😨An Ominous Weekend

Hey everyone! The Arcanum research team has been quietly investigating some recent ongoings, and we have news from them to share with you. Something ominous is stirring in Silver Springs, bringing both danger and new possibilities!

🌀Surges & Boundaries

• All content listed here launches Saturday, July 26th, 2025 at 12:00 AM PDT, alongside the Ominous Rush.

The ominous energies have paved the way for the return of Runic Surges, allowing for the acquisition of Boundary Shards, small pieces of the condensed Boundary Fragments we collected during the Runic Shift event.

These Surges are mostly similar to those from the Runic Shift, but with a few key differences. A full overview of this system can be viewed here.

• 😨 Entering an uncorrupted Rune Locale with Bad Omen active consumes it to trigger a Runic Surge. Multiple locales can surge at once.

• 🔋 Surges have 5 difficulty Tiers, determined by the initiating Bad Omen level, increasing the general danger and difficulty of the event.

• ⚔️ If the apex is slain, all participants receive Runes and 1-5 Boundary Shards, scaling with the Surge Tier.

• 💎Boundary Shards have many uses, such as:

  • ⚫ The boundary void below the Arcanum accepts offerings, consuming Shards to corrupt certain items, such as Runic Tomes into Corrupted Tomes.

  • 📖 Use Shards at the Arcanum to wipe enchants from items.

  • ... And more! Read the full post for details.

• ⚠️ As you may expect, it's hard for our small team to properly playtest content like this, so please be patient with the early balance of Surges, and work with us to make them an enjoyable, permanent feature of SSS.

⏫Surges will begin alongside this weekend's Ominous Rush, which has the following bonus effect:

• Ominous Vaults, Pillager raids, and Tier III+ Surges can award Badges of Valor.

📝General Updates

• Impetus of Dionysus now gives 50% mcMMO XP for hand brewing.

• Ear Collector no longer gives ear stacks for non-hostile mob kills. This was never really intended, but we let it go on too long, so apologies there.

🫶

📝General Updates

Hey everyone! I know the pings have been frequent lately but we’ve been getting a lot done. 😎 Got another batch of updates and fixes for you. As always, report any feedback or issues. Thanks!

💎Socketing:

• Horse armor, wolf armor, and harnesses can now be socketed.

  • All can be increased to 11 armor and 2 armor toughness, the same as Diamond Horse Armor.

  • Horse and wolf armor can hold 4 stat gems, while harnesses can hold 6. Gems of Agility socketed into harnesses instead increase fly speed.

• Gems of Tenacity now additionally grant +5% stun resist. This means full tenacity armor reduces stun durations by 80%.

🎮Gameplay:

• You can now capture Happy Ghasts in eggs.

• You now have 64 block reach in the creative world by default. This can be toggled off with ‘/toggle creative_world block_reach.’

• The Hawking Warp can now be used anywhere outside of parkours, though no longer goes through walls.

🖥️Commands:

• Added ‘/map’ to get a link to the live server map.

• Added ‘/toggle sounds combat_end’ to enable a subtle sound when you exit combat.

• Added ‘/vaporize <player>’ as a new simple command (Fine!)

🪲Bug Fixes:

• Fixed Impetus of Hades allowing you to stealth in view of players in PvP arenas.

• Fixed Mulching still giving seeds when used with Magnetism.

• Fixed Noclip warping you when sprinting towards a ladder on a thin wall.

• Fixed display copy pasting not always working for displays of items with custom stack sizes (cakes, potions, etc.)

🫶

⬆️Chase the Skies Update & Live Server Map

Hey everyone, we've got a couple nice updates for you today!

👻Chase the Skies Update - 1.21.7

• The server is now live with 1.21.7, the Chase the Skies game drop! This drop primarily includes the Happy Ghast, a new tame Ghast variant that you can fly around with friends. See here for more info.

• We've made Happy Ghasts meaningfully faster than in vanilla. Note that Dried Ghasts can be crafted with 8 Ghast Tears and Soul Sand.

• Saddles are now craftable, so we no longer buy them in the Server Shop.

• The two new music discs work with Walkman leggings.

• We currently have the locator bar enabled. Let us know what you think of it.

🗺️Live Server Map

• At long last, we've launched an SSS live map! It can be found at https://map.sssminecraft.com/. A quick overview of the features:

• There are maps for spawn, the three survival worlds, and the creative world, which you can swap between in the sidebar.

• You can see who's online in the sidebar, and the map live updates with player positions and world changes.

• Hovering shows coords in the bottom left, and the controls in the top-left can toggle visibility of players, world borders, and the world spawn.

📝Other Updates

• Aphelion of Earth's tendril attacks and Abomination are now treated as magic attacks, letting them synergize with Impetus of Hecate.

• Vanilla rendering updates allow glows to work with shaders, which importantly means you can see ores sensed with Abyssal Armor with shaders on!

• When Transmuting to clay, you now get clay balls instead of clay blocks.

Thanks friends 🫶

📝General Updates

Hey everyone, just a few quick general updates.

• ⬆️We plan to update to 1.21.7 within the next day or two. Get your updated clients ready!

