THIS IS NOT MEANT TO BASH ON SKYBLOCK AT ALL. THE GAME IS ALREADY GREAT AS IT IS BUT I FEEL IT COULD HAVE BEEN BETTER
WHY CUBECRAFT SKYBLOCK IS FLAWED AT THE CORE GAME DESIGN
This is my opinion and it is best read for people at least at island 6. Skyblock‘s core foundation works as where you plant a tree, log off, chop it down tomorrow, and repeat. Why is it cubecraft designed skyblock like this? Where there are times where you physically cannot do anything that would help you progress through your quests without waiting.
WHY CUBECRAFT SKYBLOCK IS FLAWED AT THE CORE GAME DESIGN
This is my opinion and it is best read for people at least at island 6. Skyblock‘s core foundation works as where you plant a tree, log off, chop it down tomorrow, and repeat. Why is it cubecraft designed skyblock like this? Where there are times where you physically cannot do anything that would help you progress through your quests without waiting.
Cubecraft could’ve had quests that are like kill 50 guardians. But the only way to kill guardians is to go through a portal at the hub that leads to an ocean monument. There would be physically no way to automate a guardian farm and you would have to go through the process of killing them yourself to get furthur through the quests. I think that’s just a better style of gameplay than waiting.
WHY SKYBLOCK IS FLAWED MORE BADLY THAN CLASH OF CLANS
Now popular mobile game clash of clans should in theory also have this waiting play style right? Ehhhh, kinda. You see back in 2014 it did. You were forced to wait for your army to train before being able to battle again. And an army would take maybe 2 hours maximum to train. So it was similar to cubecrafts waiting. However in coc you battled bases to get more loot to upgrade your base. Cubecraft skyblock is literally coc but the only way you could get loot is from your pumps and gold mines.
Clash of clans has a small waiting time for training armies but they do increase as you progress further. Eventually at town hall 10 it gets too repetitive so most people quit. Now in 2021 coc town hall 13 upgrades take weeks so to counter this the builder base doesn’t require your army to train and people can always just trophy push. But at the same time it limits your amount of daily loot so you don’t complete it in a month.
Now how does this tie into cubecraft skyblock? Skyblock makes waiting a part of the game. Coc is more grindy and skyblock is more waiting. Apparently there’s always something to do but how can that happen when to progress through your quests you have to just wait for your trees to grow? Sure there’s always side quests but those follow the exact same pattern when you must wait for things to produce. CubeCraft skyblock was designed with waiting as a core aspect. You can use the argument that skyblock is meant to be played between Pvp based games but there’s people who only play cubecraft for their skyblock.
Coc has done things such as the builder base to ease the pain of waiting on upgrades. Coc despite not getting many major updates have things such as clan war leagues and clan games and events that will always change your experience every 2 weeks to keep the gameplay fresh and exciting. Cubecraft skyblock doesn’t and cannot have that luxury unless the developers pay all their attention to skyblock which I don’t want to happen.
WHAT I DO NOT WANT
Now how does cubecraft innovate and keep players interested while still sticking to a vanilla like experience? Because I don’t want cubecraft to start resorting to modded items to keep the gameplay interesting. There are a few possible routes they could take. However from what they’ve done with the nether, the end is probably just gonna be more waiting days for things to grow. Like I’m sure they are planning on an enderdragon fight and an elytra reward and you‘ll just have to make an endermen farm and the quests are gonna be like harvest 10k chorus fruit or something like that.
That‘s the obvious route they probably will take. But then it will be like a week for one chorus tree to grow and at least I don’t want that. What cubecraft needs is something that will always have a different experience every few weeks yet the developers wouldn’t have to make that experience from scratch every time. So we need to keep both players and the developers happy.
WHAT I THINK THE END SHOULD LOOK LIKE
I suggest that the way to get endermen is to explore an end cave or something. But the thing with this end caveis that you can’t place or break blocks in the end cave. So to get endermen you will be forced to enter this end cave and kill endermen that spawn without any way of making an automatic farm. This will force players to actually play the game instead of sitting at a mob farm.
