I feel like it’s been quite some time since I’ve done anything with this site, I don’t really mind it though because as far as I’m concerned the site is nearly complete aside from some smaller pages that I’m not super motivated to finish off. My hyperfixation of the last four months have been Minecraft, not really the playing of it but the development of a mod which I hope I’ll continue to be able to develop despite my changing life situation (moving, uni, etc). The mod is far from being complete, I’d hoped to have finished a playable test version of it before the end of the year but that goal is looked further and further out there as time goes on so I’ll just include some screenshots and hope that suffices. That said it is open source and constantly being committed to because I’m a little paranoid my PC may one day just blow up and I’m not in the mood to lose more than a days worth of progress at a time.

The mod I’ve been working on is what I hope to be something of an RPG game made in Minecraft. It’s been heavily based on my beloved Hypixel Skyblock, initially I was just going to copy the whole thing but as time has gone on I’ve decided that I’m better than a team of developers on a server tested by 10s of thousands of people so I’ve kind of gone rogue even if for now it’s just the basic building blocks. I’ve always hoped to play something grindy like an MMORPG but singleplayer so I’m not afraid some guy can flick a switch to make me lose all of my progress yet most of those kind of games haven’t really interested me. I still might check out Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning when I have some free time and it’s on sale, I’ve heard good things about it, I just hope it can run well on modern(ish) hardware.

I kind of want to use this opportunity to rectify some of the things I think Skyblock did wrong. I’m pretty sure I’ve already commented on it before but the recent content drops aren’t all that good in my opinion, the moment you add a character called David Hunterborough something has gone wrong but even before that, I’d say after the Rift but even before that signs were starting to show. I do think however that every single major mining update has been a slam dunk, Dwarven Mines, Crystal Hollows and then Mineshafts could be their own game and I’d probably play it so I don’t really want to change anything about that. I might make Crystal Hollows not randomly generated though, I’m not too sure at the moment but I generally don’t find the interesting part about them to be that they’re random, that more often than not ends up being a pain and since the player will be needing to generate a new Crystal Hollows everytime they leave and join the area it may also be unviable performance-wise. Not too sure how I’m going to do instanced dimensions yet though so the performance thing might not really be a problem. Dungeons were also basically a slam dunk to me so I want to create some of that kind of content (perhaps even the two cancelled dungeons??), who knows. I also kind of want to make some non-procedural dungeons at some point for story stuff though all of this is very speculative and far out so I’m not too sure how achievable the goals are. Fishing, while not as well done as combat and mining is pretty good too in my opinion, just a little grindy so I’d probably drastically increase EXP gains for that. I’m not sure if it’s still the case as I’m yet to check out the Lotus Atoll but back in the day getting fishing 26 for the soul whip felt absolutely ridiculous and made it very obvious how mechanically uninteresting fishing is. I’m not too sure if the solution to this is some sort of fishing minigame like Stardew Valley or the fantastic Starcatcher or just boosting EXP rates so I guess I’ll have to find out when it’s more complete. Farming is probably going to get radically overhauled, I don’t have plans to add stuff like building farms (though I might add some sort of greenhouse equivalent because that’s really cool), so I might just leave wheat fields in the world or something for people to farm. Not too sure but I just don’t want it to end up like the mindless slog it is right now. Foraging might get modified? I really quite enjoyed the actual gameplay of the latest foraging stuff aside from hunting so I might leave it as is. As for enchanting, alchemy, hunting, carpentry and taming, I might just scrap them. I definitely want to do something with enchanting but just not in the way they’ve done it where it’s a daily slog and I think hunting has some depth to it so I might keep some fragment of it too. I’d actually thought of combining the two so that you might get enchanting shards or something instead of attribute shards. And then maybe you play a little minigame like the current enchanting ones to apply it to an item? I’ve actually already gone ahead and basically scrapped EXP so it’s really between that and crafting books and getting them from mob drops, maybe all three. Carpentry, taming and alchemy on the other hand have nothing, I’m not even sure why taming and carpentry are skills but they’re getting the boot. I’m not too big on temporary boosts in general so cookies and god pots are definitely not coming back, same with potions or at least not in the way they are right now (especially if I remove alchemy). I also might just add slayer as a mainline skill and expand it with the normal slayer bosses and then some smaller town specific tasks, like a Missives situation. I also want to give Maddox and Aatrox a bigger role in the story as I think that line about them being from Scarleton is super interesting and it basically being a throwaway was a missed opportunity.

