The Survival Update - v2 - 6/30/18

Question: Can enraged mobs spawn from spawners?

Do the horses have to be adults?

Not at home this weekend so no chance to experience the new features. Lots to read though.

No complaints from me with any of the changes. I actually like that it's closer to vanilla now. I've been here a long time now and have done alot but can get stale sometimes. I often like to pop on my voters gear, load up an enderchest with shulker boxes and just roam around. Now I will have so many new mob heads and bosses to find. I've always been 'a collector' in most games I play so these new additions are awesome.

We usually only see the final product and not the work that goes into it. Big thanks to the dev team for all these new additions. So much to do and experience now, really is great to see. So huge thanks for all your work!

Also congrats to the new devs! Really have a large group now so much more can be done at once. 👍🙂

Love most of the up date, great work dev. Still see how the rest of the update will go.

On a side note, has anyone else with captured mobs like blizzards or super turkey, noticed that they now glitch through wall?

Had to move one, and blizz glitched through again, added more blocks to make see if that helps.

Going to check on others now.

Why would I want to put myself at risk, when I already do that irl

That's correct, most villager variants only had altered outfits, and not head - so we thought it was best to not bother... so they all should drop the same one.

Mending just "uses" exp that you gather from other sources, so it should have no bearing on TEXP

Pretty sure, yes. Most babies don't have drops - So no need to slaughter your babies. xD

Thing's that are only acceptable to say in MC 🤣

I joined the dev team towards the end of the work on the survival update, so I have a total of 3 additions to the update, iirc

However, I was aware of the update for a couple months leading up to release, since staff were bug testing the update as much as we could. Thus, I'd like to share my impressions from those few months of testing, and see if it alleviates some of the concerns everyone has.

Exp Changes:
So when I first heard about these changes, I wasn't actually SS yet This was back when Aikar first told the regular staff about the update, and we began testing it. So, my first impressions of this update was actually still as a survival player, not as a creative mode SS Complete honesty, I felt the same way all of you did. Cross-server experience and no experience loss on death has been an EMC feature since long before I, or many of us, were playing on this server, and I was personally disappointed to see it leave.

However, I decided to do some history research on Minecraft updates, and came up with some interesting details.

• The original EXP changes that made it cross-server and not lost on death were made in an update on Feb 13th, 2012. Thread for reference
• By Feb 13th, 2012, Minecraft was only on version 1.1 (Wiki page for reference). At this point, the only way to gain experience was through killing mobs. However, mob spawners weren't even added to the game yet, so you actually had to go fight mobs survival style. Experience earned from mining, trading, and breeding weren't added until later, as well.

Over the past 6 years since that update, Minecraft has added many ways to gain experience and ways to make enchanting and experience earning easier. Some other changes include the mending enchantment, mob spawners, and fishing (you can get exp and enchantment books).
As such, while I was initially dismayed at the change, I can agree that it was a necessary one and adds back some of the difficulty that survival gameplay had lost on EMC. Don't forget, these are not EMC changes from vanilla - this is actually a return to vanilla intended mechanics, as Mojang designed it.

Things seem more "difficult" than they used to:
The dev team made changes to a lot of the mob pathing mechanics and the base underlying structure of how EMC custom mobs "work" in this update. As such, there is going to be a period where all the mobs seem harder, but that's just because you have to fight them differently now. The bosses especially are much smarter now, and can not be as easily evaded as they used to be. Think about the first time you fought the end dragon compared to later fights - it was easier the 3rd or 4th time you fought it, right?

One of the things that we played with a lot in testing was our difficulty level when fighting mobs. Difficulty 5 is supposed to be "normal mode" - meaning you should be able to fight everything solo with the right armor and tools. Any EMC boss should require nearly max enchanted armor and weapons at difficulty 5, as well as a healthy supply of food and other helpful items (potions, golden apples, etc). The same setup you would bring with you to fight the end dragon or a wither. The enraged mobs we tried to aim for being able to fight them with voter's gear at difficulty 5, but it still being more difficult than any regular mob.

However, things ramp up with each difficulty you go up. I would say that in the past, difficulty 7 was "normal mode" difficulty, based on my experience fighting these mobs and bosses. However, it was always intended that at difficulty 7, it would be really difficult to solo fight any EMC boss (as in, you need golden apples, plenty of exp pots for mending your gear, patience, and experience to do this fight). Difficulty 8 and above should be near impossible for solo fights, and require a group of players to defeat the boss mob (a really good player with enchanted golden apples and plenty of backup tools/resources may be able to solo a boss at difficulty 8, but good luck to you if you try ). Enraged mobs at higher difficulties shouldn't require a group, but they should ramp up with each difficulty.