  • Note that saddles will be removed from the shop when we do this, as they are now craftable. Sell any you have off now if you'd like!

• 🌍The resource world has received a few updates

  • Biome warps now generate with more randomness, and the warp names are now more generic. For example. "ResCold" warps to a semi-random cold biome, like frozen peaks, and "ResForest" warps to a random large forest, like jungles or dark forests. The desert warp is still a mainstay.

  • Warps should be much more likely to generate further apart from each other.

  • This is experimental, so let us know what you think of the general idea!

• 🌏Your creative world inventory now persists between visits.

• 😴Insomnia no longer resets if you die in non-survival scenarios.

• 🍯Signs can now be unwaxed by right-clicking with an axe. This returns the honeycomb 50% of the time.

• 🛡️Impetus of Athena effects are rebalanced. Warfare attacks now damage in a cone, while ambush only empowers the attack used to exit stealth, so it is now single-target, but it temporarily shreds 50% of their armor. Stare additionally costs +1 Aegis versus players.

• 🗓️Reminder that the Greenhouse build contest is due next weekend, and that you can submit entries as early as you'd like!

Please leave feedback on any changes in ⁠💌feedback-and-suggestions, thanks🫶

📣Charms, Lucky Rush, General Updates

Hey everyone - big weekend ahead! Aside from the PvP events, there's new charms, the Lucky Rush, and general updates with an upcoming build contest FYI.

📿Charms

There are 12 new charms to find:

• 💎The Valor Shop has 5 new charms. They are listed in-game in ‘/valor charms’, but a few examples:

  • 🗿Bobblehead: Gain the Luck effect permanently while wearing your own head.

  • 💧Prince Rupert's Drop: Your hazard enchants activate with massive power when struck from behind.

  • 🗝️Spare Key: Your first charm slot can be modified even while your charms case is locked.

• 💀The Crypt Trial Shop sells the Metal Detector, which extracts scrap in place of junk when brushing suspicious sediments.

• 🎈The Boardwalk sells Balloon Animal, which causes allied mobs to pop on death, applying a radial stun and damage. Tragic!

• There are 5 other charms findable either around spawn or via gameplay, including the Sanguine Phial. Keep an eye out!

Some old charms have also been updated:

• 🍵Coffee Beans: Reworked! Gain speed, haste, and double experience during sunrise.

• 🏌️Golf Club: Reworked! Your attacks gain range, ignore some mob knockback resist, and deal double knockback to small targets.

• 🔻Nerfs: Reduced Adventurer's Tricorne boss payout to 250 silver. Made Hourglass Sands only work on utility items. Reduced Runic Compass proc rate.

✨Lucky Rush

The rush starts in just a few! In addition to the Core Bonuses, this rush has two main benefits:

• +3 Luck all weekend. Simple but effective - and good for hunting for charms!,

• Lucky Events can randomly activate to amplify certain events. Keep an eye out!,

📝General Updates

• ⚒️FYI, we'll announce a new build contest Sunday night PST which awards a Charm slot. We're delaying the start to avoid distracting from weekend events.

• 🔨Impetus of Hephaestus gem stats decay when striking with a non-artisan weapon, and Luck caps at 8 stacks.

• ⚡Impetus of Zeus grants charge from landing shots, has improved slow down physics, and slows you while aiming a spyglass.

• ☁️Terados's maps have waypoints for A Vexing Situation's quest locations, and a subtle leaf trail guides the path between them, to aid players new to the quest.

• 🐶More allied mobs grant mcMMO taming XP and benefit from taming passives. This ignores most humanoid allies, like Paradigm of Greed contractors, but works for an Avatar of Phantoms horde, for example.

⏫Rush Weekends & General Updates

Greetings everyone! It’s time to formally announce our Rush Weekends and give a few fun general updates!

Rush Weekends

Rush Weekends are a new permanent feature of Silver Springs. They run every weekend for the full 24 hours of Saturday and Sunday, in Pacific time. The first will begin this Saturday, June 21st.

Each rush activates a set of shared Core Bonuses to help you enjoy the weekend, as well as a random Wild Bonus from a list. Below are the Core Bonuses of each rush (every weekend!), as well as the Wild Bonus for the first rush this weekend - the River Rush!

✅Core Bonuses

• +25% to earned Trial Points, mcMMO XP, and Boardwalk tickets, and to rune drop rates

• The quest A Vexing Situation has only a 4-hour cooldown

• mcMMO diminishing returns cap at 0.5x XP instead of 0.25x

🐟Wild Bonus - River Rush!

• It’s not SSS without rain and community fishing! During this rush, rain lasts longer and you’ll hook fish a bit quicker.

General Updates

🧍Armor stands:

• Updated the Armor Stand Customizer which is accessed by sneak right clicking armor stands:

  • The smallness toggle has been replaced with +/- buttons to modify the armor stand's scale between 0.2x and 2x.

  • Added a "Swap Armor" button to swap all armor the armor stand is wearing with your own.

  • Added a lower interface with editable slots to control equipment. This lets you put anything in their slots, including the hand slots for ones with arms.

• Added ‘/rotate info’, which allows punching an armor stand to view all of its current rotations.

