Welcome to this week’s Hypixel Skyblock news! This week was quite an eventful one for Hypixel Skyblock. This edition of This Week in Hypixel Skyblock covers important events that happened from October 3 – October 9. While the last event extends past the 9th, we decided to include the entire event in this week’s edition of Hypixel Skyblock news.
Events That Occurred This Week
- Watchdog Update (October 4)
- Gemstone Refunds (October 5)
- Minion Simulation Cap Removed (October 5)
- Great Spook Update (October 5)
- Great Spook Items Found (October 6)
- Bazaar, Auction House, Everything Disabled (October 8-10)
Watchdog Update (October 4)
Hypxiel’s anticheat system Watchdog got an upgrade. Likely to combat cheaters in dungeons:
This update caused many players to get kicked, even if they weren’t using cheats. The kicks mostly happened to players using the mods NEU (NotEnoughUpdates) and Skytils using their “middle click in inventories” feature, which turns regular clicks into middle clicks.
This feature exists because normally when you right-click on an item in an inventory (including a GUI inventory), you will actually pick up that item. The way the server works is that it will take the item out of your “pickup” slot and reset it, thus registering that you clicked on that button. Players with a high ping may have to wait a bit before the item gets reset. Middle-clicking makes it look nicer, as no pickup happens. According to one of the admins, the reason that the kicks were happening were because the feature was implemented incorrectly.
// Incorrect Implementation mc.playerController.windowClick(chest.windowId, event.slotId, 2, 0, mc.thePlayer) // Correct Implementation mc.playerController.windowClick(chest.windowId, event.slotId, 2, 3, mc.thePlayer)
The standard protocol mentions that 3 is the number used for indicate a middle click, whereas 0 was actually used by the developers of the mods. An easy mistake for developers to make, and why it would be good practice to avoid using magic numbers. This bug has been around for a very long while. The Admins only finally decided to validate these click packets recently, adding another negative to the Skyblock player experience.
Gemstone Refunds (October 5)
About a month ago, all perfect and flawless gemstones had their stack sizes changed from 64 → 1. Any player that had these stacked essentially got them deleted, except for 1.
Before:
After:
It was a pretty big blow to those who had invested in gemstones. Players who stored these in their stash ran into the same fate as those who stored them in chests. There were two ways to actually “save” your gemstones:
- One way was to not store them in stacks. Considering that these were stackable in the first place, this was extremely rare for someone to do.
- The other way was to just keep the filled order in the Bazaar. The downside to this was that it took up one of your Bazaar slots, which can be an inconvenience to players who trade a lot on the Bazaar.
The admins promised to refund these, up to a certain “cap”, as mentioned in this forum post. They promised a refund on September 10, and players started receiving refunds on October 5. Myself included.
Here’s how many gemstones I had before the wipe:
Here’s how much the admins returned:
In total, I was refunded:
- 10x Perfect Jasper
- 10x Perfect Sapphire
- 10x Perfect Ruby
- 10x Perfect Jade
- 5x Perfect Amethyst
The admins mentioned they would return gemstones up to a certain “cap”. It appears that 10 is that cap, for 11 gemstones in total (if you include the one that remained after the wipe). In total, I lost:
- 45 Perfect Jasper
- 25 Perfect Sapphire
- 1 Perfect Ruby
- 1 Perfect Jade
At 10m per gemstone, that’s 720m worth of Gemstones there.
Minion Simulation Cap Removed (October 5)
The minion simulation cap has finally been removed!
On September 15 (3 weeks ago), the admins reduced the cap for calculating offline resources from 100,000 minion actions down to 14,000 minion actions. How Hypixel Skyblock calculates minion drops is it takes the time between when you leave your private island, and when you next visit your private island, and that is the time it uses to calculate how many resources your minion generated.
The simulation was poorly optimized previously, and also failed to include external buffs such as island crystals (e.g. the farming crystal), and the Beacon Buff. Now, it does!
