SkyBlock Patch 0.9 - Election Event & Community Shop

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Hello!
Welcome to the Community Center!

Remember Mayor Clerk Seraphine and her friends Worker Emma & Worker Xavier? They finished their project! And it's big!

In a Nutshell:
  • Election Event every SkyBlock year
    • Includes 9 candidates, each with 3 perks
    • 3 new special calendar events (Fishing Festival, National Mining Month & Mythological Rituals)
  • New Community Shop NPC to spend SkyBlock Gems
  • Special Community Upgrades including:
    • Upgrade your private island size up to 2.1x
    • Increase your co-op size to 8 players
    • Minion Slots
  • The Booster Cookie, the ultimate SkyBlock buff
  • City Projects for the community to work towards village upgrades
  • FIRE Sales for exclusive cosmetics!
Keep reading to learn all about it!

Election Event

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The Mayor Elections is a new calendar event which happens every SkyBlock year.

It's fairly simple! Each time it happens: 5 candidates are offered and you vote for your favorite!

There is a pool of 8 regular candidates + 3 special* candidates.
Regular Candidates:
  • Barry the wizard
  • Marina the fisherwoman
  • Cole the miner
  • Aatrox, Maddox's brother-in-law
  • Paul the dungeon explorer
  • Diana the mythological pet carer
  • Foxy the event girl
  • Diaz the economist
* Special candidates only rarely choose to run for mayor.

Each candidate can offer up to 3 perks at once. All candidates start with 1 perk during their first election and have a chance to stack up to 3 perks if they are a returning candidate.

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Election Booth

The Election Room is open for about 4 real life days, then it closes for about 1 day.
During the time the booth is open, you may change your vote.
Once the election ends, the candidate with the most votes becomes Mayor for the next SkyBlock year and they grant their perk to every SkyBlock player for that time period.

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Aatrox

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Cole

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Diaz

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Marina

Marina also brings some permanent changes to fishing. Check them out below:
  • Sea creature AI improved
  • Sea creature health increased across the board
  • +35% XP from sea creatures
  • Removed defence from Legendary fishing monsters
  • Prismarine bow can now damage sea creatures
  • Ink wand now explodes on impact instead of only damaging monsters it collides with
  • Fixed Sea Witch damaging itself with potions
  • Removed time and bait requirements from Sea Witch
  • Fixed Guardian beams damaging players through walls
  • Fixed Guardian beam visuals being off
  • Made Grinch more common
  • Slow down sea creatures slightly while in water
  • Fixed double drop exploit with Ink Wand and other weapons
  • Fixed Grinch in Sea Creature Guide
  • Fixed pets display in Sea Creature Guide
  • Sponge armour now has 1.8 Sea Creature Chance
  • Made Sea Creatures immune to intimidation
    • Developer Note: this solves the issue where end game players fish up a sea monster and it immediately targets the nearest player (who is often lower in HP and armor) sometimes killing them instantly. If you're pulling a monster out of the water, it's going to be angry, it's definitely going to attack you.

Community Shop
The Community Shop is a new, special shop run by Elizabeth in the Community Center.

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New Shop inside the Community Center

The shop offers many functionalities, divided into 6 tabs:
  • City Projects
  • Account & Profile Upgrades
  • Booster Cookies
  • Bits Shop
  • FIRE Sales
  • Hypixel Ranks
They all do different things, so let's go through all of them!

City Projects
City Projects allow the community to work and contribute towards upgrades to the village and beyond.

We're starting off with two projects: the Blacksmith Workspace and the Builder's House.

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Project: Builder's House

Each project has several components which you can contribute. Once enough contributions are accumulated throughout the community, the project goes into BUILDING mode, after which we'll shortly release the associated update to the village.

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Blacksmith project: Renovations component

Apart from helping release the upgrade to the village, contributing grants you:
  1. A unique personal bonus
  2. A decent amount of Fame * We'll talk about Fame later. *
City Project contributions count for all your profiles and you may only contribute once per component.