📖Runecrafting balance, largely in preparation for the PvP tournament this weekend:

• Reduced the PvP damage of the Avatar of Wardens sonic blast from 5 ❤ to 1.5 ❤.

• Reduced the damage of Gatling's additional arrows by 50%.

  • This is harsh, but we believe justified. It too quickly outscales options like Multishot, and some of its power comes from the sheer projectile count, which increases reliability and proc rates, so it doesn't need best-in-class damage within a few shots. It still scales into being the strongest DPS spread enchant.

• Halved the duration of Adrenaline Rush's reduced speed and gravity in PvP.

• Fixed Ice Aspect and Plague Aspect applying their effects even when the hit was blocked.

✏️For those who were interested in the design behind the Arcanum expansion, a large post detailing the process is available here: Designing Boundaries of the Arcanum

✨Added the ‘/paragon’ command for viewing info about the existing Paragon items.

🪲Fixed mcMMO XP diminishing returns going down to 0.05x instead of our intended 0.25x. mcMMO was bugged and ignoring our config for this field.

Thanks, friends! Please leave feedback for any of this in ⁠#💌feedback-and-suggestions as usual. 🫶

📖Designing Boundaries of the Arcanum

🥅Main Goals

This expansion was born not long after the prior one completed. We knew we had a ton of space left to explore, and some of the core concepts arose very early. For example, the first design chat mention of Impetuses was on November 16th, 2023.

Around that time, we set a primary goal of broadly filling out options. Many enchant slots still didn’t offer interesting choices, and leggings and boots lacked unique enchant sets. The Valor update wasn't initially planned, but we were feeling confident in the enchant design quality, so when Valor content came up during a design chat in mid-2024, our desire to update that space became clear.

While we didn’t start off designing around a specific vision statement, by the time we figured things out, the main goal was clear: modernize and expand our offerings to enable truly diverse late-game builds.

Finally, there’s the expansion title: Boundaries of the Arcanum. We considered other names (“Wild Magic” was around for a while early on) before settling on what seemed to best represent the intended lore and vibe - the arcane matrix which encapsulates our world, now fragmented, allowing the influential light from other realms to penetrate, forever leaving their mark on Silver Springs.

🧠High-level design explanations

🏅Enchant tiers

An important part of our enchant design philosophy relies on grouping them into tiers, of which we recognize three:

• 🥇Tier 1: The big groups. Paradigms, Avatars, Impetuses, and Aphelions. These are unique enchants which can break normal complexity rules and should feel thematically special even if behaviorally simple.

• 🥈Tier 2: High complexity. Enchants which are not part of a tier 1 group, but are unique due to high systemic complexity, such as Ear Collector, or Sapiovore previously.

• 🥉Tier 3: Mid-to-low complexity. This makes up most Runecrafted enchants, which should feel approachable and the most vanilla-like, such as Strafing.

This should shed light on not only our approach, but areas which could change in the future. For example, from a design purist standpoint, many tier 2 enchants shouldn’t exist, as they break complexity rules without justifying it by being tier 1. Being pragmatic, it’s fine or even good to break some design rules in moderation, but it’s a space we’re mindful of.

✏️Items and enchant categories

An issue we sought to correct during this expansion was the lack of a firm design direction for specific items and enchant categories. These should feel distinct, but many didn’t previously offer enough variety or unique outputs. Here are a few examples of such spaces and how we approached them:

• Tridents were already designed to feel visceral, which we leaned into further while deepening them as thematic oceanic weapons with big calls to action.

• Crossbows are designed to feel very tactile, with strong AoE to make them unique among ranged weapons.

• Axes lacked a clear distinction from swords. We sought to emphasize their in-your-face aggression, especially via their sweeping enchants which are now very different from swords (compare Chainsaw to Coup de Grâce).

• Some AoE enchants were bafflingly single-target focused. We removed these to introduce designs with more AoE potential like Dreadnought and Gatling.

🌟Why mythical enchants?

It's important to us to avoid explicit, broad power creep in our modern content. It’s impossible to avoid entirely - even new equal strength content creeps power for versatile players by expanding their options - but we’ve avoided adding an entire new top tier of gear, for example.

This is easy to satisfy for Valor armors, which can simply compete with Netherite, but is difficult for other Valor relics - how can Karru’Val not simply outclass other bows when there’s only one bow tier?

Mythical enchants were our solution. They allow for relics which make meaningful tradeoffs to access unique forms of power, and are a great chance to create unique thematic experiences. To the latter point, mythical enchants tend to be a great use case for tier 2 enchants.

✏️Design of Aphelions & Impetuses

The new tier 1 enchant sets are the centerpieces of this expansion. They make up exactly 33% of the new enchants, and epitomize the expansion’s design pillars both in the build diversity they enable and the multiversal influence they represent, so both groups deserve a space outlining their exact design goals.

🪐Aphelions

The Aphelions were designed to add alternate forms of iconic custom content. Each takes a mechanic thematically linkable to its planet and rethinks it in the same space, creating "echo fighters" of "the greatest hits of SSS".

