Hey everyone, the newest map of Skyblock Utopia is finally here!

With this map, we are focusing on redesigning the economy, **introducing Player Skills to replace Item Skills, revamping the Mob Mine, and introducing our new vision of Skyblock: **UHC Skyblock!

You’ll want to take a look at the trailer:

Amazing! Here’s an overview of our changes this map:

Economy Redesign - No more experience economy!

We’ve heard your complaints loud and clear. This map, we are redesigning our economy to have a more balanced feel. We’ve put lots of care into making sure that all parts of the gamemode are balanced and integrate well into each other. Most importantly, we are again redefining how Island Top is determined. Last fall, we introduced the concept of Trophies as a better way to calculate Island Top than placing value blocks on your island. Now that we’ve seen plenty of servers being inspired by this, we figure it’s about time to improve the concept to where we always wanted it to be.

Last map, we introduced Competitions as an awesome way to compete towards objectives against others for rewards. We really liked the concept because it encourages real-time, head-to-head competition against others. However, we saw area for improvement here. Mainly, we came to these conclusions:

  • Objectives should mostly relate to grindy parts of the economy (farming crops, grinding mobs by hand, etc.)
  • Rewards for Competitions were too limited: why go through the effort for just a Supreme Key?

With these things in mind as well as the overwhelmingly negative response to an “experience economy”, we are now introducing Competition Rewards as the sole source of Trophies for /is top!

When a competition ends, the top 3 winners (1-2-3) will each get 3x, 2x, and 1x Trophy respectively. This is the only way to get trophies towards Island Top. What are the advantages of this system, you may ask?

  • The leaderboard is dynamic. Unlike last map, there is no single “best spawner” or “best crop”. You will need to have a variety of farms and grinders on your island to be competitive for /is top.
  • The leaderboard is fair. Results of /is top accurately reflect who is the best overall player, not just who had the most success with one specific niche of the economy (like EXP shops from last season)
  • The leaderboard is fun. You will need to change your strategy/meta from time to time which will help you to explore different areas of gameplay.

To accomodate this new purpose of Competitions, we are making each competition last 8 hours. Additionally, the objective itself will repeat itself three times (so if the objective is “Kill Wolves”, this will appear for 3 consecutive competitions). We believe this is the perfect middle-ground on competition length and will also be fair to users regardless of timezone (US/EU/AU players will all get a fair shot at winning for any given objective).

Altogether, we believe this will be an interesting new way to experience our Skyblock economy, and we hope you agree with us.

UHC Skyblock - Risk with Reward!

Another one of the constant complaints we have had with our Skyblock is it is “too easy” and gets boring quickly. In response to this, we are changing some basic mechanics around to make the gameplay more thrilling, just like Minecraft Hardcore/UHC:

  • Natural regeneration of health is disabled.
  • To regenerate health, you will need to use Golden Apples (not god apples)
  • On death, you will lose half of all your balances (money/exp/mcoins). This applies to all death types (falling from your island, dying in the revamped mob mine, or dying in PvP).
  • Economy changes are designed to increase scarcity of key resources.
  • Farming changes add progression to crop farming (read more below)

Battle Pass Improvements

This map, we are improving our Battle Pass to have challenges which closely follow the player experience, from challenges which relate to early gameplay just starting out to challenges which relate to mid-game and end-game at the later challenges.

Free rewards from the Battle Pass will help you along your journey and help you improve your farms especially (see Progression-Based Farming).

Paid rewards from the Battle Pass will now be multipliers, boosts, and other rewards which are always useful as opposed to our old rewards of just throwing out money/crate keys/top spawners. We think this will make gameplay less boring and more fair.

Progression-Based Farming

With our commitment to keep farming as an important part of the economy, we have found one key problem with typical farming in the past: there is usually “one single crop” which is most lucrative, and players will just start out farming that crop. This is not ideal for the following reasons:

  • It makes farming get boring quickly!
  • Once you start with the “meta” crop, you have no way to improve your farm’s worth.
  • It is too easy to build mega farms right off the start.

