EliteMobs 7.3.0-SNAPSHOT 2 & 3 AKA the item upgrade update

Hello everyone!

This is a bit of a debriefing of the new item upgrade systems. It is partly an explanation of how they work, why they work that way, why they do not work a different way and the path that took us here. It also ends with talking about the near future.

If you have a few minutes to spare and want to peek behind the curtain of development, go ahead and continue reading this. If not, documentation will be provided for these features once they mature and assume a more stable form.

7.3.0-SNAPSHOT-2 (and the snapshot 3 bugfix) introduced the new item mechanics for 7.3. Three new items act as the pillars of this new system: the unbinding scroll, elite scraps, and item upgrade orbs.

Starting with the simplest system, unbinding scrolls allow users to unbind items at the item unbinding NPC. Currently there is no way to obtain these scrolls outside of directly awarding them to players or putting them in the loot tables of a Custom Boss.

Starting next month, 69OzCanOfBepis and I will be working on a new Lair which will be the de facto endgame of EliteMobs. This will be an epic fight with a level 250 boss, probably the first and canonically only fight against an Elite Ender Dragon. I hope I can invest a decent chunk of time into developing this fight, making it feel unique and memorable – and thanks to all the support I have gotten on Patreon and itch.io, it is pretty much guaranteed that I will be able to invest that kind of time & money for the map.

The reason why I bring up this “ultimate” fight is that that will be the only boss which can drop the item unbind scroll. It will be an incredibly tough fight, featuring new advanced mechanics, with a 1 weeklong respawn timer and only a 1% drop chance for the scroll itself.

You might be wondering why it is that the rarity of this unbind scroll is being taken to this extreme. To justify it, it is necessary to go a bit in-depth with the progression philosophy of EliteMobs.

One key feature for players who really enjoy EliteMobs and play it for hours on end is the Adventurer’s Guild and its prestige system. This system was conceived so casual players could easily reach a natural end to the progression of EliteMobs, and so dedicated players could continue past this ending and still be rewarded for their efforts.

To this end, the prestige system resets player progression, and removing the items they looted thus far is a key part of this reset system.

Through the unbind system, savvy EliteMobs veterans will be able to save specific items (such as a good weapon) between prestige tiers. This will superboost their ability to blast through EliteMobs ranks, drastically shortening the amount of time they need to invest before they max out the ranks once again.

On its own, unbinding items is a net negative. Beyond bypassing the gearing up system, it also allows veteran players to simply give incredibly overpowered and otherwise unusable weapons to new players.

This is where the rarity kicks in. By making these items prohibitively rare and hard to obtain, you will scarcely see players selling unbound items, let alone give them away. The purpose here is to create items so rare and precious that players will remember all items that have been unbound in a server and have it become a sign of status and power within a server. Using the scroll should take a lot of deliberation to maximize their efficiency, and risking losing an unbound item should be something players give some thought any time they think about using it.

Obviously, this is my personal view on how loot works. Different servers can and have radically different view on how quickly players should progress and how much effort it should take. To this end, these unbind scrolls are fundamentally just like any other Elite Item, and you can customize them to make them drop as rarely or as frequently as you desire.

The item unbind system ties into the new item upgrade system. This system is based on scrap, which you obtain by trading Elite Items with the scrapper NPC. This NPC has a 50% chance to convert an elite item of a certain level to elite scrap of the same level. This scrap can then be upgraded at the Refiner NPC at a rate of 10 scrap for 1 upgraded scrap, used for repairs at the Repairman NPC (more about it in a bit) and finally it can be used to create item upgrade orbs by giving 25 scrap of a level to create 1 item upgrade orb of the same level at the Smelter NPC.

This item upgrade orb can then be used at the Enhancer NPC to upgrade an Elite Item from 1 level below the orb’s level to the level of the orb. This is where the first tweak to the system is coming in. To simplify this system for players, I am altering it so any item upgrade orb of any level higher than the item’s level will increase that item’s level by 1.

