MineZ MineZ Origins - Changelog

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At last, your journey has brought you here.

Before this, I would like to say a few words. This update became an idea some years ago when Majicou, former lead of MineZ, wanted to create an endgame for MineZ following the Secret Update. Since then, it has grown and evolved into a passion project of the select few staff members trusted to work on it. When we began, we had no idea creating this update would span nearly four years. I could not be more proud of the team that helped see this through. Their work and dedication to this game is truly amazing.

While I may be the face of the build team, it is the builders, developers, and administrators you don’t see who have spent countless months working behind the scenes who deserve your praise. It is impossible to thank all those who have worked on this update and made it what it is today, but those of you who have helped along the way have my undying gratitude.

Finally, I would like to thank you, the players. While it may seem cliché, your support throughout the years has been what has kept this game alive, even when it seemed like it wasn’t the case. We can not wait for you to wash upon those old shores and step into the new world.


Build Changes

What's New:

While we will not be updating the web map until one week after the update, we also will not be mentioning the bulk of what the build team has changed here. That is for you to explore and find out. I will state briefly, though some general changes. There is far more to see.

• Instant kill puzzles and falls have been summarily removed from nearly all (barring tier V) dungeons. This was not a fair puzzle tactic in most dungeons and very frustrating should you fail.
• The story has been cryptic and hard to piece together for some time. It has been rewritten completely. This resulted in nearly 40 pages of new lore, some of which you can find already in the MineZ: Our Story mini-series. The rest can be found in many places throughout the map.
• A large number of locations have been re-envisioned or touched up. As stated before, the game needed to evolve past layouts of 2012.
• Five of the world's biomes have been changed.
• A new town has been added into the east (this is not the only new town).
• Several dungeons have been partially updated. More on that in the future.
• Build submissions will be more readily encouraged. To facilitate this, one week after Origins we will begin posting downloads to specific areas where we believe locations should be. This world is yours to make an impact on, too.

Loot Changes

Dungeon Chests

Dungeons have been regrouped into tiers. There are five tiers, each with scaling loot. This allows us to design a myriad of dungeons without worrying about the repercussions of farming. This also allows us to specifically create solo-able dungeons again.

Tiers 1 through 3 can be found in easy to medium dungeons. A good example of a tier 1 dungeon is Maze of the Tenth. Tier 4 and 5 are placed in difficult dungeons including elite dungeons. A good example of a tier 5 would be Zerbia Depths. These chests contains high tier military, potions, and food and are similar to old dungeon_in and dungeon_out as the dungeons they are placed cannot be farmed and require a lot of resources, skills and players to complete.

spire_fire

• Removed fire protection I and II chestplates and moved some % to III and IV.
• now has similar loot to mil_uncommons.

spire_earth

• Removed feather falling I and II boots and moved some % to III and IV.
• Now has similar loot to mil_epics.

spire_water

• Depth Strider pants now spawn in lower durability.
• Now has similar loot to mil_rares.

spire_wind

• Changed Respiration II and III helmets to Respiration I helmets.
• Respiration II and III helmets are no longer obtainable.
• Respiration I helmets now spawn in lower durability
• Now has similar loot to mil_epics

graves

• Added all types of healing dyes

fishing drops

• Added lure fishing rods

Please note that specific loot changes (towns, dungeons) are not listed here.

Gameplay Changes

PvE Line

For new players on MineZ, the most challenging part of the game is not always the zombies, but surviving at overpopulated spawn towns with spawn bandits who have nothing to lose. Many new players at spawn towns die to other players, lose all progress they made, and quit the game. We want the game to be harder as a player makes progress in the game, not when a player first joins the server. We are implementing the PvE line to give a better chance for new players to learn how to play the game without being killed shortly after spawning in.

• Southern part of the map will be a PvE zone. All areas below z=200 will be PvE only and PvP will be disabled.
• Loot in this zone will spawn in a low tier but in a high quantity.
• New types of loot (pot_south, tool south) have been added. pot_south has drink I and splash I potions and tool_south has same items as tool chests but without buttons.