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Account & Profile Upgrades
Community Shop upgrades are a new set of improvements exclusive to the community shop.
The upgrades are split into two categories:
  1. Profile upgrades, which apply to one profile and are shared with your co-op
  2. Account upgrades, which apply to all your profiles but only for you
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Community Upgrades​

Here are all the upgrades available on release:

Profile Upgrades
  • Island Size: Expand your private island's size to 2.1x the default size​
  • Minion Slots: Obtain up to +5 minion slots​
  • Guests Limit: Increase your island's guest limit up to +5 guests​
  • Co-op Slots: Invite up to +3 players to your co-op​
  • Coins Allowance: Each co-op member gains a daily coin bonus of up to 50k coins​
Account Upgrades
  • Ender Chest Pages: Use up to +8 ender chest pages (3 rows each)
  • Talisman Bag: Unlock up to +6 talisman bag slots
  • Sack of Sacks: Add +5 slots to your Sack of Sacks
  • Magic Find: Gain up to +5 permanent Magic Find
  • Bazaar Flipper: Run more concurrent Bazaar orders and reduce Bazaar sell taxes
Unlocking a community upgrade is done in 2 steps.

You first start an upgrade, then there's a pre-defined upgrade time, and once it's ended you claim the upgrade to activate it. All the upgrades are tiered with different amounts of tiers for each type.

For example, the first Minion Slot upgrade lasts 1 (real life) day.

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Minion Slots I upgrade

You can have two upgrades running at the same time: one Profile and one Account. Remember, profile upgrades are shared with your co-op, so anyone on a co-op profile may pick and start the profile upgrade.

Most of the community upgrades can be obtained completely for free. Some of the higher tiers of certain upgrades aren't free, for example the Island Size. The Co-op Slots upgrade is the only one that costs something to unlock tier 1.

All upgrade tiers making your profile/character more powerful are available for free.

Upgrades and tiers which aren't free cost SkyBlock Gems. SkyBlock Gems are a new currency that you may purchase on the Hypixel Store.

You are also able to skip the upgrade time using SkyBlock Gems. Skipping the time of a profile upgrade on a co-op will bypass the time for every member.

Booster Cookies
The Booster Cookie is a new consumable item sold in the Community Shop. It is purchasable for SkyBlock Gems in the community shop, but may also be purchased and exchanged by players for coins in the Bazaar.

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Perks of the booster cookie

The Cookie Buff lasts 4 days per cookie. You may eat as many cookies as you want to add to your buff's duration. Elizabeth offers one free (untradable) cookie to every player, which you can use to try out the buff.

Once you eat your first cookie, you will unlock the Booster Cookie Menu in your SkyBlock menu.

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Booster Cookie menu

Bits Shop
While the Cookie Buff is active, you gain the ability to earn and find Bits in SkyBlock.

They're not given directly: they are awarded while your cookie buff is active!

For example, you will earn bits over time by simply playing the game, but you may also earn them from completing dungeons, killing dragons, and various other tasks. Each time you consume a Booster Cookie, you gain the ability to find an extra 4,800 Bits.

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Bits, explained in-game

Once earn, bits allow you to purchase items in Elizabeth's Bits Shop:

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Bits Shop & example item


The last crumb of the cookie puzzle is Fame.
Fame allows you to tier up your Fame Rank.
Your Fame Rank determines 2 benefits:

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Bits Multiplier
As your Fame Rank goes up, so does your Bits Multiplier. Your Bits Multiplier multiplies both your Bits Available per cookie and your bits earned from actions.

For example, as a "New Player" (the default, 1.0x multiplier), you would gain 4,800 Bits Available per cookie eaten and 300 bits per hour online.

With Citizen (1.2x multiplier), you gain 5,760 Bits Available per cookie eaten and 360 bits per hour.

On top of that, the Bits Multiplier is retroactive for all the cookies you've ever eaten. It sounds fancy, but all it means is you'll gain Bits when you tier up your Fame Rank:

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Election Votes
With a higher Fame Rank, your vote in the election counts for more.

FIRE Sales
Fire Sales is a new mechanic for us to deliver exclusive cosmetic items.

They're simple:
  1. A countdown shows for the next FIRE sale in the shop
  2. Once it starts, there is a limited amount of items for sale
  3. After the item is sold out: That's it! The sale is over! The items may or may never come back on sale.
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A Fire Sale in progress
We implemented new types of cosmetics and stockpiled a ton of them for upcoming fire sales.
There are now Pet Skins, Armor Skins, new Minion skins and Runes.

