Skyblock Let's Improve New User Retention and Expand Challenges

Hello friends of SkyBlock! My name is BriChickadee, Slagomizer in-game. I started playing SkyBlock a few months ago and have been obsessive ever since. I hope we've met inside the game or on the Discord, and I hope you enjoy my suggestion here.

Why did I come up with this idea?
When I started playing, I enjoyed the goal-oriented nature of the fifty challenges. It was a great way to reward new payers while giving them some sense of direction and encouraging them to move beyond the comfort of their own island to trade and interact with other community members. When I joined, I quickly raced through finishing them all, but I found myself feeling a little aimless thereafter and felt myself wishing for a subsequent set to become unlocked once the first was through. Now that I'm a (still new, but) somewhat established player, I have been ruminating on how to go about this in a way that is compatible with the inherent limits of SkyBlock and that is ultimately beneficial for player retention, as it would have helped my "stickiness" earlier on, for sure, when I felt listless and felt not sure what to do with myself after reaching a small level of stability. Thankfully, I'm obsessed with MineCraft in general, so I didn't leave SkyBlock But that isn't true for all! So many new players come on daily and don't come back. As the developers close in on the release of SkyBlock 1.19, I hope they will consider this suggestion for their next implementation.

Let's expand upon the first set of fifty challenges and give both established and newer players something to strive for:
1. Plant one of all six classic saplings (oak, dark oak, acacia, birch, jungle, and spruce)
2. Build a stone generator (smooth, not cobble)
3. Craft one redstone item (repeater, observer, etc)
4. Craft a shulker box
5. Break a diamond pickaxe
6. Mine 64 ores (could be a certain number of each type, obviously skewed toward the more common ones, I cannot imagine sitting through and trying to get 64 iron ores!)
7. Have of each of the following in your inventory: watermelon, pumpkin, beet, wheat, cocoa
8. Harvest nether wart
9. Craft a glistering melon
10. Build an iron golem
11. Place 10 sea lanterns
12. Give 20 bread to villagers
13. Craft 5 item frames
14. Craft one of each dye
15. Get a fish in a bucket
16. Create one tradeshop (or, depending if detecting that is hard to do, perhaps just interacting with one usershop is easier?)
17. Construct 32 chiseled stone blocks
18. Craft 16 cookies (as if there aren't enough cookies being thrust into the void already!)
19. Chop 16 each of: acacia, jungle, and spruce wood
20. Explode a bed in the Nether
21. Craft 27 bookshelves
22. Craft 10 rabbit stews (and then promptly leave them to rot in a chest in the corner of the island, like you did with the mushroom stews in the first round of challenges!)
23. Craft 40 sugar
24. Craft 64 bone blocks
25. Reach level 30
26. Craft 16 bricks
27. Set fire to a mob with a bow (or, use a crossbow, in this new update, that might be better)
28. Place 64 grass, you robber baron, you
29. Mine an iron ore
30. Kill 25 witches, 25 creepers, and 25 enders (forces people to not rely on player spawners!)
31. Craft an enchantment table
32. Craft 5 gold blocks
33. Craft 5 redstone items (redstone repeaters, daylight sensors, pistons, observers, etc)
34. Craft 8 stripped birch wood
35. Get creative with your diet: consume 1 rotten flesh, 1 spider eye, 1 poisonous potato, 1 raw beef, 1 suspicious stew
36. Enchant an item with silk touch
37. Expand to 99 blocks
38. Craft a compass and a map
39. Craft 10 slime blocks
40. Craft 12 rail
41. Craft 10 lapis blocks
42. Craft 10 diamond blocks
43. Craft 10 coal blocks
44. Craft 10 iron blocks
45. Teleport with chorus
46. Craft a fire charge
47. Enter a Nether fortress
48. Mine 64 quartz
49. Collect 16 blaze rods (or maybe ghast tears)
50. Use (or maybe craft) an anvil

Now, this is not a definitive list, and I hope that my suggestion garners sufficient attention to foster discussion about some of the specifics here. I tried to go number-by-number on the previous set of challenges and one-up their difficulty (for instance, instead of teleporting with ender eyes, now, one must teleport with chorus). I think for many players, this would be a welcome new challenge, even those who've been playing a good bit, but most importantly, it could help goal-oriented players stick to an open-format game like SkyBlock and all-around improve player retention, which this server seems to suffer from.

