MagmaGuy – Boss fights to enchant items in Minecraft? EliteMobs upgrade system devlog

Hello everyone, Recently I held a Patreon poll   to figure out what aspect of my EliteMobs boss  battles Minecraft plugin I should work on next,   and, in a shocking twist that I am sure no  one saw coming, the item upgrade system won.  

Now, creating a good item upgrade system is no  easy task, and it is something that different   people will have very different opinions about. Item systems can be as complex as Path of Exile’s,   where upgrading items with gems will determine  how the game is played or can also be as simple  

As adding a plus one damage to a weapon. As many of you may know, if the hundreds of   discord messages asking me about it are to be  believed, this is not the first item upgrade   system that I have made for the EliteMobs plugin. I am not satisfied with how the old item upgrade  

System used to work. To keep things short, there  was a long chain of actions that allowed you to   turn large amounts of useless high-level  items into upgrade orbs that could then be   used to upgrade the level of an item by 1. This system was not great, but it gave people  

Something useful to do with the large amounts  of loot they could obtain other than selling it   or leaving it on the floor. However, loot design  has since moved away from dropping huge amounts   of loot to instead dropping smaller amounts  of more interesting and focused loot – think  

Less Diablo and more World of Warcraft. Since the loot philosophy changed, I felt like a   change in the upgrade system was needed as well. Most of all, the system was… boring. Adding one   damage, or five damage, or whatever amount to  a sword is fundamentally not interesting and  

Doesn’t really provide any options for players. Thus, to solve these issues, and based on some   popular requests, I came up with a new plan. The planning phase   A wise man once said that there is no such  thing as a new idea. As the person that came  

Up with that saying, I knew I had to turn to other  games to get some “inspiration” as to how this new   and completely original system might function. During planning, I decided to mix elements from   Black Desert Online’s item upgrade system, the  trials from the World of Warcraft proving grounds,  

The random event system of Runescape and the  enchantment system of a little-known indie   game called Minecraft to come up with a totally  original, patent pending item upgrade system.   First, let’s quickly go over how the item  system works: all combat items have a  

Level. Item levels determine the base damage of  weapons and the base damage reduction of armor.   These stats only matter when fighting  Elites, so it doesn’t make vanilla combat   ridiculously easy nor does it break  PvP, or at least it tries not to.   Items can have enchantments, which  will increase damage, damage reduction,  

Or do some kind of special behavior like  the flamethrower enchantment. Enchantments   do not affect the level of the item. Items with a lot of good enchantments   are called high quality items. Items with little  to no enchantments are called low quality items.   Lower-level high-quality items can do more  damage than higher-level low-quality items,  

But ultimately higher-level high-quality items  are what players usually want to try to get.   Got it? Alright, let’s talk  about the system as planned.   I originally drafted a plan consisting in  a system where players could loot elite   enchanted books from bosses. These books, once  combined with item upgrade tickets could then be  

Used to upgrade an item with a new enchantment.  This would also have a currency price that would   increase with the quality of the item. The higher the quality of the item,   the more enchanted books and enchantment tickets  you would need to further enchant the item,  

As well as exponentially increasing  amounts of currency needed.   There would also be four possible  outcomes to enchanting an item:   – Success, where the item is enchanted correctly. – Failure, where the components used to enchant   the item are lost without  the item getting enchanted.  

– Critical failure, where the item the player  was trying to enchant is permanently lost.   – And challenge, the most fun outcome  which I am not going to spoil right now.   Now armed with what would undoubtedly be the  perfect plan, I got to work programming.  

It is said that no plan survives first  contact with the enemy, and I am faced   with the worst enemy of them all: getting  people to understand how something works.   One week in I had finally programmed  enough to feel comfortable sharing   the first sneak peek into some  of the enchantment system, and…  

Hm, not exactly the reaction I was hoping for. With the weird suspicion that the system might   still be a bit too complex, after to talking to  one of my patrons about it, I came to realize   that this was the least interesting way  of adding depth to the upgrade system.  

