- Bedrock Player
Just to add a bit of context for you to understand my response, I started playing Cubecraft around 2019, maybe a bit earlier, and completely fell in love with lucky islands specifically. Eventually, I joined the forums, focusing on feedback, bug reporting, and community discussion in general. I was even invited to the short-lived cubecraft feedback team. I used to play lucky islands obsessively, becoming 4th on the solos leaderboard. Even so, the gameplay was so unique and divergent I never once felt tired of playing it.
However I no longer have the same passion I once did. A few years ago, Cubecraft made a major update called the 1.19 update; It was the update that added new lucky block types and other major features. In short, this update radically changed lucky islands in a way I did not like, and as I go on, I’ll try to explain why.
1. As mentioned, I no longer play cubecraft on any sort of a regular basis and rarely come back. I did play for about an hour today before writing this, just to see what it was like.
2. I would redesign lucky islands so that it plays in a way that is closer to how it was before the 1.19 update. To elaborate:
Previously, the thing I liked about lucky islands was how well it stood out from game modes like skywars. Lucky islands did this by…
- Giving players low amounts of resources, particularly block, which made having to conserve them a bigger factor and slowed down the pace of the game.
- Making the loot at middle very similar to the loot at spawn islands and sub center islands. This meant that a variety of different strategies were viable, and rushing middle every game wasn't what most players did. This also made the game’s pace slower and more begginer friendly. Most fights would never happen until both players had gathered a fair bit of loot to fight with.
- Offering unique and custom tools that players could fight with. This includes everything from the special bows, wands, potions, etc., and it made pvp way more creative and interesting.
I feel like lucky islands doesn't have any of that anymore. The loot at middle in every map is extremely overpowered thanks to the rainbow and diamond lucky blocks, both of which are extremely overturned. And if you don't rush for that loot immediately, it’ll all be gone by the time you reach middle. As a result, a lot of fights between skilled players happen between people rushing middle at once, and these fights are always lame wooden sword fights because neither player collected any loot.
There's quite a few other things as well. Things like the giga-sword where you just die if you happen to be the player your opponent chooses, the map design in maps like yarn for example, and the fact that diamond lucky blocks feel way more bland since they drop items almost exclusively from everything else, yet you're practically shooting yourself in the foot if you don't specifically go after them.
There's more I honestly keep going into but I don't want to make this thread longer than it needs to, as an example, you can look at this thread I made in 2023:
https://www.cubecraft.net/threads/lucky-islands-feedback-5-rainbow-lucky-blocks.354002/#post-1560909
It contains a conversation between me and the #1 solo lucky islands player on bedrock at the time, Visored Track, and he shared a lot of the same feelings as me:
You couldn't explain it better, I play lucky islands since its beta phase on bedrock and before that I played it on java, now there is too much loot that doesnt add anything to the game, personally I feel that I dont use the wands or the special bows as much as before, games were funnier before 1.19, now as you say, it's just fight-fight-fight, you don't need to think much and that’s so sad, I used to play like 30 games (everyday) in a row without getting bored and now I barely can play 6 games and left the server for some days again…
He ended up quitting as well.
I hope you can tell how much love and genuine passion I had for the old lucky islands, and how much I've grown to miss those days. But the game just isn't the same anymore. It's like returning to a favorite restaurant you haven't had in years, only to discover they changed the recepie. I would give anything to have the gameplay of lucky islands feel like the way it did back in the day.
3. There isn't much I would say absolutely shouldn't be changed because it's naive to say that something can't possibly be improved. With that being said, one of the main thing cubecraft does way better than the hive is its healing system on bedrock, which is made similar to vanilla Java, as being able to heal between fights allows you to recover quickly; I've always had a problem with the Hive’s health regen system and getting 3rd partied.
