Welcome back to a brand new map everyone.

This map wipe has included some reasonably significant changes to Sky Servers and there will be many more to come over the next few weeks.

The intention is to be able to test all of these changes out and see how they go before 1.17 drops later this year.

Changes to Timed Perks

Fly, God, /repair, /sellhand and /setwarp have been removed from the timed perk section of the store.

For those who have had these perks pre-EULA, Fly and God remain but /setwarp and /repair will be limited to three uses a week.

Fly has moved to the permanent section of the store.

New Perks

There will be a variety of new perks added to the store over the next week or so and some returning ones as well.

Shamans and Tokens

This map, we really wanted to make interacting with the Shamans an integral part of gameplay.

Each Shaman has their own brand new area at spawn with information on how to use them and what they do.

Along with giving you custom enchants, the Sky Shaman now has a chance to give you a perk token.

The perk tokens currently include timed access to /fly, /god and will soon add /sellhand and some other benefits.

You can now left-click the Shamans to see what they give you.

Voting Changes

The voting rewards remain the same but there has been a fairly substantial change to vote parties.

From now on, you will only get a microblock for the first vote party you are online for.

Cosmetics

We have been revamping the cosmetic system for a while now and it is scheduled to be unveiled this coming weekend.

There are lots of exciting changes instore for everyone to see.

Market

The market has been moved out of the main spawn area. This is for two reasons. Firstly, to reduce FPS lag at spawn and secondly it allowed for a much larger area for the market.

This will allow us to include a significant number of the new blocks that 1.17 will introduce into the game.

New Rule

We have added a new rule to the server - No giving away free items to players.

So why all the changes?

Sky Servers has been around for over 9 years now. In this time, it has gotten significantly harder to introduce new content, keep things fresh and balance the gameplay.

It is particularly difficult given the EULA changes made back in 2017 substantially sped up the gameplay of the server.

This has meant that as a server, we have needed to attract more players and retain them at a higher rate in order to maintain a good playerbase as players will get bored and run out of things to do quicker than on other servers.

The changes that have been made today and others that will me bade over the next few weeks have been designed to make gameplay more sustainable.