Many relate to their planet's physical traits, and many planets were personified by interpreting what they’d influence at their aphelion: Mars most longing yet ever failing to house life, humanity furthest from its sun basking in horrors on Earth, and Pluto and Charon in their most private dance. The Lexicon lore helps illustrate this, highlighting each planet’s emotions at its aphelion.

Raceway, Aspects, R.E.D., Envy, meteors, Tome, socketing, Howling, Grasshopper, Cerberus. All have rich histories; even those added recently spiritually succeed notable content. These icons stand tall in our world, and through the torn runic matrix, each planet eclipses what most resembles it, its pull providing influence at their shared aphelion - at their furthest reach, most abstract and foreign.

⚡Impetuses

The Impetuses were designed to buff weak or missing playstyles into primary use. While many provide power in standard gameplay, they're optimal when "doing that deity's thing", "flipping the switch" to enable a gameplay style which wasn’t previously viable.

Silver Springs has much Grecian influence: hybrids, Plimmýra, and now Enelysios, reborn as the Sparks locale before our eyes, spurred by a great influence. But what, or who? Perhaps runic fluctuations have long inspired our world's discoverers, granting glimpses of other realms?

Mounts, high strategy, potions, stealth, magic, tinkering, tricksters, mobility fighters, dogfighting. All playstyles which Minecraft had potential for, but didn’t deliver. These deities championed these now lost arts, and through the torn runic matrix, their deep and powerful mythos have physically manifested in our world as the Impetuses - each of them urging and inspiring you, giving you the impetus, to return glory to their craft.

❌Failed designs & learnings

It’s not all sunshine and roses. Some things took hours of discussions to nail down. It would take too much space to cover everything, but below we've highlighted the most notable difficulties we faced.

🪐Aphelion of Saturn

Originally, Saturn eclipsed Sapiovore and let you permanently consume curses to cast Eldritch spells. Sound familiar?

This of course eventually became Earth, but we got very stuck trying to make it work as Saturn, even at times losing the heart of the great initial concept in trying to fit Saturn’s rings into the design. "Wake up babe, time to discuss Saturn!" became a tired joke within the team.

We eventually moved this idea to Earth, which fits better thematically, and mostly reverted to the original design, though tweaked to fit the R.E.D. The exercise taught us a lot about successful Aphelion design, namely needing to retain the essence of the eclipsed mechanic (in this case, unarmed for the eclipsed R.E.D.), and only cost us a little sanity.

🛡️Shields & Athena

Early on, we had >10 shield enchants designed to make them viable "weapons" for mobile scrappy fighters, à la Loader of Risk of Rain.

While the idea was fun, we quickly realized that it was the wrong way to introduce a fighting style, as it would eat a ton of design space and turn shields into something they’re not. We instead focused on making shields fun to offhand, while subtly enabling scrappy mobility fighters (Poseidon, Tempest, etc.)

Meanwhile, we got distracted trying to design Athena around shields, which fell apart when remembering the point of Impetuses - buff weak playstyles. Shields alone aren’t a playstyle, and if weak, it would be because our shield content is weak, meaning we should buff that content, not use an Impetus as a band-aid. We eventually recognized this and refocused Athena on strategic melee combat, which is a better space for an Impetus and a better fit for Athena.

🔱Tridents

The melee vs. range issue

We initially aimed to add multiple enchants skewed towards buffing melee tridents. This was fruitless, given there’s nothing exciting about melee trident attacks, which should have been obvious. It works better to focus on their unique ranged outputs and only add melee hooks when it fits naturally (which is rare).

Mutiny and heroism

Trident enchant categories also gave us trouble. We spent ages trying to ideate a new trajectory enchant, and planned for one named Mutiny, which would make the trident return only by “proving yourself” in one of a few ways, but in exchange you'd get buffs. The flavor of repeatedly re-earning your mutinous crew's respect was fun, but it filled an odd design space as a tier 2 enchant that felt less new and more like eclipsed Loyalty, so we scrapped it. Perhaps it will return in a different form one day.

The heroism category was also tough. We wanted a Channeling mutual, but got stuck viewing the core concept as "unique buffs in rare scenarios" (like Channeling's lightning in thunderstorms). An example design is Valhallan, which could resurrect you in rare elongated combat scenarios. While cool, these designs were too niche or too gameable. We finally had the "duh" moment: the appropriately niche, not gameable scenario is thunderstorms - we didn't need to find a new one. Heraclean was born shortly thereafter. A good lesson in not overthinking things!

📿Rune of Virtues

In a fervent design session in late January, we almost added a Rune of Virtues, hoping to fill the lacking rune representation of morals, conscience, and the id. The rune could work well for things like Paradigms or to represent heroics (Heraclean), pacifying (Shrink Ray), etc. We even discussed potential locales (Cultist HQ!)

We were split, but ultimately felt the rune didn't add enough meaning to the system to be worth the design space it would take up, so we decided against it, which we're very glad about in hindsight.

🗓️The future

📖Runecrafting going forward

We've called this the final Runecrafting expansion, which is indeed our plan, but that doesn't mean Runecrafting will stagnate. It's a key fixture of the server which affects and is affected by our other content and the vanilla game itself.

