Changelog/2021/July 14

Adventurers are gathering on the outskirts of the Dwarven Village, the minecart system leading to the Crystal Hollows is finally repaired!

The Crystal Hollows
This mining area filled with Gemstones and secrets is accessible to anyone above Heart of the Mountain 3. Gwendolyn grants passage for a small price of 10 thousand coins. Pay the price and you will have access for 2 hours!

Once in the Crystal Hollows, you can either follow the tunnels, or branch away into the unknown. The stone outside of the tunnels is harder than usual, but very rich in ores and gemstones.

The new collections associated with these new minerals are split into Hard Stone and Gemstones.

Some gemstones are rarer than others, and their Breaking Power required to break each varies.

Gemstones are special minerals imbued with power, and each Gemstone will give a predetermined SkyBlock stat when ground up. There are 3 Mining related Gemstones: - Jade, from the Dwarven Biome, gives Mining Fortune when ground up - Amber, from the Goblin Biome, gives Mining Speed when ground up - Topaz, from the Magma Biome, gives Pristine when ground up

The other 4 Gemstones are related to Combat: - Ruby, which can be found everywhere in the Crystal Hollows, gives Health when ground up - Amethyst, from the Jungle Biome, gives Defense when ground up - Sapphire, from the Precursor Biome, gives Intelligence when ground up - Jasper, from the very rare Fairy Biome, gives Strength when ground up

Talk to Geo, near Gwendolyn, they know all about Gemstones and their usage. sdhtgsh.PNG The Gemstone Grinder next to him is able to apply Gemstones to specific items. Not all items can have Gemstones!

Because Gemstones can be found or crafted into different qualities, you will only get the full potential of the Gemstone slots with the highest rarity Gemstones. Gemstones can be removed at any time through Geo.

Crystal Nucleus
While exploring the Crystal Hollows, you will come across unique Gemstone Crystals. Collect all 5 of them and bring them to the Crystal Nucleus room located in the center of the entire area to obtain rare unique rewards. The Gemstone Crystals won't be easy to collect - each of them will require a few objectives to be completed before you can grab them!

New Mining Content
On top of the Crystal Hollows, this update includes:


 * New Mining Events
 * 2 New Heart of the Mountain levels, which can be upgraded with Gemstone Powder
 * A Minecart system across the Dwarven Caves, which can be use to travel faster
 * Mining Achievements
 * Many bug fixes
 * Small changes:
 * Slayer Commissions now require 2x less monsters to kill
 * The Powder Ghast screams will now be 2x less annoying
 * Buffs to some drills and Heart of the Mountain perks
 * Jotraeline now allows to remove Drill modules

That's it! We hope you will enjoy this update. :)

A note about the Alpha Net Pickaxe Keep an eye on Jerry in the next few days for your unique Alpha Net Pickaxe. Thanks for the help!

A note about Skyblock production: At the end of the 0.11 thread we said: ''Part of our 2021 resolution as a team is to be more structured with our content releases. With more and more people working on SkyBlock, it might take a few months but you can expect our production to improve. We will offer more information about releases ahead of time and we will potentially also start giving release dates ahead of times. However, please yell at us if we have to delay releases!'' Since then we have been experimenting with new production patterns. Some of you might have noticed, version 0.11.1 was a month after 0.11, it was then followed by 0.11.2, 0.11.3 and finally 0.11.4 which were all separated by exactly 3 weeks. There were also multiple patches in between updates. On top of that we tried to add ongoing Events in between updates, with the Dante saga.

While we have the manpower and motivation to release updates every 3 weeks, two issues arised: It became a lot harder to test updates properly with our new tight schedules, which led to the re-release of Alpha. This 3 week schedule leaves very little room for large updates such as 0.12. We are still learning and growing. Behind the scenes we are constantly making improvements to our methods and production discipline. Very few games out there release updates every 3 weeks, and we realize now that we should aim for larger updates, rather than more often. Like explained previously we recently started works on a new Foraging Island, as long as a complete revamp of the Blazing Fortress, which will become a large Combat island, much harder than the End island. On top of that we are making good progress on the initial design of 1.0.

A large portion of our production will be allocated to those updates, while the rest of the team will be focused on releasing content often in between.