This all might sound a bit complex, but it really is a compact system. It guarantees that, if players so desire, every piece of loot that players obtain contribute towards gear progression, without outright allowing players to shop around for which items they want. It allows players to stick to a specific weapon or piece of armor if they enjoy using it, even as it would otherwise become irrelevant to the level of challenge they might face at higher levels. It also drastically increases the value of unbound items, as it means that unbound items can not only be used between prestige tiers but also that a player can further enhance the item after unbinding it.

Item upgrade orbs are interesting little items which I fully intend to use as quest rewards, among other things, as they will always tend to be rather useful to players.

Finally, the item repair system uses scrap, and repairs 1 durability per 1 level of elite scrap, times the amount of scrap you want to use. As such, if you use 20 level 5 scrap, you will be able to repair 100 durability on an Elite Item. This will not work for non-Elite items.

Regarding customizability: as per usual, I aim to make these systems as customizable as I reasonably can. To the best of my knowledge, everything is already translatable in its current state. You can also play around with a lot of the visual elements of the menus. The amounts are not currently customizable, and that is intentional. I aim to get some feedback on the amounts currently in use, to have an idea of how the defaults can be improved. Once I get enough feedback, I will then add in customization options for customizing things such as the amount of scrap needed to upgrade scrap, or to craft an item upgrade orb, while providing what is generally accepted as a reasonable middle ground for most servers by default.

Obviously, some bugs have been reported, and I have tried to respond to these as soon as they pop up. You may have noticed that this adds quite a few features to EliteMobs, and that it also expands the Adventurer’s Guild Hub world.

If you have been following the streams (twitch.tv/magmaguy), you may have seen 69OzCanOfBepis working on the Adventurer’s Guild Hub World. The world is not yet in its final form, but I believe that Bepis has once again done a stellar job of staying on theme with the rest of the map while seriously expanding the amount of space I can add features to.

Speaking of streams and maps, 69OzCanOfBepis has finished adding all the bosses for Chapter 2 of the Oasis, and I will be spending the last few days of March working on bugfixes and features for that minidungeon, much of it on stream. The entire map should now be accessible, and much of it should be in its final form. We will mostly be focusing on lore, powers & polish for the third chapter, so you can expect Chapter 2 to be a good preview for the final form of the Oasis.

Since Chapter 3 will be about polish, we will be mostly pausing development of the Oasis throughout April to gather feedback about it and to focus on the level 250 lair & potential Elite Ender Dragon encounter. I want to stick to the schedule of providing Patreon supporters with 1 new Patreon release per month, but I do not want to have to split my attention between making both a premium minidungeon and this extremely complex lair, nor do I want to make the only way of obtaining the unbind scroll a premium Lair. As such, if everything goes right, Patreon supporters (and itch.io purchasers) will be able to download the level 250 Lair at the end of April, and it will become free for anyone to download starting in June.

I hope that this compromise will please both those who choose to support the plugin and those who either do not or are not able to do so.

I also want to acknowledge the honestly amazing amount of support that the plugin has seen in recent times, both on patreon and itch.io. Things are really taking off for EliteMobs, and I hope that it is clear that I am putting quite a bit of time and effort into trying to make sure that it keeps growing into something worthy of your use and support.

To share some stats, EliteMobs is currently sitting at 109 patreon supporters, and has seen 168 payments on itch.io. It is about to reach 75,000 downloads on Spigot, having been reviewed 137 times and sitting near the top of the mechanics section of Spigot in ratings! Release and documentation videos regularly reach multiple thousands of views, and some of them even reached over 10k.

These are perhaps not the most impressive numbers in the larger scale of things, but I believe that for a Spigot plugin, it is a resounding success which I was absolutely not expecting, and I thank you all for it. Thanks to this extra income, I was able to afford amazing upgrades for my office, a new cellphone and I am even getting private Japanese lessons, as I am working a lot with that language and I am interested in learning it.

I will continue streaming over at twitch.tv/magmaguy for the foreseeable future, as I aim to make that a place people can come to hang out and see the plugin get developed in front of their eyes, and potentially even see requests made on stream be added live.

On those streams I will continue furthering the 7.3.0 update and the Oasis minidungeon. The first version of the 7.3.0 update will hopefully be coming out in early April, as I will be releasing it once I see that the new item upgrade system is stable and will start working on arenas once that is done.

That’s all for now, I’ll see you all on the next one!