Hey everyone!

After months of planning, development, and private testing, we’re finally ready to announce that Skyblock Utopia **will be releasing its **BETA MAP **next Saturday, May 28th, at **3PM EST!

With this complete ground-up overhaul of Skyblock Utopia, we have three main priorities:

  1. Listening to *our community *and providing the gamemodes you are used to: no surprises with this revamp, but requests being answered and improvements all-around!
  2. Providing an engaging, classic Skyblock experience like the classic Skyblock Utopia gamemode.
  3. Introducing meaningful improvements to the Skyblock gamemode, bringing innovative new features to the gamemode.

Or, to put it more clearly, we are listening to you and working to bring Skyblock back to the standard you expect.

⏰ Logistics ⏰

The OPEN BETA of Skyblock Utopia will launch on Saturday, May 28th at 3PM EST. It will be a short map which will run until Tuesday, May 31st at 5PM EST. The main purpose of this map will be to find issues with the server and test stability on a larger scale before our all-out release.

Island Top will be recorded at the end of the map on May 31st. The payout values will be announced in our Discord, so make sure to join!

🤔 Skyblock Overview: The Basics 🤔

For Skyblock, the most important updates to note are our approach to:

  • Economy Design: A proper server-managed economy, but with interesting price fluctuations to provide endless different rotating economy types.
  • **Custom Enchants: **An innovative combination of new custom enchant types with a streamlined mechanism for purchasing and improving your gear sets.
  • **Spawners and Farming: **Solid stacking mechanisms and useful gear abilities make for a smooth and engaging grinding/farming gameplay.
  • **Island Top: **A balanced approach across our different strategies to provide a good competitive environment while also allowing for new leaders to emerge each week.
  • Other Improvements: Top-to-bottom improvements for all the ways you play Skyblock!

💸 Economy Design 💸

With Skyblock Utopia, we are providing slight improvements on top of a standard economy design which emphasizes both farming and grinding stacked spawner mobs.

⏳ Daily Deals ⏳

In order to provide some more interesting dynamics to the economy, every day up to 7 different items receive buffs to their sell prices! This means up to 4 items are selected with a positive buff (meaning you will receive more money from selling them to /shop per items), and up to 3 are selected with a negative buff (meaning you will receive less money from selling them to /shop). You can see the current daily deals (server-wide) with /deals! We hope that this interesting mechanic provides an exciting new twist to the much-loved standard server-wide /shop, which provides the simplicity of allowing you to always buy or sell whichever items you want.

🧟‍♀️ PvE 🧟‍♀️

The first area you will likely start out with on your Skyblock journey is the PvE world at /warp mine. This is the main PvE area which is offered during beta, but it will connect to more spawn worlds at launch. In order to gain enough resources to start building your own farm on your island, you will want to kill mobs for EXP and break crops or mine ores to sell to /shop for money.

👨🏻‍🌾 Farming 👨🏻‍🌾

The next task you will likely want to build out is a starter farm. Farming crops is a great way to earn money on SB Utopia, and once you have enough money started to build a farm, you’ll want to do so! Importantly, all kinds of useful skull buffs can be unlocked on your armor and hoe to improve your farming experience, including Replant for auto-replant and Telepath for auto-pickup.

🐷 Stacked Mobs/Spawners 🐷

Finally, we have the typical stacked mobs and spawners which can be used to build overpowered grinders. Similar to past SB Utopia, spawner mobs are a one-hit kill, but now you can toggle the kill effects and sounds off with /settings if you wish to have a less eventful experience. For building AFK grinders, only Lava, Fall Damage, and Cactus **(for ghasts only) count as damage sources that will harm or kill a stacked mob. If there are any damage sources missing which prevent you from building an important type of an AFK grinder, please make sure to report it during beta! Similar to farming, there are many useful skull buffs for grinding mobs, including **Telepath for auto-pickup, Coin Bee for a Mob Coin multiplier, Lucky Golem for mine key multipliers, and **Wolf Pack **for a multiplier on how many mobs you kill at once!

💀 Skull Gear - Overhauled Custom Enchants! 💀

For Custom Enchants, we are introducing **Skull Gear: **custom gear you can upgrade with EXP!

When you first spawn in, you will receive one set of skull gear (armor and tools). If you have a rank kit, you can claim that for a different set with some starter upgrades.

In order to manage your skull gear, you can type /buffs while it is equipped and click the piece you want to upgrade. There are many different buffs which range in their abilities, from PvP enchants to multipliers and other utility buffs. This exciting new gear system should provide a balance between the old Item Skills system on Utopia and the types of Custom Enchants that are exciting for PvP. We hope you enjoy this new gear setup!

🦄 Custom Containers 🦄

For Skyblock Utopia, we are introducing two types of custom containers to help you manage your crop and mob drops: Magnet Chests and Smart Chests.

Both of these custom containers collect drops in a 8x8x8 block radius from where the block is placed. This is a change from the per-chunk behavior of past Utopia, but should help give you better granularity for building multiple different farms within a small amount of space.

🧲 Magnet Chests 🧲

Magnet Chests are the entry-level mechanism for collecting drops: they are a standard chest with 3 rows of inventory space which picks up nearby crop and mob drops. These are easier to obtain and can be used in combination with **Sell Wands **to manage your farm.

👨‍🔬 Smart Chests 👨‍🔬

Smart Chests are te higher-end mechanism for collecting drops. They have 5 slots of space, each which can hold one type of drop. Once you set up a Smart Chest with the drops you want, it has infinite storage for the types you have set up. With one click, you can sell all of the contents of a given item type!

🏆 Island Top 🏆

For Island Top, spaeners have a week attached to them when they enter the game (e.g the time you purchase the spawner or win it from a crate, it is a “Week 1” or “Week 2” spawner based on when you obtain the spawner).

**All spawners work and spawn mobs**, but only the week’s spawners count towards island top. This means that you will need to obtain new spawners each week in order for them to count for Island Top! We will be testing this leaderboard style for the Beta Map, and hopefully this new style is a success!

For the Beta Map, we will be announcing the payouts for the short map in #payouts, so stay tuned to learn about the prizes for winning /is top for the BETA!

🪄 Other Improvements 🪄

We’ve also introduced many top-to-bottom improvements to Utopia. These include:

  • A comprehensive /settings system which allows you to toggle on/off many notifications and effects.
  • An improved flight time system which only decreases your time while you are on your island. Ranks get flight time in their /kits.
  • A new daily missions system!
  • A comprehensive Credits virtual currency which can be used to purchase Ranks, GKits,  Crate Keys, and more!
  • A player level metric which tracks how far you have come in Skyblock. Based on your player level, many crate rewards improve in value!

If you made it this far, thank you for checking out our changelog for Skyblock Utopia V2 Beta! We’re really excited for one of our favorite gamemodes to make a proper return this summer, and we hope you join us on Saturday at 3PM EST to check it out!