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Armor Skin example for Mastiff

Hypixel Ranks
Finally, since SkyBlock's release, we always had Hypixel rank features, but they've never been fully documented in one place. The rank benefits are now laid out plainly for all in the Community Shop and will be kept up to date:


Whew! That's it for this update!
I hope to see you all in game, I'm excited to see which candidate will be elected mayor first!

Thanks to @Dctr for doing half the work on this update and @DistrictGecko for builds / furnitures.
Enjoy!
:hypixel_smile:
 

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Last edited by a staff member:
One of the goals of this update is to at least double the size of the SkyBlock development team. We want to create a lot more content in the following months and years to come while also giving a healthy work environment for our developers.

Just like players, we want to see new islands to explore, features, bug fixes, end game content, and much more. In recent weeks, we felt like the more content we created, the more maintenance, updates, and QA we were adding to our workload, on top of all the bugs and exploits we constantly have to deal with. All of these issues require us to scale the team and we believe that this update will allow us to financially be able to do so.

The whole SkyBlock community has been asking for more consistent updates and we hear you. We will be working hard to hire a lot more developers, designers, builders, artists, and more in the coming weeks. We don’t want another to be in a situation like the Dungeons update that took 8 months to complete and had been an overall unhealthy process for our developers.

Ever since we released SkyBlock, over a year ago, we have been having difficulties to scale the team as we were dealing with limited monetization options for SkyBlock and the increasing costs and dev time to maintain the game was growing rapidly.

We would like to thank the Minecraft team for changing the EULA rules for PvE games back in April 2020, after working with hundreds of server owners across the whole Minecraft community and listening to our feedback. I believe that these changes saved many servers and this is important for the Minecraft PvE ecosystem.

While we understand that some players will be upset that we are breaking some of our early promises about monetization, we made sure that most of these new features can also be purchased with coins and that everyone can access them, regardless of their rank or money spent. The goal is to grow and take care of our team, not grow profits and we want to make sure we deliver more content for our community.

Another important goal for this update is to eliminate illegal real-life trading. In the past few months, some people have been scamming, stealing, exploiting, duping, and hacking to then sell SkyBlock coins on illegal markets or other channels for real-life money. Causing thousands and thousands of players to be banned in the process. These sellers do not care about players, they just want to sell before they get caught and run away with the money. If we were to total the profit of all these traders, they would probably be making more than us, the creator of the game! Another issue with these illegal traders is that they are not reporting exploits and dupes to keep their illegal businesses running without the need to play the game.
Fortunately, our detection tools are getting better and better at catching them but it doesn’t stop some from trying and getting more players banned in the process. It became clear to us that giving a way for players to exchange coins safely between them using the Bazaar and Booster Cookies will be much safer and will turn away profits from illegal activities and not create coins out of thin air to keep a much more stable economy. Once again, no coins are created, only exchanged securely between players.

Thank you to our amazing community for supporting us over the last 7+ years, it truly has been an amazing journey and we are excited to see what the future holds! We are still breaking player numbers after all this time!

Enjoy the update!
 
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Hey everyone!

In regards to this update, I thought I'd come to post a small update regarding Hiring within Hypixel.

As posted above by Simon, the current goal is to grow the team to ensure we can deliver more regular SkyBlock updates, but also so we can continue to update the rest of the network like we always did. For this reason, we are currently looking to hire up to 6 more mini-game developers, 5 more builders, and a few more game designers.

If you've applied to any of these positions before today, I would suggest reapplying to keep your applications fresh!

You can apply here: https://hypixel.net/jobs/
 
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Hype

bruh you release the update during class, I can’t play ;-;

PS: maybe make a monetization round thread where people come up with monetization ideas to help you guys help in terms of income and hiring more devs?
 
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Pog
Edit: or not, the update makes the game way too p2w

Edit2: for people asking how , you can basically irl trade by buying cookies and selling on the bazaar. This is the main p2w thing most other stuff you use gems for are just cosmetic. However, if you can sell these cosmetics on the ah, like you can the summer, halloween and Easter rewards, then that is also p2w.
I suggest making some way to get gems for free, like in the clash of clans model everyone is talking about.
 
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