Now that it’s been fixed, you can now log out for a year and the minion will generate the correct number of resources rather only giving you at most 100k actions.
Great Spook Update (October 5)
Last year in Skyblock, there was the Great Spook event, where players went on a scavenger hunt of sorts to obtain limited-time armor and equipment. It involves strangely specific things, such as killing a bat on your private island with a Wither Bow and using Icy Arrows. All of the equipment from last year is obtainable again, with some new ones being introduced:
- Spooky Staff (from last year)
- Spooky Helmet/Chestplate/Leggings/Boots (from last year)
- Spooky Talisman/Artifact
- Spooky Sword
- Spooky Neclace/Clock/Cloves/Belt
You can also purchase some Pet Skins for essentially playing on Hypixel.
You can read the patch notes here.
Great Spook Items Found (October 6)
Players have been hard at work on finding the methods to obtaining these items. This year’s items seem much more complex to obtain than last year’s items. Each item has an “edition number” attached, indicating how many others obtained this item before you did.
You can only purchase one of each item from the shop. Note that there is a new Talisman that you can obtain for this year’s event. Even if you got the Great Spook Staff and Great Spook Armor from last year’s experiments, the item’s lore differs as it says “Obtained during the 2022 Alchemist experiments!”, so players are able to obtain a second set of this Armor and Staff if they want.
You can find a guide to getting all of the Great Spook items here.
In case you missed this event in the future, nothing sold in this shop is Soulbound or Co-op Soulbound, meaning you can purchase these items from the Auction house.
Bazaar, Auction House, Everything Disabled (October 8-10)
Another dupe has been discovered, taking out a bunch of Skyblock features along with it. You can find the incident status here, and the follow-up incident status here. Note that these dupes have been patched and we are providing some details here for documentary purposes.
Here’s a list of features that were disabled:
- Profile switching
- Auction House
- Bazaar
- Guesting
/p Warp- Island explorer
- Trading
- Dungeons
- Kuudra
All these features were disabled because the dupe details were public on YouTube.
Even worse, dupers went around spreading the method to as many players as possible.
There were many different methods for actually performing the dupe, as there are many different types of islands in Skyblock and many different possibilities of your Start and Destination server. However, one of the quickest ways to dupe involved the bank – where players would deposit money into their bank, and trigger a rollback, thus the money is still in their inventory, but also in the bank. The player can then withdraw the money out of the bank normally, and now their purse has twice the amount of money they had started with! This quickly grew out of control, with the limit being the amount of coins the bank can hold.
Surprisingly, the bank wasn’t disabled during this incident. But, the auction house and bazaar were disabled, so there wasn’t any real way to ruin the game’s economy.
The admins acted relatively quickly to “fix” this issue, only taking around 12 hours to “fix” this (9pm October 8 EDT to 9am October 9 EDT).
Since guesting was one of the ways players could dupe, all the ways to bypass /visit were removed. This includes using /p warp, which actually was disabled across the entire Hypixel Network, affecting players outside of Skyblock. Kuudra and Dungeons were also disabled. However, since the bazaar and auction house were also disabled, the price of dungeon items didn’t spike as they have when dungeons was previously disabled.
Since most of it happened during the nighttime hours, there wasn’t that much downtime. Except the “fix” didn’t work. The dupe still existed.
A few hours later, at about 12pm October 9 EDT, Skyblock went into emergency maintenance, and no one could play as the admins worked on the internal server transfer system.
At around 6:30pm EDT, Skyblock opened again. This time, the dupe was actually fixed. The admins mentioned that they would reopen the bazaar and auction house the next day, and they were reopened at about 9am EDT on October 10.
Conclusion
That’s it for this week’s Hypixel Skyblock updates and happenings! Tune in next week for more news related to Hypixel Skyblock.
Next week’s news: https://www.sirknightj.com/blog/2022/10/16/this-week-in-hypixel-skyblock-october-10-october-16/