Our expectation is that Runecrafted enchant changes will always be part of our design and balancing going forward, especially in response to changes to other content. For example, maybe we'll eventually remove some enchants via moving their mechanics into other spaces. Or perhaps Mojang will add a new weapon and we'll design a slew of new enchants for it, like we just did for maces. Only time will tell with these things, but we're committed to keeping Runecrafting modern in response to any changes to the Silver Springs experience.

❓What's next?

We've already announced a bunch of upcoming content for this map. I'm also happy to share that we're already in early ideation stages of next map's big content updates. We're not ready to share anything there yet, but that content doesn't rely on secrecy in the same way as the new enchants did, so there's a fair chance you'll hear about it well before the next reset. No promises though - we have to see how things evolve first.

If you made it this far, thanks so much for reading and for your commitment to Silver Springs!❤️

📖Runecrafting Expansion Wrap Up

With the discovery of Walkman, the final Runecrafting expansion is complete!

Thank you all so, so much for your engagement and enthusiasm with not only this event, but truly the entire content update; we couldn’t be happier with the response! We'd like to wrap with a final special Runecrafting announcement, then a quick look at what’s next.

🏅Special Thanks

First, as thanks for everyone’s efforts, all researchers will soon receive an ancestral Boundary Fragment commemorating your contributions!

We also extend particular thanks to four key researchers who showcased great interest and theorizing. Each will soon receive a unique, ancestral Mythic Rune from the college archives. These runes are relics of other times, now inert and only found in mythical enchants and legends. They are novelties which we hope you will cherish - and thanks to each of you for your outsized contribution to making events like this worthwhile!

• ❤️@J_, for your ingenuity and discernment of all possibilities, you are granted the Rune of Prisms. May it aid your search for other realms.

• 💎@Starmarsh™, for your valor and lasting guidance, you are granted the Rune of Whispers. May their voices guide you.

• 📈@TroyTheCrafter, for your great ambition, you are granted the Rune of Asymptotes. May it lead you ever upwards.

• 🏅@Maidl, for your prolific longevity, you are granted the Rune of Silence. May you be inspired by the persistence of what has always been.

• 🏆As each expansion's top discoverer, @J_ and @Starmarsh™ are also granted the Rune of Singularities. May it pull you to further greatness.

📆What's Next?

The expansion was our big map event, but we have more in the works! No exact timelines yet, but here are some things to look forward to in the coming weeks:

• ✏️A post from the design team covering how we concepted this expansion, and more Valor lore stories.

• 🔋The return of runic surges in a new form.

• 📿A Charms drop containing roughly 10 new charms to experiment with.

• ⬆️Rotating rush weekends which will give free boosts in various areas. These will happen every weekend!

• ⛏️QoL updates for builders, including updates to ‘/display’ and access to light blocks.

• ⚔️A new duo BYOG Trial with unique prizes.

• ⚒️Continued contests and events as long as there is interest!

Thanks again everyone. We love you and couldn't do this without the encouragement we get from your enjoyment. It means the world!

-🫶Staff

📝General Updates

Hey everyone! Hope your shrine builds are going well. Normally I try to keep the general updates to once/week, but there were enough changes recently or missed in prior announcements that I wanted to get some info sent out. Without further ado!

⚔️mcMMO

• Added 5 new potions brewable at the upper Alchemy tiers:

  • Level 625: Glow Berries brew the Potion of Glowing.

  • Level 750: Shulker Shells brew the Potion of Levitation.

    • Note: AoE Levitation potions have intentionally low durations for combat balance.

  • Level 875: Hearts of the Sea brew the Potion of Conduit Power.

  • Level 1000: New tier! Resin Blocks brew the Potion of Luck, and Totems of Undying brew the Potion of Heroism, granting Hero of the Village.

• Fixed missing names on custom potions. This causes newly brewed custom potions to have new ‘/iteminfo’ IDs', so you'll need to update shops selling them (sorry!)

Terminology

• Going forward, all past and future unique items won by players (via Splurges, etc.) will be referred to as Paragons, to highlight them as unique, ultimate items. You're all pretty good about using our designated terms, so I wanted this to be known!

Miscellaneous

• Added ‘/display background <r> <g> <b> <alpha>’, each 0-255, for setting text display background colors.

• Updated Impetus of Zeus to display a progress bar towards your next lightning shot.

• Updated unwaxing copper blocks with an axe to refund honeycomb 50% of the time.

• Updated levitation chambers to play subtle sounds and prevent activating Rocket Boosting by sneaking while within.

• Advancement completion is now announced for vanilla ones of Goal or Challenge tier or certain SSS ones. Let us know if you enjoy this change!

• Fixed Absorption health sticking after the effect expired. Sorry, but this was not intentional.

🫶

📚Contest Winners and General Updates

Hey again everyone. It's been an exciting few days - we've jumped from 8 discoveries to 19 in the few days since our last announcement! There are over 50 enchants total, so still tons to find, but great work so far! It's time to announce the build contest winners, and give a few more days’ worth of general updates.

🔭Observatory: Build Contest Winners

Thanks much to all the entrants, these were really fun to judge! Here are the top 3 entries:

• 🥇1st Place: J1mbers and Krashafa - A perfect score from all judges! Your warp is set as Observatory1.

