MineZ MineZ: Books, Dungeons and Towns, Oh My!

Hello Survivors,

A little over three weeks ago, we released MineZ: Origins. This update gave our team a great foundation to rapidly improve upon the game and roll updates more routinely. In Origins, we introduced a wide variety of new rebuilds, layouts for dungeons, and the groundwork for new legendaries.

Legendary Tomes

Throughout the main MineZ questline, you may acquire certain knowledge long since forgotten. These tomes did not have a use at the time of release, but we intended to give them a purpose. Before this point, most items you received during questlines were completely cosmetic and served no real functional purpose.

These tomes are the beginning of a new design concept where items can serve multiple purposes: you could use them in the story or in the environment. These legendary tomes are very special and each have a unique effect when activated. They are currently a one time use.

This has been done to allow us to create potentially powerful effects and offset the problem of durability when it comes to books. Currently, the dungeons you need to beat to receive these are not updated to reflect their difficulty as an elite dungeon. It is possible that in the future, when these dungeons are changed, these legendaries will change as well.

Seal of Time

By right clicking this item, you will begin a countdown of 7.5 seconds. Your location will be marked where you clicked it and after this small countdown, time itself will be turned back for you. You will find that you have been brought back to the moment you used the item - your health, hunger and saturation being fully restored.

I can think of many uses for this item, and it can definitely have the potential to be very useful in combat.

Seal of Space

By right clicking this item, a circle of influence will appear around you. You control two points in space and after a given countdown, you will find that these points between space have been connected and you along with anyone in this circle have been moved up to twenty blocks.

Have you ever been locked in combat at one of the bridges in the gravel canyon? With this item, you could transport your entire team across the bridge!

Seal of Entropy

By right clicking this item, a circle of influence will appear around you. You harness the unpredictable nature of the universe. You are its conduit, and those around you will be moved in unpredictable and potentially debilitating ways. You do not want to get caught in this tome’s area of effect.

Seal of Gravity

By right clicking this item, you toss the book out like a flash grenade. After a short time, wherever it lands becomes the epicenter of a sudden change in gravity. You wield the force which attracts players towards wherever you choose and after a small countdown, anyone near that point is pulled inwards. This can be used to do incredible things, you just have to be creative.

Dungeons

In Origins, we introduced a new tier system to dungeons to allow for scalable loot to be placed in a variety of dungeons. While loot is not always static and can be updated throughout time, this tier system will remain.

This update includes three dungeons: two tier one dungeons and a new tier three dungeon. Tier one dungeons are meant to be intro dungeons that a basic player with almost no gear could do. The rewards for this reflect the difficulty of these intro dungeons and their close proximity to spawn regions. These two dungeons can be found in Grimdale and Carmi.

The new tier three dungeon can be found in the swamp and boasts a completely new and exciting legendary, but be warned - what crawls in the swamp may leave you feeling…nauseous.

Towns

If you thought Origins would bring the last of location reworks, you were mistaken. We have selected two locations which definitely deserved a rebuild and have reenvisioned them. They keep the general theme of their older version, but have been brought into 2020.

One location is an emerging, isolated gearing spot and the other is a western town that has been neglected for some time. We hope you enjoy these new additions to the world!

Patchwork, the town north of Romero has never existed, by the way. I believe something else has taken its place.

In addition, we've included a handful of areas we are looking for build submissions for. Below are five areas for anyone to use and create something that could potentially make it into the map!

Saens Rebuild

• A minor location in the eastern savannah biome. Provided is a range for what we're looking for rather than the build. You do not need to conform to the current style of Saens.

Possible Savannah Minor Build

• A range for a minor location in the eastern savannah biome.

Possible Savannah Medium Build

• A range for a medium location in the eastern savannah biome. This location would also replace Saens.

McIovinville Rebuild

• A minor location in the snow biome. You may choose to scrap all of McLovinVille and build something entirely different.

Desert Savannah

• An area for a minor / medium sized location in a biome otherwise completely inhabited by dungeons.

Closing

Since the release of Origins, we have been hard at work fixing issues with the servers and the map. We would like to thank you for your patience as we sift through the issues that pop up from time to time. We are committed to being transparent on all changes we make to the game and have been constantly updating them here.

I’d like to give credit to Builder IvanDoomy for the two town rebuilds, _frostie (formerly known as PineFrost64) and Tannatron for the tier 3 dungeon and one of the tier one dungeons, ACrispyTortilla for the tier one dungeon at Carmi, Pichu2002 for help on dungeon redstone, Doc for working hard to bring us these new legendaries while sifting through server issues, JACOBSMILE for helping QA test these dungeons and providing ideas, and Marine_PvP for working to balance the loot along the way.

There are many exciting things planned for this summer, and we are looking forward to releasing more content to you as we progress through the summer.

As always, thank you for flying Shotbow and remember, there is no dungeon beneath the dock.

The update releases at the next server reboot, and the build submissions are open from this point onwards, and we'll run them for a while.