Agriculture

The server economy seems pretty well balanced, but that might not be the case later on. For those that do not know, lapis is worth fifty dollars each, but everything else is worth only fifty cents. This is because people are encouraged to trade with each other rather than sell items to the server. This could be a problem especially with farmed goods. Usually, people make farms on their claims and sell their crops to the server, but rarely do people sell crops or make a prophet through selling crops and farmed goods to players. This is because most players are self sufficient and can farm enough food to sustain themselves. People do not waist cash by buying other people's farmed goods. Also, lapis is actually rarer than gold, and even though lapis ore drops at least five pieces of lapis from it, it is still not a good way to make a prophet, because lapis, unlike farmed goods, is irreplaceable. Once a lot of people start joining the server, and the main mines get mined out and the lapis is all gone, people will start having a real difficulty making cash. If somebody manages to find diamonds and makes a diamond sword and enchants it, he might not be able to sell it for a high price, because there would be only a very small amount of cash in the economy. The people who will get the worst deal of all is the noobs and new members joining the server, because it will be especially hard for them to mine and stuff. This is why farmed items should be able to have a higher price then other items. For example, cocoa beans should be worth three dollars each instead of one dollar. The same goes for items like carrots, potatoes, wheat, apples, and sugarcane. Like this people will have a reliable way to make money. The reason this will work is because people need a fairly large area to make a decent farm. This means that they will need to claim that area to prevent griefing. Like this, people will have to start with a small farm and work hard to make enough cash to buy more claim blocks. People also will be restrained from making giant automated farms, because that counts as a lag machine. Also, people will have better stuff to do then sit around their base all day and wait for their crops to grow. People can go out and adventure / pvp / build / trade with others, and by the time they get back, most of the crops in their farm would have grown up. This is how come a farm based economy could work better than a lapis based one.