every now and then i come back to this idea for a minecraft server where, rather than new players spawning at global world spawn, each player would be given a random, unique spawn point, suitably far away from every other spawn. to make it harder for players to meet up, the server would lie about the world coordinates (telling each player that their own spawn is close to (0,0)) and prevent chat messages appearing to players who are too far from the sender. but then, modded items would allow these restrictions to be overcome; say, a radio that can communicate with other radios over long distances, or a compass that points to the true (0,0).
the experience then would be a multiplayer server that starts singleplayer, with finding and meeting others - likely over very long distances - a major part of the arc of the game. i think it'd be interesting to see what people do with that.
now the sneaky thing is that you could hide this in some unrelated modpack or something: you think you're creating a singleplayer world, you're actually joining this secretly multiplayer one. i think that'd be a fun reveal (imagine exploring and coming across structures that look suspiciously like a player-built base!), but it would probably be against every terms of service so. maybe not worth it.