I did search the forum with 2-3 different strings to see if someone had proposed such a thing and could not find something similar (do excuse if this has been asked and answered). I have little concept of how much relative work this would be for the wonderful devs, but I really hope my thoughtful suggestion is met positively I'm happy to have become a regular SB player and want to see it grow

 

I think giving more challenges to players would/could definitely help with player retention because I see people say the same things in game that they don't know what to do after they make a cobble gen and start expanding their islands. When challenges were fixed (thanks Dex), people were eager to try and complete them to see if there were more or just to check them all off for completion. While I do love a lot of your challenge ideas and I think they are incredibly creative and well thought out, this seems like something that would need to be visited or thought about after the server is updated. I have no idea how hard it is to implement new challenges like this, but I'm sure most of the attention is getting the server up and running and ironing out any of the bugs that possibly arise after that.
All that being said, 1.19 would open up a world of possibilities when it came to new challenges and I think could entice and help new and old players learn some of the new features from jumping from 1.12-1.19. Once the update is complete, I fully support new challenges being implemented and I think they would provide a ton of benefits if they aren't difficult to add into the server plugin. I also think rewards for new challenges could give access to new items and blocks in 1.19 and would be a different kind of grind to get farmable items or things like skulk catalysts or things of that nature. Thanks for taking the time to try and help new players and keep the player base growing!!

 

So they had this on Mineverse 1.18 Survival and it was really nice to have challenges to complete although a lot of them wouldn't transfer. You got a different kind of currency when completing them that allowed you to spend them in a special shop that had shulkers, land expansion, rare-leg keys and such. I think that would require a pretty big overhaul to implement cause most was designed for survival but man I was excited to hop on every day and see what challenges I needed to complete to try and save up for keys and such.

 

Thank you all for the discourse.

I think you're absolutely correct, Drogo. The biggest hurdle, to me, in the game is getting from the point at which a player "gets it" to where they can really integrate themselves with the economy. Perhaps a second set of challenges can help bridge the gap, or supply rewards which help them better compete. For instance, if a reward gave something that would make farming trees, shulks, end products, or what have you easier, so long as it didn't oversaturate or otherwise mess with the current economic situation. And while integration into the economy sustains the server, perhaps we must recognize that different players are excited by different aspects of the server. We see this in the types of islands people build. Some enjoy aiming to get a high island level, some enjoy building whimsical, beautiful islands, some like building player activities into their islands. In general, I love open-world games and don't enjoy games that prescribe one's trajectory too tightly via linear, goal-oriented game play. Others enjoy set tasks. Maybe more challenge could broaden the player type we appeal to.

This is fun, and rewards daily play and consistency, but it might be a headache for devs. Not sure.

Something else that occurred to me while reading replies to discussion is that perhaps it would be relatively straightforward for the devs to integrate Minecraft's normal achievement branches with SB rewards. I got the idea for number 35 from a Minecraft achievement won when having eaten every technically consumable thing in the game.

Thanks all for the feedback, keep it going!

 

Man this is incredible to hear. Appreciate all your hard work and you are bringing and implementing things I couldn't have even dreamed to have had. Also thanks for the updates and keeping us posted.

 

This all sounds great! I'm sure other members are sick of repeating themselves in the server: "drop rates are lower in the nether, click the obsidian with a bucket, type /kit sapling, do /sethome, click a user's name in-chat to visit their island" et cetera...

Hopefully some of the challenge mechanics can help guide through some of these processes. Perhaps also starter chests could come with a SkyBlock guide book.