To fix these issues, we are implementing progression-based farming in tandem with the Battle Pass:

  • Crops can no longer be purchased from /shop! Instead, you will need to grow your farms manually using renewable resources. This brings back the essence of farming and makes growing your farms from nothing more rewarding.
  • When you start out, you will only have access to the crops which spawn at your island. Crop values grow in increasing order from wheat -> potatos -> carrots. **To get access to these more valuable crops, you will win them as **Free**Battle Pass Rewards** at varying stages of the Battle Pass (25% complete, 50% complete, 75% complete).
  • To make farming and grinding even more interesting, upgradable Chance Drops will make a continued grind worth it.

While these changes may seem radical, we believe they will help to “fix farming”, which has long been a part of our Skyblock which has led to early boredom.

Player Skills - Chance Drops & Abilities!

ITEM SKILLS ARE NO MORE. I repeat, item skills are no more. Don’t worry, however! In its place, we are introducing an improved version of Player Skills.

These skills (Farming, Mining, Slaying) now are permanent values which unlock for your character. You level them up just as before, but now the abilities are tied to your account instead of to an item.

Now, when you level up your Skills, you are rewarded with permanent season-long abilities which make your grind more rewarding. They include:

  • Chance Drops: Increase your percent chance of receiving Chance Drops while farming. See the section below on Chance Drops for more information
  • Mob Coins Chance (Slayer): Increase your percent chance of receiving Mob Coins while grinding.
  • Auto Replant Chance (Farmer): Increase your percent chance of automatically replanting crops you break.
  • Double Drops Chance (Miner): **Increase your percent chance of getting double drops while mining ores in the **revamped Mob Mine.
  • **Stack Slash Chance (Slayer): **Increase your percent chance of killing two mobs instead of one.

We hope that you enjoy this new twist on Skills. We have been playing with the concept for over a year at this point, and think we have finally perfected it.

Chance Drops - Much-needed improvement to grinding!

One of the biggest complaints we’ve received about our previous iterations of Skyblock is that it has gotten boring too quickly. As a part of improving this, we are introducing Chance Drops - a new way of adding progression to grinding.

All crops have “chance drops”, which are very rare special versions of crops. **While they cannot be planted, they are worth **way more money and are extremely valuable. Some of the chance drops for crops include enchanted versions and “runic” versions of items.

While these normally can be obtained as a very low chance, you can increase the chance of getting these by grinding out your Player Skills or by using extremely rare Runic Boosters.

We hope that you enjoy this new twist which will help to add some purpose to grinding skills.

Mob Mine Revamp - Forbidden Miners

We are completely revamping the Mob Mine for UHC Skyblock. This map on Prison we added an area called “The Ozone”. This was a grand experiment for us on how we can add new areas of gameplay which function indepdently of other gameplay elements.

With this revamp, we are changing the way ore/mob drops from the Mob Mine work. Instead of being directly sellable for money, you instead will want to collect these drops and use them at the new Forbidden Miners: special trading NPCs in each mine.

These forbidden miners will allow you to trade your ores for great rewards: rare boosters, special enchants, and even special suits!

Mob Coin Revamp

To accomodate these new gameplay changes, we are reverting “Coins” back to Mob Coins. Now, you will only receive these from grinding mobs. To make this change worth it, we are adding the following to the Mob Coin shop:

  • Rotating rewards: the rewards available in the /transfer shop will change daily.
  • Better rewards: the rewards available in the /transfer shop will include exclusive items and “pay-to-win” rewards.

🥇 Payouts 🥇

For this fifth map, we are offering PayPal + Buycraft payouts to the top 5 island owners on /island top based on weekly trophies! Here is the breakdown:

Island Top #1: $50 PayPal + $30 Buycraft

Island Top #2: $20 PayPal + $20 Buycraft

Island Top #3: $15 PayPal + $15 Buycraft

Island Top #4: $10 PayPal + $10 Buycraft

Island Top #5: $5 PayPal + $5 Buycraft

Conclusion

As you can see, we have been hard at work figuring out how to make our Skyblock gamemode the best it can possibly be. We hope you give these changes a shot and see the kind of vision we have for Skyblock. We have been working long and hard on these changes, and know that they will lead to a better Skyblock experience. We know we aren’t perfect, but each reset we strive to make the best gameplay we possibly can. Come check out the map on the **27th of March at 3PM EST, **and make sure to play with your favorite media and partners! Stay tuned for awesome new updates, events, and more!