Hello Everyone,

I'm a tad late on posting this, but this is going to be a very, very comprehensive thread on what will and will not happen on ECC's Skyblock.


First, let's address the elephant in the room. AEM.

AEM is the server we acquired last year, with the intent of making sure their community stays alive. Our second goal was to include their servers in our network. Hopefully by hosting the AEM forums on our servers and welcoming many of their players into our server has done that first part.
The second, is what Skyblock aims to do.


AEM

We're adding a near duplicate of the AEM configurations and ranks to ECC's Skyblock, with a few modifications to ensure longevity (stability is critical for ECC in general).

Here's a list of things that have been copied over from AEM (non-exhaustive)

• Skyblock Donor Ranks
• Skyblock Challenges
• Skyblock Kits
• Past donations (Skyblock ranks)

Here's a list of things that cannot be copied over from AEM (non-exhaustive)

• Player data (saves, inventories, etc)
• Skyblock Islands
• Majority of the plugins
• Custom data/systems AEM developed (though, rest assured we have them saved)

The reason we could not copy any of the above, or other things you may find missing, is that it met one or more of the following criteria:

• Plugin was out of date/required more work than needed to update
• Plugin had issues with the setup/system that required AEM's specific environment
• Would have given AEM players an unfair advantage over ECC players
• Caused incompatibilities/conflicts with our infrastructure
• Security/Exploits caused by it
• Does not fit the ECC standards

I hope that the AEM players can understand that we did our best to include the most important parts for them.

Progress

Progress can be tracked via our Jira issue tracker, (https://jira.ecocitycraft.com) which will have a close to up to date list of things that I have to get done before release, in addition to a few things that I can't publicly share (like setting up certain backend servers, and re-doing a bit of the work that I accidentally did in reverse)

I'm still on track for a release during the first week of April. Now, whether or not that release is donors only, or whether it's the full public release is yet to be seen. I need to have a bit more testing done to see what's going on and how I can fix the existing few bugs.


Beta Server

As I need to test things, the production skyblock server is open for all players, and can be accessed by doing /server skyblock in game.

Now, as this is a beta there are some caveats. The server may reset at any point, with or without warning.
There will also be a full reset before the public release to prevent any players having head starts.


Server Mechanics

Below are subsections explaining the mechanics and how the server will interact with the rest of the network.


Voting

Each time you vote, you'll get a reward (if applicable) on each of the servers. On main you will get a netherstar. On Skyblock, you'll get a Vote Key. The vote key on skyblock allows you to open a vote chest which contains a series of items that you can win (similar to the star crates, but with less valuables)

Money

Skyblock's nature of automation and systems that break the stability and conventions on the main server put us into a very hard spot. Transferring money into skyblock had to be changed and limited, and transferring out of it could not be done by a player.

Andrew and I spent a good 4 hours discussing what to do and what to make Skyblock worthwhile for players in the main server.

We came up with the following:

Skyblock is based on island levels. They track your progress, and usually are a good representative of your effort. Because of this, I came up with the mechanic of a progressive reward. For each 10 Island Levels you get, you'll get 15k on the forums.
There is one limitation with this. Team islands. Teams will only receive 15k to the owner of the island, not the members. It's up to the leader to distribute the reward accordingly, and is not our responsibility.

The reason for this, is because you could have 10 accounts on your island, and each get 15k. You just made 150k from doing the work for 15k's time. Hence why we have to do it this way.

Now, that gains you a short term benefit (15k per hour ish). What about the long term?
I'll explain the long term in the Resets section, as it's related to that more.

Regarding money into skyblock, it'll work as follows.

Skyblock has its worth values exactly one tenth of main. This means that block you sold in main for $0.05, is now $0.005. Because of this, Essentials displays it a bit weird. (see below)

Note how the "at $0 each" is actually wrong. Dirt is worth $0.005 on skyblock, and essentials truncates this. It'll seem weird, but trust me it actually has a value. (worth shows the same)

Because of this, we can't allow you to directly transfer your millions of ECD 1:1 into skyblock, you'd destroy the economy instantly.

For this reason, the exchange ratio INTO skyblock is 15:1. Meaning 15 ECD on main is 1 ECD on skyblock.
You're probably asking where the extra 5 comes from. That ladies and gentlemen, is a tax. Sorry not sorry.

Resets

Skyblock servers must reset to be successful. Players need a repeatability, and that's something we can't offer players on the main server. There's no feasible way to reset the entire server.
On skyblock, this is possible. And we're going to follow the following reset schedule

December 12th 2018 (Full Skyblock Reset)
December 12th 2019 (Full Skyblock Reset)
December 12th 2020 (Full Skyblock Reset)
and so on...

Yes, this does mean that this year's cycle is shorter, but that's something we'll have to live with.

For the long term players, we'll be having some serious rewards for the top 10 players listed on /is top at the end of the reset period.

I can't give exact details, but there will be real life rewards (Phones, Game consoles, etc) as well as in game rewards (ECD, Feature Giftcards, etc)

Player Markets

Those of you who have been in the beta server, you'll have noticed the player market.
Similar to the player market on the main server, players will have the chance to sell things from these plots. With one major difference. You can't rent them. All shops will be auctioned off, one month at a time, one month in advance. This is to prevent the "shop squatting" as I call it, in the main server. The auctions will be done using your bank balance, and you can bid as much as you like, or as little as you like. Highest bid wins.

The first 8 auctions will commence one week before the release of skyblock to give players some time to plan out what they want to do.

Automation

Skyblock's major feature is automation, being able to automate something will give you supremacy over a manual worker.
Now, I can't give full details regarding how the rules on automation will go, but they are basically as follows;
If you can automate it via 100% minecraft mechanics, it's allowed.
Automating via any 3rd party programs/mods(macromod included) is illegal.

I'll also touch on redstone here, as it's going to be used by the heavy automation experts.
Redstone, is mostly unlimited. If you crash the server or severely lag it, I'm coming for you and will ask you to tone it down.
Now, the catch.
Redstone will not run when someone on your island team is not on your island. This is to prevent mass redstone farms from basically being a set and forget.

Leaderboards

Some of you may have noted that /is top and /baltop are disabled for player use. These commands are equivalent to /baltop on the main server. It lags. A lot.

To supplement this, I've made a rankings system that should update every 24hrs with each island's level, balance, challenges completed, and team members. You can see it at https://skyblock.ecocitycraft.com.

The reason for this, is more on the edge of server stability. If you want to know a team's island level, just look at the prefix before their rank in game. That's their island level. It updates real time (provides they do /is level)

Questions

I've left some space here for people to ask questions that I either haven't answered here: https://www.ecocitycraft.com/forum/threads/skyblock-questions-thread.175047/
or in this post.

Please tag me in a reply to the questions thread, and I'll make sure to add the question/answer to this post.