That leads pretty well into the story which I intend to make sweeping changes to too, I definitely want to loosely base it on Skyblock as I think much of the world building is actually pretty strong but I just don’t think there are enough quests or quests can be properly interacted with. I don’t want every quest to be a super serious your choices matter type situation but I definitely want a few where the player makes a proper impact on how the story progresses. Since the mod is designed to be singleplayer (or you and like a few friends) I can also make quest progress worldwide and actually modify the world based on choices which will be fun. Not sure how much extra work that’d give me though so I’ll have to look into that. Baseline I want to have proper consequences for picking your Nether faction. I might even put the Hyperion (or a Hyperion type magic weapon) behind joining the mage faction and then some berserker equivalent behind the barbarians. Aside from just items I don’t want to say I want to lean into the race-war aspect but I definitely want to do something of the sort, just kind of wondering how I’d go about making people willing to join the racist side.

For combat and movement I’ll probably just make it a lot slower. Initially I got rid of weapon cooldowns to give a more 1.8.9 combat setup but I’ve recently reverted that and I kind of want to do a mix of old and new combat. I’ve removed jump crits and normal Minecraft crits in general as Skyblock has its own crit setup that I prefer but aside from that I haven’t done too much to the main mechanics. Currently I’m using the vanilla crit sound and effects when you crit but I’m a little concerned that’d get super annoying when you have 100% crit chance so we’ll just have to see. I definitely want to make a lot more weapon variety, currently I have daggers which massively buff ferocity and cleavers which cleave as well as the usual vanilla stuff. I’m considering making ferocity a stat specific to the dagger weapon type like how cleave is for cleavers but I’m not too sure about that, the goal is to create more combat variety and interesting builds for me so we’ll have to see which path best works for that. On the opposite end of the spectrum I’ve considered adding cleave as it’s own attribute to separate it from cleavers but I’m also not too sure about that. I’ve already noticed I have way too many stats as is even after merging sea creature chance, trophy chance and treasure chance into fishing fortune so we’ll have to see how that ends up going. For movement I’ve massive nerfed speed and will be nerfing the AOTE when I get around to it too, I hope this will make the world seem larger because in modern Skyblock I rarely look at the world as I’m so high in the air just getting around. My only worry with this is that it’d make optimising movement in dungeons which is probably the best part for me much less interesting. Whether I massively buff player speed in dungeons or just design dungeons differently will have to be seen. I’ll probably also nerf the grappling hook into the ground by not allowing it to hook to the air, this isn’t just for the movement speed issue but also because I want to make it more of a combat weapon. I think it’d be really rad to be shot up into the air by a boss and then have the player be forced to grapple down before they get hit by an airborne attack, perhaps even getting an extra reward by dealing extra damage based on their movement speed?? I also want to give shields some sort of function though definitely not complete damage negation. Perhaps damage negation and knockback for normal blocks with a perfectly timed block negating all damage and giving a temporary damage boost for the next hit would spice up combat. Just shots in the dark though (though I did look into the parrying thing and honestly it doesn’t seem too hard).

I’m not too sure how legal it is to just copy someone else’s idea so you can make your own version like this but I haven’t stolen any code, assets or builds so I hope I’m fine. Actually, despite this being my first Minecraft mod, I’d say the building and pixel art aspect is actually the harder part to me. I’ve never been much of an artistically gifted person so it’s a fun change of pace to have to make this stuff even if so far they unfortunately look quite awful. I’m hoping I’ll get better as I go on but even if I don’t I’m not too bothered when this is just a passion project for me.

P.S. Most of the stuff I talked about here isn’t made yet, right now it’s only really the basic stuff (stats, some weapons, block regen, quests system, fishing, abilities, skills). Most of the work over the past few months has been on stripping out normal Minecraft stuff rather than implementing new features of my own but I’m hoping I’m quickly approaching a point where I’ll be able to be more creative with what I’m making. I also haven’t proofread this at all, I’ll do it when I have some images to add (#YOLO).