Checking if a block was placed by the world generator or something/someone

How could I go about checking this? Right now my NPCs would likely cause mass destruction on a populated server because they'll destroy everything.

 

hmmm the only thing i can think of would be to store the location of each and every player placed block which is VERY unrealistic as for ur problem, just set the NPC's to only destroy naturaly generated blocks (grass, dirt, stone, sand, sandstone, ice, gravel, all ores). If someone builds there house out of sandstone and grass, well its time to upgrade

 

I can't do that because the NPCs are supposed to get blocks and progress up the normal tech tree, starting with wood and going up. That would result in a large number of blocks in people's stuff being targeted.

 

The only way is to store all the player modifications to the world. Highly impractical unless you have an extremely massive and fast hard-drive to store all of this data. An alternative would be making them obey some sort of regions, and providing players with a way to 'protect' their houses from NPCs by defining a player-region the NPCs won't bother.

 

Maybe you could make all blocks placed by players have a specific damage value but it would cause problems with some blocks like wool.

 

I thought there was a function that returned if a block was placed by a player or not... (it's used by Endermen?)

Edit: Turns out there isn't. Plugins that claim to do this use LogBlock integration.

 

Only 2 solution I can think of:

1. Log every block a player places.
2. Somehow use the generator to get all the blocks which are placed by the generator. Then check if the block broken was placed by the generator or later placed by a player

 

You could hook into the LogBlock API, that might help you.