Instead, enchantment tickets got retooled to  become lucky tickets which double your chance   of success when attempting to upgrade  an item, making this ticket optional,   far more interesting to use and making it  so only one gets used per enchantment.  

Now much more satisfied with the new and improved  lucky tickets, I was left wondering how I wanted   to deal with the enchantment books. At this stage,  the enchanted books were a very rigid system,   a special item which admins could not create,  and which were required in very large amounts  

To enchant items. This smelled fishy to me,  but I couldn’t quite find a solution for it.   Because I was unsure of what I wanted to do, I  took a quick detour and added full documentation   for every global configuration file, fixed a  bunch of bugs, removed now unused features oh,  

And completely remade the repair system. Alright so the video is not really about this,   but remaking the repair system helped  me better understand how to fix the   enchantment system so let’s talk about that. Fundamentally, repairing elite items requires  

Scrapping other elite items at the scrapper. The way the repair used to work was that the   level of the scrap was the same as the level  of the scrapped item, and higher-level scrap   would repair more. Since by default there  are about 200 levels of items in EliteMobs,  

There were also about 200 levels of scrap. I wanted a new solution where scrap was   drastically simplified and better integrated  into the plugin, so I quickly wrote a new   enchantment mysteriously called Repair with 5  different levels. I then created 5 different  

Custom items that use the 5 different levels  of the new Repair enchantment and made it so   scrapping an item between levels 0-50 gives a  tiny scrap, between 50-100 gives a small scrap,   100-150 gives a medium scrap, 150-200 gives a  large scrap and above 200 gives a huge scrap.  

Scrap from higher level items still  repairs more, but the repair system   is globally far more generous with how much  it repairs compared to how it was before.   I also modified it so default scrap is not  soulbound to players, making it tradeable,  

And since it’s just an enchantment, admins  can create their own custom item as scrap.   Finally, I had a repair system  people could give a scrap about.   Now wiser from the quick detour I had  just taken, I saw the issue with fresh  

Eyes. The system was once again too hard  to understand, and I had a plan to fix it.   I went back and deleted large chunks of the new  overly complex system. Fortunately, some things   could be salvaged, but removing hours of work  also removes little bit of your soul every time.  

Feeling inspired, I created the lucky source  and the enchanted source custom enchantments.   These enchantments exist only to let the plugin  know that an item can be used at the enchanter   as a lucky ticket, doubling the chance of the  enchantment working, or as an enchanted book,  

Meaning that any enchantment other than  enchantment source on the enchanted book   will be transferred to the item. This has a lot of fun implications:   any item can be a lucky ticket or an  enchanted book. Enchanted books can   have enchantments with multiple levels and  even multiple enchantments. All enchantments  

Are transferred, so if your sword has  sharpness 1 and your book has sharpness   2 then your item will get enchanted with  sharpness 3. You can even do interesting   things like creating books with high quality  enchantments, but which also contain curses.   Also, admins can create  their own enchanted books.  

The fact these are just custom items also means  they can be inserted normally into all existing   EliteMobs loot tables without requiring any  special unique entries, which is also very cool.   So, let’s lay out the final form of this system: You either use the enchantment menu command or go  

To the new enchanter NPC at the Adventurer’s  Guild start the enchantment process.   Then, you add an elite item that you want  to enchant. Any elite item can be enchanted   with anything, so long as you have the  enchantment and the resources to do it.  

The only thing you can’t enchant is an item  with the enchantment source enchantment.   So basically, don’t enchant enchantment books. Then, you add the enchantment   book you want to use. Finally, you can optionally insert a lucky ticket.   Lucky tickets double the enchantment chance,  and you can only place one per enchantment.  

At long last, after double the amount of time  I initially thought was going to be necessary,   I had a system that was twice as  good as what was initially planned.   Now 2 weeks into working on this system, and after  seriously rewriting vast sections of EliteMobs,  

I was finally ready to get to the  fun part: challenge chances.   Alright now, maybe you won’t  believe me, but EliteMobs is   actually a plugin about making boss battles. They say that to a man with a boss plugin,  

Every issue looks like it needs a boss.  It’s a weird saying, and I don’t really   get it, but that’s what I’ve been told. So, while designing the enchantment system,   I was left wondering: how could bosses  be used to make things more interesting?  