• 🥈2nd Place: Starmarsh and Daria! Your warp is set as Oculus as requested.

• 🥉3rd Place: A tie!

  • Maidl and TroyTheCrafter! Your warp is set as Observatory3.,

  • TheJ_Team! Your warp is set as Observatory4.

Congrats winners! For all entrants, your prize money has been distributed (split evenly where necessary) and your prize items are in a bundle on the bottom row of the submitter's ender chest (J1mbers, Star, and Maidl for the joint entries). Winners, feel free to request a free warp rename if desired.

📝General Updates

• 💎Socketing

  • Gem socketing now works for custom helmets!

  • Note that Runecrafted enchants can be applied to custom helmets. This isn't new, but stating it for visibility.

• 🪙Shops

  • Updated the stock and price of items sold at ‘/warp buyables’. Notably, we now sell Creaking Spawn Eggs, Gilded Blackstone, and Reinforced Deepslate.

  • You can sneak + punch to bulk sell to the server shop. This was changed a little while back, but listing it for visibility.

• 📖Runecrafting Event:

  • The enchant research quest board now displays % progress of ongoing projects, and a board has been added for new discoveries from this expansion.

• ✏️Miscellaneous

  • Fixed potions brewing directly to their extended state and sometimes not granting mcMMO Alchemy XP.

  • You can now cleanse candles in a cauldron to undye them.

  • Added a toggle in /toggle sounds to disable the sound that plays every jump with Avatar of Slimes.

🫶

📚Contest Reminder & General Updates

Hey again everyone. Another week gone! We've had 8 enchant discoveries so far. It's been great to see everyone's theories about what's to come. Time for a quick reminder and to summarize the main updates from the past week!

🔭 Build Contest Reminder

Reminder that there are just over 48 hours left in the Observatory build contest, and that the top 3 entrants get 2 Boundary Fragments. Good luck!

📝General Updates

• 💎 Valor & Trials:

  • Added a new Silence Tonic (seen below) to the Artifact Trader for a water bottle and Rune of Echoes. Use one on an entity to silence it. Each has two uses.

  • Fixed bugs with the Asteroids Hawking class and adjusted its boss fighting prowess. The bonus warp damage to bosses is lower, but it now generates Entropy when damaging bosses with warps or the black hole.

• 📖 Lexicon:

  • Added `/lexicon by_rune <rune>` to view all enchants whose recipes use the rune. This replaces the list in each `/rune` entry.

  • Updated `/rune` to show the rune's main *meanings*, the spell it casts in the Runic Tome, and a link to its `/lexicon by_rune`.

• 🪄 Enchantment adjustments:

  • Buffed the hunger/saturation restored by Taste Test.

  • Added rooted dirt and gravel as low-value transmutables for Transmuting shovels.

• 🌎 Rune Locales:

  • Increased spawn rates in Skatheim (Chills) and The Allforge (Moments), and increased the strength of The Allforge's copper golems.

  • Added corrupted variants of Arkose (Mortus) and Plimmýra (Tides). Thanks beccc!

• ✏️Miscellaneous:

  • Made poisonous potatoes compostable in a composter.

  • Fixed `/sit` and similar commands not working in chome...

  • Many other minor balance tweaks, bug fixes, and general optimizations.

Thanks friends! 🫶

📚Trusted Promos and General Updates

Hey again everyone. Hope you're all enjoying the event so far! We've had two discoveries so far - Mulching by JenoSnowconeIce, a hoe enchant which automatically composts surplus seeds, and Pestle by skelud, a mace enchant which crushes enemies into primordial dust which can be used to dupe gems. Excited to see more discoveries start ramping up!

We've got a decent batch of people we're promoting to [Trusted], and some general updates and fixes from the past week.

🤝Trusted Promos

We've got a big build up of people who have been around a while, play quite often, and have consistently shown good behavior and community involvement. All of the following players are now [Trusted] rank - congrats and much love to you all!

• Bunniworth

• ElectricSparx

• JenoSnowconeIce

• MareeAM

• Mishiaria

• MrHollowPoint99

• Shotdown01

• skelud

📝General Updates

• We've made many general optimizations to improve performance. Lemme know if the TPS feels better on average!,

• The boardwalk now sells a Creaking modulator, and the clairvoyant's hint is now for a random undiscovered spawn secret instead of always your next one.,

• Fixed Bane of Arthropods not working on Shulkers, and Kuiper Shulkers duping using the vanilla mechanic. These combined should make Kuiper less annoying!,

• Displays:

  • Many cases now show useful info when omitting arguments. e.g. /display brightness with no extra args shows the brightness of your selected displays.

    • Note /display info exists to show all info about selected displays.

  • When setting a text display to fixed billboard mode, it now turns to face your head so you don't lose it.,

• Fixed mob scarecrows not placing correctly.,

• Buffed Ground Pound by ensuring it uses pre-roll damage.,

• Various bugs and compatibility issues fixed, notably for Cerberus and Wrath (still more work to do for them...)

Thanks all!