These are changes to bring the EMC difficulty levels closer to what they were originally intended to be. The first time I fought Eyender at difficuly 5, I died once during the fight. After that first fight though, I could fight eyender and not die at difficulty 5. However, at difficulty 7, I died twice the first time and only died occasionally for every fight after that (usually only when I made a mistake, like not eating a golden apple soon enough).

Something I realized from these fights - experience made the fight easier. Which I actually really liked about the system. The more I fought the bosses, the better I got at fighting them. I may have died at first, and yes it was annoying, but it was just more satisfying when I was able to finally kill them without dying myself And then once I was able to win at difficulty 5, I could ramp up to the next difficulty and get better, where eventually I could solo the boss mobs at difficulty 7.

(Note: When I say "golden apple," I mean the regular ones, not enchanted ones. We never used enchanted golden apples in our difficulty testing, because we knew that Mojang made changes so that they were not craftable anymore.)

So I can say with certainty that just having patience and fighting the new mobs a few times will help you adjust to the slightly new gameplay style. It may be difficult at first, but you'll get used to it

The dev team will continue to monitor and tweak these mechanics though, so if something does seem too OP to you, let us know at pmdev.emc.gs - When you do, try to include what your setup and environment was while fighting. Details such as your experience level, armor type/enchants, weapons, and the other resources you used will help us to determine how difficult the fight was and how we can help.

Awesome job guys!

I'm running out of titles to gain though! Might be time I start making new teams just to give myself more titles...

Hmm, how does Official Ice Cream Eater sound?

Anyone noticed an unusually large number of witches, endermen, and enraged polar bears spawning?

Or maybe just become an admin someday, if the others will let you? If you're already everything else combined, you're basically very close and already very well-fit for it.

new enderman mob gave me a heart attack, but thanks for the update team!

Is it still alive also can u pm me coords

YES! I LOVE THIS UPDATE!

Something which I'm pretty sure is a bit of oversight. Since you can't set your spawn if you've attacked mobs recently or if there are mobs nearby, then there really is no way to set spawn if there are mobs even remotely near you. If there are nearby mobs, the most obvious solution would be to kill them, but attacking them resets your 5 minute timer, meaning that there is no quick solution to this problem. plz fix

(Hitting a mob with thorns is also considered to be combat)

A group of us went out yesterday to go check out the new stuff. We decided to go caving in the waste, see if we ran into anything.

We ended up fighting numerous enraged mobs (there were so many), and encountered two new bosses in the same area, in addition to a marlix and a momo. Token history says we spent two hours out there, same area.

With the new restrictions on sleeping, all 3 of us ended up sitting around waiting for our combat timers to end while we took turns defending the base from creepers and the like. One member of our group (wairor852, I believe) went to the surface to place a bed there, but could not sleep because mobs were too close. An eyender was following him. We had not attacked him, not looked at him, not shown any sign of aggression. He did not show any sign of trying to fight, just followed warior to prevent him from setting a spawn point. I decided to try and lure him away just by staring at him and walking around. It worked, until warior took a step towards the bed. The eyender was literally on top of him the whole time. We decided the best option was to fight him.

I disagree with the idea that eyenders are easy- two of us physically fought while a third brought resources... The eyender killed us both numerous times- I believe warior dropped 6 heads (and I none, even though my head drops were on- this is a consistent problem for me, but probably unrelated to the update as it happened before, too). When we died, we spawned at a bed in a cave we'd been mining. The eyender would teleport down, latch onto us, and then teleport us into a nearby cave system (could've been connected, we just hadn't gotten that far yet). Know that eyenders can teleport through doors. It was annoying and relentless. Near the end, it teleported us two hills away, and began fighting us in the water. Might've taken a half hour or so to take down (I thought it was an hour, but we're not sure). When it died, we didn't get a message about the tokens we recieved (but my tokens history says 288 for eyender, so...) and all that was dropped was an enderman's head. I was disappointed, to say the least.

The Marlix now someone's wither skeletons (in full armor!) for assistance, in addition to skeletons. Assistance mobs for both the momo and the marlix are now named "Marlix/Momo Assistance" and that makes it a little easier to differentiate. I like that change.

We did find, however, that group members could pick up other group member's stuff without any sort of timer or vouching (but we were all friends, so I don't know which one it was). We could also pick up the other's XP, and be notified that we had helped them recover some of their XP. So losing XP upon death isn't entirely hopeless.

When we were out killing normal mobs, warior and I both shot at a skeleton until he died. When I went to retrieve the loot, I got a message saying "That Arrow isn't yours!", but was still able to retrieve the loot. I don't know if that message was in reference to warior possibly getting the last hit, or because he had dropped an hour while firing that he could've retrieved, but I've never seen that message before.

All in all, exploring was fun, but the new bosses were a menace... I'd like to see some improvement upon the eyender. If you don't want to fight bosses, you should be able to go about your business without them following you and preventing you from setting spawn points.