world portals; locked portals show their requirements (D-WORLD-SYSTEM-09).
- Records Plaza — the hfrecords systems made physical: leaderboard displays, the town crier's stage, the server-goal monument. Records are read in menus; they are seen here.
- The Pirate Arena — the loud quarter: docks, ships, taverns, treasure piles. Home of the crate opening stage (launch-critical — every crate in the game opens here, D-CRATES-02), the rank showcase surfaces, Captain Veylor and his questline, and easter-egg density. The flex zone, built to be screenshotted.
Showcase surfaces ship before their contents: pedestals, featured rotations, and display platforms are hub furniture now; what a rank may display waits for the Ranks session's P2A audit. Leaderboard and goal displays draw from hfrecords as-is.
Hub liveliness is content, not systems: parkour routes, tavern activities, easter eggs, seasonal dressing land in content passes; admin gatherings and giveaways use the Records Plaza and Arena stages.
Decisions
D-HUBS-01 — one Hub island, five districts (proposed)
Spawn Plaza, Market District, Portal Rings, Records Plaza, Pirate Arena — all on the single Hub island. Concentration is the point: crate traffic feeds the market, market traffic feeds the crier's audience. V1's separate "hub types" that had canon homes elsewhere went there (PvP/event hubs → events world; profession hubs → adventure islands).
Rejected: multiple separate social islands (splits the population the hubs exist to gather); a minimal spawn-only hub (leaves the social systems homeless).
D-HUBS-02 — the Pirate Arena is a Hub district and hosts the crate stage (proposed)
The arena-only crate ruling (D-CRATES-02) needs a venue at the center of traffic — a district of the Hub, not a destination behind a portal. Veylor, the showcases, and the spectacle live where everyone already walks.
Rejected: an ungated social island of its own (splits traffic; invents an island class for one use); an events-world venue (puts the core crate loop behind the onboarding-gated portal).
D-HUBS-03 — showcase surfaces now, showcase contents after Ranks (proposed)
The platforms, pedestals, and featured rotations are canon hub furniture; every question of what a rank displays is deferred to the Ranks session's P2A audit. Nothing blocks either way.
Rejected: waiting entirely (arena loses a pillar for a sequencing nicety); designing rank tiers here (monetization deserves its own audited session).
D-HUBS-04 — records made physical: the plaza is hfrecords furniture (proposed)
Leaderboards, the town crier's stage, and the server-goal monument are
in-world displays of the existing records systems — no new state, pure
presentation of records.db truths.
Rejected: menu-only records (the vision's town crier is a public moment; walls make ordinals mean something).
D-HUBS-05 — the V1 corpus fate table (proposed)
| V1 idea | Fate |
|---|---|
| Player housing districts | Dead — personal islands ARE housing (skyblock substrate) |
| Guild halls in hubs | Dead — the guild island is the guild's home (D-GUILDS-02) |
| PvP hub / event hub | Placed — events world (portal in the rings) |
| Profession hubs | Placed — adventure-island zones own profession space |
| Parkour, taverns, easter eggs, seasonal dressing | Adopted as content-pass flavor |
| Social mini games, tavern activities | Parked — content ideas, no owning system yet |
| Ship battles, pirate-themed events | Deferred → events content pass |
| Pirate reputation | Dead — no reputation system |
| Community voting systems | Parked — needs its own intent check |
| Rotating featured players / showcase leaderboards | Adopted as showcase-surface rotations (contents post-Ranks) |
Rejected: designing parked/dead items now.
Tuning
data/hubs.json— district registry, arena feature slots, showcase surface counts and rotation cadence. Owner-edited; sparse until content passes.
Implementation
Hub construction is world content, not mod work. The systems it surfaces already have owners: portals (world gating), market machinery (hfbazaar + markets canon), records displays (hfrecords reads), crate stage (crates canon), Veylor (quests canon). Showcase-surface rendering is HyUI/world-prop territory — visual claims need in-client evidence, as always.
Open questions
- District layout and art direction — owner/builder content pass.
- Showcase rotation cadence and surface counts — data, post-Ranks.
- Whether the Records Plaza monument reflects the active server goal live (build feasibility) — probe territory.
- Tavern/minigame content — parked until someone owns it.