📖1.21.5 Runecrafting Expansion

📖Runecrafting Expansion: Research Overview

Hello researchers! Thanks for joining today's research expeditions. We've discovered so much already, but this is just the beginning! I'm here to give you a quick summary of what was discovered, and how research and enchant discoveries will work throughout this event.

📝Event Summary

• Together, we discovered two new rune locales:

  • 🌆Val, the Ancient Capital, home of the Rune of Echoes, representing sound and repetition.

  • 🌩️Enelysios, the Deadly Current, home of the Rune of Sparks, representing electricity and inspiration.

• Upon discovering Enelysios, the nascent locale surged with energy, spawning an apex enemy.

• The apex enemy dropped Boundary Fragments, which we used to uncover information about 8 new enchants.

🔬Research Mechanics

• ⬆️The Arcanum has been upgraded, but at a cost:

  • Discovering new enchants now requires perfectly accurate recipes - runes must be submitted in perfect order.

  • The Arcanum now salvages 2 runes from failed runecrafts. If you nearly discover an active research project by using its correct runes in the wrong order, The Arcanum detects this, notifies you, and salvages 4 runes.

• 🔋A random locale surges with energy 4 times daily, at 10:00 AM, 2:00 PM, 6:00 PM, and 10:00 PM CDT:

  • The surging locale spawns a boundary-touched apex boss and starts overcharging, accelerated by player deaths and slowed by damaging the apex.

  • The apex periodically spawns damageable runic tears and releases diffusion waves from them and itself, dealing damage which bypasses most enchants.

  • If slain, the apex drops 1 Boundary Fragment. If the locale fully overcharges, the surge ends unsuccessfully.

• 📑Active projects roll a new research quest daily at the start of the hour of their discovery.

  • Research quests use shared progress - once anyone completes it, that project's quest is done for the day. Work together to complete each quest daily!

  • Projects can be viewed using /lexicon project <project number>.

• 🧭A quest board has been set up on the back wall of /warp ArcanumResearchLab:

  • Active projects have a board entry that can be interacted with to progress their quest (if applicable) or submit a Boundary Fragment to it.

  • Completing a project's quest grants it +10% Research Progress. Submitting a Boundary Fragment directly to a project grants it +50% Research Progress.

  • When a project hits 100% progress, new information about it is discovered, up to 4 times per project.

  • Alternatively, a Boundary Fragment can be submitted directly to the Arcanum to scry for new enchants - this will randomly either uncover information about a new enchantment, beginning its research project, or add 50% progress to an ongoing project.

• 🧑‍🎓Once an enchant is discovered, its top researcher (whoever contributed the most research progress to it) will be contributed as an additional discoverer!

Thanks everyone for your help today. There are over 50 new enchants to discover. Feel free to ask any questions in ⁠📖arcanum-expansion. Good luck and happy researching!

📖1.21.5 Enchantment Changes

🔧System

• Many Runecrafted enchantments have been reworked, updated, or removed.

• There are 5 new enchantments which we're revealing immediately ↓

• There are 8 new curses which can be received from failed Runecrafts. These replace our previous 2 custom curses, and are mostly for fun, but some have potential use cases. These aren't listed here, but they (and the two vanilla curses) are viewable in the Lexicon for reference.

• Some enchantment recipes have been updated to more modern standards.

🎉New

• Ground Pound:

  • Replaces Feather Falling V. Reduces fall damage and allows double sneaking while airborne to slam down and deal radial damage. Exclusive with Feather Falling & Rocket Boosting.

• Ragdoll:

  • Replaces Knockback III. Killing blows deals 3x knockback ignoring knockback resistance. Enemies hit by their body are stunned. Exclusive with Knockback.

• Riposte:

  • Replaces Kinetic Battery. After a parry, your next attack automatically critically strikes.

• Wire Cutters:

  • Port of Blast Protection V, which is reworked. Shears enchant which allows shearing explosive entities to “defuse” them. Exclusive with Mitosis & Tithing.

• Kaleidoscope:

  • Now a spyglass enchant instead of a charm.

✨Reworked

• All Chestplate "Aspects" have been renamed to “Avatars”, e.g. “Aspect of the Shulker” is now “Avatar of Shulkers”. This differentiates them from the DoT Aspects, and subjectively we feel it sounds cooler.

• Battering Ram:

  • Bash (double block) to rapidly dash forward, pushing and stunning enemies you collide with.

• Blast Protection:

  • Defuse mechanic replaced with an Absorption “blast shield” upon taking blast damage, granting knockback immunity and damage reduction while it holds.

• Executioner:

  • Now a 1-level Looting mutual. Executes below 5% health and grants +200% head drop rates.

• Fencing:

  • After attacking, you can double-tap a movement key to hop invulnerably in that direction.

• Frost Walker:

  • Removed Runecrafted level III. Innately buffed to grant bonus speed on ice and snow blocks and convert powder snow to regular snow.

• Hot Rod:

  • Sears some caught fish, doubling their restored hunger and sell price, and allows lava fishing for 2x sear chance.

• Paradigm of Lust:

  • Enemies targeting a spouse are scorned, allowing you to leap strike them from afar, but if a spouse dies in combat, you wither away unless you enact reckless vengeance against their killer.