Support Kit

• You can now store your bandages and healing dyes to your support kit (shears).
• Replacement of shears with heal kits.
• Found in civ common chests.
• You no longer need to hit a player three different times to heal them. Instead, if you hit a player, they will automatically get all effects from the items stored in your shears.
• Bandages and dyes are now consumed per heal.
• Overall healing cooldown has been decreased, but the cooldown will vary depending on how many healing dyes were applied to them.

Scoreboard

• You can now see useful information on a scoreboard.
• Available options: ping, sugar, speed pot, and horizontal grapple cooldowns. More options will be added later.
• You can choose which option to display on your scoreboard using /toggle.

Radio

• Replacement for the eye of ender.
• Works exactly same as old eye of ender, but you can now open a GUI by right clicking to change the frequency.
• If you chat while holding it, your chat will only go to the frequency that you are using.
• Has been added to the default spawn kit. Cannot be obtained in chests.

New Mobs

• Husk: spawns in deserts, gives hunger on hit.

Adventure Mode

• Players are now set to adventure mode.
• You can still place cobwebs, cakes, buttons and break cobwebs and graves using iron shovel. But all other block place/break interactions are now disabled.

Other Changes

• Zombies will increase in speed as you head further north.
• Splash II potions: heal: 3.5 => 3 (hearts)
  • The main reason for this change is to potentially lower splash potion’s dominance in all situations. MineZ combat has shifted to being too reliant on splashes, where the number of splashes you carry is one of the biggest factors in a win/loss of a fight. The goal of this change is not to make splashes weaker than drinks, but rather to make drinks and splashes have clear pros and cons depending on combat scenarios.
• Giants have more health and have 20% chance to spawn a zombie pigman when it spawns a zombie.
• Two block high grapple hook will now count as horizontal grapple.
  • Grappling to 2 blocks height in some terrain in the gravel canyon allows players to move horizontally but their hook counts as vertical grapple, meaning that their horizontal grapple would not go on cooldown. 2 block grappling is now considered as horizontal grapple and your horizontal grapple will go on cooldown.
• Villager zombies no longer spawn.
• Readded old stats. Note that if you have changed your name, your stats might have been reset because the old stats system was name based, not UUID.
• With the return of stats, bandit and healer tags have been readded.
• Giant tethering distance has been increased to 200 blocks.
• Slowness and weakness drink potions now can be brewed into splashes with a gunpowder.
• Other changes made during PTR can be found here.
• Updated ingame tips.
• A few waygate destinations have been rerouted. Listed below are the symbols and the corresponding locations they now lead to.
  • Patchwork Waygate
    • α / Alpha - Portsmouth
    • β / Beta - Anvalia
    • θ / Theta - McIovinville
    • Ω / Omega - Snow Mountain
  • Anvalia Waygate
    • α / Alpha - Patchwork
    • β / Beta - Desert Canyon Sanctuary
    • θ / Theta - Exolesco
    • Ω / Omega - Snow Mountain
  • Desert Forest Lake Waygate
    • α / Alpha - Desert Castle
    • β / Beta - McIovinville
    • θ / Theta - Exolesco
    • Ω / Omega - Snow Mountain
• Modified the path to Axis Mundi. Your existing keys will work at Path of Light. If you have extra keys, start there!
• Made Septus great again!
• Readded mil_swag

Food changes

Currently, spawn towns give you more than enough food to run across the entire map without stopping. It takes only a small amount of time to accumulate the food needed to do this. Instead of getting enough food at spawn town and run directly to the north, we hope players will now stop by locations and start getting higher quality crafted food as they make their progress to the northern part of the map. Ideally, this does not add much time to your progression. The major change is lowering the stack size of noncrafted food and buffing crafted food.

• Beetroot: stack size: 6 => 4. lowered saturation.
• Melon: stack size: 4 => 3, restores 2 water level.
• Apple: stack size: 2 => 1, restores 1 water level
• Raw Fish: increased saturation.
• Cookie: increased saturation.
• Mushroom soup: hunger: 6 => 8, increased saturation.
• Baked Potato: hunger: 5 => 6
• Golden Apple: lowered saturation.

