Community Roundup Blog #1

Hey everyone, today we hosted our first community roundup on our Discord. Community roundups are where we discuss future updates, changes to the server and allow you to give us feedback on what we should change on Chasecraft! The first roundup went very well, with 55 people attending! This blog post aims to cover most of the topics we went over during our first roundup.

These community roundups will be held every month, with our next roundup being December 18th @ 5 PM EST! We hope you can join us in then.

Anyway, let's get onto all of the topics that we discussed during the community roundup.

Chasecraft's base version is current 1.16.5, however, that's not the latest version of Minecraft! Not long ago, Mojang released the Caves & Cliffs Update (Part 1), but Chasecraft is not on that version. We made the decision to make all future Chasecraft resets and updates on 1.17.1.

As some of you might know, whenever we'd update a server to an entirely new version, we had to reset it. The recently released Skyblock server was built in a way that allowed us to ensure that we didn't need to reset it to update it to a new version, that being said we're able to update Skyblock from 1.16.5 to 1.17.1 without resetting the server (meaning you'll keep all of your items, islands, currencies and more).

We're currently in the process of testing 1.17.1 on Skyblock with our quality assurance team. We believe that it'll be ready to be released in the next few weeks, before November ends so expect Skyblock to be updated to 1.17.1 (without a reset) very soon!

Just like Skyblock, we want to update Creative to 1.17.1 without having to reset it like we did when we updated it to 1.16.5. At the moment, updating Creative to 1.17.1 is at the back of our list of priorities for moving Chasecraft to 1.17.1, therefore you shouldn't expect Caves & Cliffs blocks to be available on Creative until early next year (probably in around 2 to 3 months).

We've been working on resetting Survival and Prison for a while now. With those resets, we'll update both servers to 1.17.1. Both resets (with 1.17.1) should be out before the end of the year.

We're currently working on three updates for Skyblock, one fairly small one and two large updates - then there's another two updates that are currently in the planning stages. I'll give a quick rundown on these new updates - blog posts more information and details will be published when the updates are released.

• Stacked Spawners and Items
  • Much like stacked mobs, we're soon going to be adding stacked spawners and items to Skyblock.
  • You'll be able to easily add and remove spawners through a GUI and stack all mob drop and ore/mineral items.
• Barrels & Furniture Update
  • Soon we'll be releasing a large update that'll introduce barrels and furniture to Skyblock. Barrels will automatically collect specific items within a chunk (like a collection chest) and then automatically sell it every few minutes. Furniture will consist of mostly decoration related models such as chairs and tables - some will have uses.
  • Many aspects of barrels can be controlled, for example you can take the items that it collects out of it or turn off the auto sell feature.
  • Barrels will be obtained through the Barrel Shop, you will have to wait a few hours for a barrel to be 'crafted', or you can 'craft' it instantly using Chase Coins. Furniture can be purchased using in game Skyblock money.
• Blacksmith Update
  • The blacksmith update will add a ton of useful tools, weapons and armor sets, with each tool, weapon or armor set requiring you to obtain a specific amount of rare items in order to craft them.
  • Some of the items you can craft include a Construction Wand that'll allow you to place hundreds of blocks all at once through the click of a button or armor that doubles the mob drops from the mobs you kill while wearing the armour.
• Enderdragon Update
  • The Enderdragon update is an update that we currently have in the plans. We'd like to allow players to spawn the enderdragon, fight it by themselves or with their island team and get some really cool rewards out of it. We plan to change the regular Vanilla Minecraft Enderdragon boss fight experience.
• PvP Update
  • We understand that the PvP arena is pretty boring at the moment and that envoys can only be obtained by people who have strong armor, weapons and lots of potions - we're coming up with a plan for an update to the PvP arena that'll completely change that, adding in new events and more PvE related things.

Those are all of the updates we are working on and the updates that we have planned for Skyblock. So far, the first three updates are currently being worked on and should all release by the end of this year (if not, one might release early January next year) - the remaining two updates are in the plans and have no release date in sight, so don't expect anything out of them anytime soon!

Moving onto our Survival and Prison servers, as mostly everyone is aware, we've been hard at work on a Survival reset. I'm happy to say that this reset is practically finished and currently going through a few phases of testing with our internal and quality assurance teams, we're aiming to have the Survival reset out by the end of this month. What you would have not known is that we've been working on a Prison reset for the last few weeks as well, which will add quite a few new features and drastically change up some of the existing features.

Some of the new features that Prison will add is a ton of more custom enchantments for your pickaxe, a gem shop (not going to give any info on this yet though!), an AFK Mine where you can auto mine blocks whilst asleep/away from keyboard. We're also changing up the A to Z ranking system within Prison, we're moving to levels where you'll be able to rank up to level 1,000, there will also be 100 prestiges that you can progress through.

A reset does mean that all your current progress on both Survival and Prison will be wiped, so you'll have to start over again - but this does allow us to update to the newest technology and add so much more like having the servers be 1.17.1. We'll have blog posts that cover more information for each individual reset out before they release.

Minigames were once incredibly popular, however, as time went on and we turned our attention away from them, they became a jumbled mess of broken games. Right now, our team is too busy with the Skyblock updates and the Prison and Survival resets as well as much needed network-wide bug fixes that we are unable to support Minigames during this time.

We feel that it's much more important to focus on Skyblock, Prison and Survival instead of Minigames due to the fact that all of those servers are much more popular at this point in time, therefore, we'll be temporarily shutting Minigames down on November 30th.

On November 30th you will no longer be able to access Minigames.

Note how I said we'll be temporarily shutting them down though! Once we are comfortable that Skyblock, Prison, Survival and Creative are working perfectly, we'll be able to move our attention over to Minigames (whilst still focusing on the other servers) to ensure that it's developed better and functions properly for the long term to come. We anticipate that we'll start development on a reworked Minigames in January and have it ready about 4 to 6 months after then - so please do not expect anything to come out of Minigames for a very long time.

That concludes the community roundup blog post. During the roundup, we did ask those who were there for feedback on the server and we received a lot of great suggestions and ideas for change that we can implement - we'll be looking into a lot of those over the next few days. We won't cover that feedback in these blog posts however.

We can't wait to share the future with you guys, from the 3 upcoming Skyblock updates, to the Prison and Survival resets as well as our move over to 1.17.1! It is sad to announce the temporary shut down of Minigames, however we are confident that it'll come back stronger than ever.

Thank you for reading, we'll see you on December 18th @ 5 PM EST for our next community roundup.