• Paradigm of Greed:

  • You can form lifelong contracts with humanoid mobs using raw gold, but if ever you don't re-up a contractor, they betray you.

• Paradigm of Sloth:

  • You can lumber, moving slower and gaining slow, massive attacks, but lumbering replaces sprinting.

• Shockwave:

  • Renamed to Undertow. Now releases a radial wave from you which pushes away enemies.

  Singularity:

  • Renamed to Snare. Now releases ropes which pull enemies towards the impact point.

• Skewering:

  • Attacks gain range and pierce in a 3-prong cone, and throws bypass shields and pierce enemies. Pierced enemies are slowed.

• Utility Belt:

  • Grants leggings a belt, a 9-slot item inventory. Shift right clicking them swaps the contents of their belt and your hotbar.

📝Adjusted

All changes are relative to current mechanics; unlisted = unchanged. Any very minor adjustments also unlisted. Use the Lexicon if you want every detail! ➕Buff, 🟰Neutral, ➖Nerf

• ➕Avatar of Bees:

  • Grants +1 block reach and prevents bees from targeting you.

• ➕Avatar of Ender Dragons:

  • Fires a dragon fireball instead of continuous dragon breath.

• ➕Avatar of Iron Golems:

  • Grants +2❤️ max health instead of bonus knockback.

• ➕Avatar of Shulkers:

  • Shell mode is now activated by sneak punching below you, grants knockback immunity, and only converts arrows to Shulker bullets.

• ➕Avatar of Slimes:

  • Replaced random slimes on damage with a split at 75%, 50%, and 25% health, spawning a slime which draws aggro.

• ➕Bane of Arthropods:

  • Always slows for the full duration (yes, it slows) and works against Shulkers (not new, but stating for visibility).

• ➕Blitz:

  • Max level reduced, III → II. Same strength at max level.

• ➕Bottom Feeder:

  • Pulls from a new scrap table with grab bag-style items.

• ➖Bounty Hunter:

  • Only rolls to spawn a bounty on-kill. Reduces AFK silver collecting, though can result in more bounties during active gameplay.

• ➖Chaining:

  • Nerfed chain range, 16 blocks → 12.

• ➕Eldritch Inclination:

  • Luck gained from void damage now stacks. Now causes Wardens to warn you 1 additional time before they spawn.

• ➖Extinction:

  • Can stack against any non-player entity. Damage against non-bosses capped to 5-10 ❤. Rune locale mobs now treated as unique entity types.

• ➕Fire Aspect:

  • Cuts healing of burning targets by 50%.

• ➕Flare:

  • Entities hit directly glow for 30 seconds.

• ➕Green Thumb:

  • Max level reduced, III → II. Same strength at max level.

• ➖Howling:

  • Attack speed per stack reduced, 10% → 5%. Offhand howl damage reduced, 37.5% → 25%.

• ➕Multishot:

  • Note that this enchant is buffed by projectiles bypassing iframes.

• ➕Paradigm of Vainglory:

  • Replaced cowering slow with +10% speed to reduce reliance on mobility/Envy. The key punishment is intended to be exiting combat, not the debuff.

• ➖Pestilence & Plague Aspect:

  • Spread is now delayed and only to the 1-3 closest enemies in range.

• ➕Riptide:

  • Now plays well with most enchants, and so is now only exclusive with Loyalty.

• ➕Rocket Boosting:

  • Max level reduced, III → II. Same strength at max level.

• ➖Schrödinger’s Thumb:

  • Max level increased, I → II. Same strength at max level.

• ➖Slingshot:

  • Can no longer store equipment.

• ➕Soul Speed:

  • Removed durability drain.

• ➕Sundering:

  • Now deals +1❤ attack damage, and stacks 3 times for 4❤ instead of 5 times for 3❤.

• ➕Sweeping Edge: Sweeps even when no target is hit directly.

❌Removed

• Aspect of the Blaze:

  • Struggled to find a good home since losing Blaze pacifying, which we don't plan to readd.

• Crucifying:

  • Doesn't see much use, nor is it worth the space.

• Feather Falling V:

  • Replaced by Ground Pound, see above.

• Frost Walker III:

  • Lava walking is better served by Striders. Vanilla enchant is now innately buffed, see above.

• Haunted Bulwark:

  • Doesn't see much use or fit our modern ideals for shields.

• Knockback III:

  • Replaced by Ragdoll, see above.

• Lightning Rod:

  • Doesn't see much use or fit our modern ideals for shields.

• Misanthropy:

  • Unnecessary now that Extinction works against any target.

• Phantom Strike:

  • We're not fond of single-target DPS enchants competing with AoE ones.

• Point Blank:

  • Fills an odd space as a bow enchant. Now better serviced by options like Valor Cerberus.

• Rune Scented:

  • Replaced by the Valor Mark of the Cult.

• Sapiovore:

  • Replaced by the Valor R.E.D. armor.

• Shadow Shot:

  • We're not fond of single-target DPS enchants competing with AoE ones.

• Swift Sneak IV:

  • Largely replaced by the Valor Umbral armor.

• Overload:

  • Plagued by balance issues, only used in abuse cases.