Combat changes

• W tapping now works.
• Sword damage has been adjusted:
  • Diamond -> Full Iron: 9 hits -> 10 hits
  • Iron -> Full Iron: 11 hits (unchanged)
  • Iron -> Full Chain: 9 hits (unchanged)
  • Diamond -> Full leather: 5 hits -> 6 hits
• Bow damage has been lowered slightly.
• Overall improvements on knockback.

Bug Fixes

• Improvement on server stability. A lot of issues that cause lag have been fixed, especially the lag that's caused when many players try to join the server at the same time.
• Improvements on grapple nocheat.

Our Process
Designing content for MineZ is often a difficult endeavour. Dungeon creation can be slow and tedious. The decisions that we make in one dungeon can not always be transferred to another. From inception to completion a dungeon can be torn down multiple times and rebuilt.

When dungeons first emerged at Frostbain, they were a unique and challenging opportunity to do something new in the game. It was the first time that there was another goal in the game other than survival and PvP.


Shown is one of the earliest renditions of this dungeon. There’s really not a whole lot to unpack here. The dungeon is quite simple and consists of parkour, wave rooms and light puzzles. That was your usual dungeon for some time. They were often unforgiving and more of a grind than an enjoyable experience.
During the Secret Update, we pushed beyond those core principles a little. We had more tools and a little bit more experience in dungeon design, though it wasn’t perfect or always fun. Shown here is a walkthrough of the old Body Offload dungeon. Notice the repetitive nature and bland experience you would receive. While this dungeon was quickly closed, it represents a key problem with older dungeons.



To us, these old dungeons represent the wrong way to create an enjoyable yet challenging experience. They were repetitive, uniformly the same and lacked replayability. Throughout this update, we have continually reevaluated the dungeons we were making and what we wanted to give to you. Not just a mediocre hack and slash, but a challenging, unique dungeon.
While the majority of dungeons do mirror our old sentiment, as we begin to transition away from larger, less frequent updates to more routine monthly updates, newer, more playable and exciting dungeons will take their place - starting now.
Of course most of the build team's effort this update had been spent on the final endgame addition. This dungeon is daunting, far larger and more complex than anything you have seen in the game. It has been a puzzle to even complete, pushing the limits of what is possible with our tools.

Unfortunately, it was not perfect the first or second time we visited its concept and design. As any game designer can tell you, the worst thing you can do is put out something that you had the ability to change, but didn’t. Around April of last year, we had gotten close to releasing the second iteration of Origins. The dungeon was there and it worked. But it was disjointed and did not hold a unifying tone. It was heartbreaking, but we made the decision to scrap it all, twice.

What is being released is not the culmination of 3 years of work. It is the hard work of this small team over the course of the last 10 months to create a fresh, exciting new experience from the ashes of what came before. This has its trade offs though. While the endgame dungeon is obviously something that a majority of the community wants to experience, it can not be released now. I'll be making a post the second week of June about this monumental dungeon that is its own update - MineZ: Endgame.

The decision to release without it was hard since it was close, but the game needs this now more than ever. This update will fix so many of the issues you are having, whether it be lag, loot, dungeons or map errors. To hold it back further would only intensify the problem. This needed to come out now.

You will not need to wait another year for this dungeon and the rest of its content. It will be close behind, but in the meantime Origins will give you a plethora of new experiences in the world and in some dungeons. I hope you can understand the process it took to get here, and the reasons we are releasing without that final piece. As a reminder, I will put an update about MineZ: Endgame out in June.


In closing

The biggest and most exciting thing that Origins can give us all is a new base to work on MineZ from. We took many bold decisions to get here, and have many more planned. If you take nothing else away from this changelog please take this with you; we will never again take this long to release an update. Our hope and plan is to periodically release new content in streams to you. Whether this be every month or so, the map will receive new dungeons, new towns or continued updates to the existing world.

We hope Origins breathes life back into a game that has been neglected for too long. It is our passion to work on this, and we hope as you explore you think of not only the time you’ve spent playing but also of the people who have dedicated weeks, months, years to building this world we share together.

See you out there, and thanks for flying Shotbow!

- The MineZ Team