There will of course also be an end city somewhere. But the thing with this end city should be that it’s a randomly generated one and it will randomly generated every every 5 days. This will make the experience slightly different some of the time. Sometimes there will be an end ship, others not. sometimes you will get more shulkers, deal with it. But for the first time you get to the end city there Should always be an end ship if that’s possible. And then later on in a quest you get like an unbreaking 5 elytra that doesn’t actually cost more to repair because theres Unbreaking on it or something. I would suggest a reward of a quest to be a mending elytra but I think the servers are run on 1.10 so mending doesn’t exist :(
Of course there will be a classic dragon boss and other things but this suggestion isn’t meant for the dragon itself as I believe cubecraft is perfectly capable on making a good way to summon the dragon seeing what they’ve done with the wither is not the worst thing in the world. Having 1.10 servers really do suck as they’re so many things they could add if it an updated version but I fully undertaken why java cubecarft has to stay at 1.10.
Now does this suggestion completely stop the cycle of waiting? No. And at this point waiting is apart of cubecraft’s skyblock identity that cannot be taken away. But this suggestion does lighten and renew things for active players of the community. I would like to see woodland mansions but that’s 1.11 so not happening though ocean monuments were 1.8 I think so there‘s hope that we do see a quest where you must kill guardians but you can’t make a guardian farm and you have to actually explore the monument to kill them.
SUGGESTIONS FOR NON END DIMENSION ISLANDS
Now do I think this is a good suggestion? Yes. Do I think this will be added? No. Do I think new players will get as far as the end to even see the cycle of waiting slow down? Big no. Now let‘s take a very quick look at another direction skyblock could go. Y’all ever played Mario odyssey of breath of the wild? I’ll use odyssey as an example.
You see in odyssey you are rewarded with new areas if the game to explore for collecting power moons. The game has 999 moons I think. However the game stops rewarding you with new content to play after you reach 500 moons. The other 500 are just more grind for nothing. Usually a game would give the players an incentive to complete the game. Why is odyssey such a popular game when it doesn’t even follow this classic formula? This is because Nintendo are ok with players only playing up to end of the story mode. They aren’t motivating players to find the rest if their secrets because they are confident the players will enjoy the game even without it.
All the content in the game is for someone. Not for everyone. This is what cubecraft could do. They could add more islands in the overworld however there wouldn’t be anything in those islands that would be needed to unlock the end. They should make it so that the things in the nether unlock the end and the end will have items that sell for more than the overworld. However the overworld will still have more islands which while can be used to make things more efficient in the end, they should only be played because the players want to explore them.
The player should be incentivized to go to the end but not to the future nether and overworld islands. This could allow cubecraft to add silly and easy quests in the next overworld and nether islands because they aren’t meant to be played by the majority of the players. They need to be confident that their content is good and that they don’t need to give players rewards just to play the content. This is why they can make the end a lot less waiting and a lot more gameplay while the nether and overworld can stay as the waiting game that’s meant to be done on the side of the end quests.
CONCLUSION
So to summarize. The end should be a lot of actual interesting incentivized gameplay for the player to complete and the other dimensions can just be more waiting that doesn’t really give rewards and can be small islands instead of huge islands that should be done for the fun of it. Of course the other dimensions can give rewards that would make things more efficient but that’s a completely different route than something as Mario odyssey.
I honestly don’t think I could stand it if the end was just more skyblock with trees taking weeks to grow. Coc has monthly things that refresh things that cubecraft should have. Odyssey has optional things that are done because players enjoy them that cubecraft should have. So I think the end should be legitimate gameplay rather than making mob farms. Keep in mind that this is just my opinion. Feel free to leave your opinions down in the comments and hopefully I can get an answer from the cubecraft staff team on why cubecraft took their game with this specific direction and their thoughts on my idea. This is not meant to bash skyblock as I think it’s one of the main reasons cubecraft is an amazing server.