For one, the enchantment books drop  from bosses, as do the lucky tickets,   although they can also be looted  from Primis quests and arenas.   However, I really wanted to go one step  further to spice things up, and that is  

How I came up with the enchantment challenge. When enchanting an item, there is a chance the   player gets teleported to an instanced  dungeon where they will have to fight a   boss for the item to be enchanted. Defeating the  boss will reward players with the enchanted item,  

And losing the fight has a 10% chance of critical  failure where the item will be lost. The bosses   also drop custom loot as an additional reward. With some help from Frostcone for the custom   bosses, powers and loot and Bepis and Dali_  for the arena designs, we ended up creating  

Some unique and really fun fights. Due to plugin size restrictions,   you will have to download the enchantment  challenge sanctums separately from EliteMobs.   There are 10 free and 10 premium sanctum  fights. These fights happen in two arenas,  

The gold and white arena is free and the trippy  binder of worlds themed arena is premium. All   fights are fully custom, each featuring  unique powers designed by Frostcone.   The main difference with the premium sanctums is  that some of the bosses have custom models and  

Animations made for those boss battles. These  models were made by me, which is why I am sure   you’ll agree they are some of the best models you  have ever seen in Minecraft if not any game. You   will particularly notice how the textures look  like they were drawn by my 3-year-old niece,  

Which I think is a really nice touch. The fights themselves are designed to not   be too challenging since a lot is on the line if  players lose. Also, the events are unpredictable,   so there is a decent chance that players  will be dragged into a fight without being  

As prepared for it as they would usually be. As you can see, the final result is pretty dang   cool. I think that this is a system players will  really enjoy, and one that has some depth that   is fun to play around with. But wait, there’s more!  

Parallel to the work on the item upgrade system,  we have also been working on the Primis update,   fixing all reported bugs, adding custom powers to  every boss and miniboss, expanding the questlines,   working on new regions and new bosses,  adding a whole instanced dungeon inside  

Of this adventure and generally polishing  the experience up. Also, there was already a   really cool arena in there, but it wasn’t  working before. That has now been fixed.   Primis has now been in development for a year, and  I am happy to say that it is nearing completion! A  

Big thank you to the people supporting the plugin  who helped us bring this insane project to life,   even though it will probably have taken 3x  longer than expected by the time we are done.   At this stage I believe there will be  one or two more big updates for it,  

Wrapping up the blood temple questline with the  boss kill and maybe adding a little bit of side   content and QOL improvements and rebalances. People have been asking what comes next,   and the answer is the Oasis rework. We will  be adding similar quests and side activities  

To the Oasis adventure and reworking  the last zone inside of the pyramid.   Work on the oasis has already begun, and a  minor update has already been released for it.   Additionally, several other dungeons  have been updated to make sure   everything is working smoothly. By the time this video is out,  

The Climb dungeon and the Cave sanctum  will probably already be out. These mark   the launch of a completely new storyline for  EliteMobs, based around instanced dungeons.   The main story dungeons will all be free, and  I hope to release at least 10 dungeons and 10  

Sanctums, all being a part of the same story. The craftenmine sanctum might also already be out,   which is a cool sanctum we originally wanted  to release for Halloween. It’s now mid march,   which I think we can all agree is  the spookiest time of the year.  

And that’s all for today! This video is a  completely new format to me, if you like   the format let me know down in the comments  below and don’t forget to like and subscribe   to the channel for more content like this. A big thank you to the Patreon supporters  

Bankrolling the projects I release! You  can get access to all the premium content   I release for my plugins and even plugins  in early alpha at patreon.com/magmaguy , so   check it out if that interests you. If you want to see this system working live,  

You can head on over to the official EliteMobs  server over at elitesurvival.matecraft.org or try   our partner server VexalMC at play.vexalmc.co. And until next time, remember: time is a social   construct created to sell you on  sundials and Mayan calendars.   Ha-ha!