[Megathread] My Hypixel Skyblock Journey - 15+ months and 3.5k+ hours of playtime

Hammerkit said:

I have recently stopped playing hypixel skyblock due to a combination of school, irl things, and lack of interest, so I thought I'd make this post to document all the time I spent on this game that we all love. My memory might be a bit hazy, but I'll do my best.

Note: Not all the sections will be in perfect chronological order, I'll try to keep it mostly the same, but I'll group some things together

Making my profile
The reason why I am separating this from my start on skyblock is because I actually didn't play skyblock for more than an hour or two before summer of 2020. I created my profile on July 14, 2019 (for context, this is the summer before I started high school), after seeing a video by technoblade on the gamemode. At first I didn't really understand what the point of the gamemode was, and I almost treated it like a vanilla skyblock experience with the added bonus of minions. I played for maybe a few hours but didn't really play anymore, since at this point I was still playing a singleplayer mc world and didn't play much hypixel. From what I remember, I had a few minions, including a dark oak, pig, iron, gold, and cobblestone minion which would sit full for almost a year.

The start
I really started playing skyblock after being unbanned (security) around early June, 2020 (based on item tags from skycrypt). I don't really remember what made me want to play the game again, but I'd guess it was a combination of nothing to do because of covid and technoblade's videos. I logged back in to some full minions that I'd placed all those months ago, but still had no idea what to do. As I had with many other games, I immediately searched for the hypixel skyblock wiki, which was a huge source of information for me at the time. Being a new player in 2020, when many players had already obtained items such as superior dragon armor and the 50 million midas, I was quite far behind. My first grind on hypixel skyblock consisted of me grinding for full lapis armor, which took around half an hour and was a massive grind for me back in the day (the footage is one of the first videos on my youtube channel). I did this grind using full unenchanted diamond armor and an undead sword, meaning that I died many times to the lapis zombies. At this point I didn't know about the custom enchantment system or reforging. Also, I was scammed for the first time at this point, since a player offered me 100k for my crab hat, which I took since 100k was a lot back then. Looking back it was dumb, but that 100k helped me progress through the start of the game.

Early game
At this point I had a full set of lapis armor, but still didn't know how to reforge. Using the wiki, I found the golem armor and golem sword, which I set my sights on due to their high stats (I obviously didn't know about the much cheaper hardened diamond). Thus, I placed down iron minions to grind for these items, and also saved up coins to buy a fully enchanted golem sword from the auction house. After obtaining golem armor and being able to naenae the deep caverns mobs, I turned to young dragon armor, as I wanted the speed and heard from many people that it was the best armor for zealot farming, the best money making method at the time.

By this point I had discovered a few skyblock youtubers, namely speedsilver, whose early game guides helped me out a lot back then. Thus, following his advice, I obtained a common enderman pet for free from a nice person, and with the help of an eff 5 gold axe/haste 3 farmed spruce wood for money. At the time foraging was not as toxic as it is now, as not many people had treecaps and I was foraging one of the less competitive wood types. Using the money from foraging, I invested in a jungle axe, and eventually began to buy young dragon pieces from the auction house, until I had the full set.

However, I got scammed again, as a player asked to borrow my young armor for zealot farming, and I took a treecap in collat. However, being a naive early game player, I didn't check the price of treecaps to see that they had fallen by almost 1m since I had last checked, meaning that i lost about 1m in total value. However, armed with my treecap, I was able to forage much more efficiently, and used it to grind back the coins I had lost.

The quest to 1-shot zealots
At the time, zealot farming was the best money making strategy so obviously I wanted to do it. however, zealots had 13k hp, which was quite difficult to obtain. Thus, I grinded for strong dragon armor and a raider axe, which I thought would be enough to one-shot zealots. However, I had not gotten my fairy souls or many talismans, so I still lacked lots of basic understanding of the game. Rather than getting talismans and reforging them, I instead saved up for an aotd to try to squeeze out enough damage for zealots. It was around this time that I discovered that some of my irl friends from my old school played skyblock, meaning that I would join discord calls with them at night and play skyblock together. We were also trying to prepare for dungeons (at the time released on the alpha), and I had been selected to play the tank class, so had to eventually get perfect armor. My friends also pushed me to get my fairy souls, which I finally completed, giving me a very helpful stat boost.

Midgame
At this point I had reached the midgame (for the time of course), meaning that I had a set of strong and young dragon armor with an aotd. At the time skills/slayer weren't really a concern, as my gear was the most important thing. This was around the time that I joined free splash servers to get god splashes, as I was not in a guild and didn't want to pay taxes. These splashes enabled me to grind slayer (especially sven) more efficiently, which was huge for my progress in slayer. Using mastiff and a pooch sword, I was able to reach sven 5, and with my other gear quickly got 6-5-5 slayer.

I began to set my sights on doing t4 slayers, so I grinded for the scorpion foil to do t4 tarantulas. This took a considerable amount of time to reach tara 6, but I was able to do tarantula t4's making them my first t4 slayer. Afterwards, I did sven t4's by cheesing them using water, which were not too difficult. However, I struggled to do t4 revs, since it was mostly a dps race with the boss. After unlocking the mana flux, however, I was able to do all t4 slayers.

Release of Dungeons
With the release of dungeons, my irl friends and I, naturally, tried to do them together. Using our gear, we were able to clear entrance and f1, with a handful of f2 completions. However, on release, I didn't find much fun in dungeons, likely because I didn't know secrets or what was going on tbh. I will admit, for the beginning of dungeons, I was getting hard carried by my irl friends, as I played tank, thus doing to dps, but also didn't know secrets.

When f4 was released, my team and I of course tried to do it. We had all watched the hellcastle&furryeboy video on the mechanics of the boss, so we kind of knew what we were doing. However, we didn't do enough dps as a team, as our tank (me), healer, and archer had bad gear and did little damage, and our mage had a newly nerfed bonzo staff. Thus, on our first 2 attempts, even with fire abuse, we timed out of the boss fight because of low dps, missing thorn, and teammates having to leave due to irl things. however, on our 3rd try, we managed to complete the boss fight after around 50 minutes. I got super lucky and dropped a spirit wing within my first 5 completions, and sold it to our mage for around 5m profit. However, this would be the last time for a while that I would play dungeons.

The first slayer grind
While my irls and I would still play dungeons at night, we would go our separate ways during the day. While they mostly played dungeons, I grinded slayer. My first level 7 slayer was tarantula, which I got after grinding t4's with a scorpion foil. Shortly afterwards I got sven 7, and then rev 7. This gave me access to all the slayer items, but I was still too broke to use any of them.

The election update
The election update was probably one of the most controversial updates to skyblock ever released, adding a p2w aspect to the game. After reading the patch notes, I was in support of the update, as stats cannot be bought with coins, and it meant less illegal irl trading and more updates. Also, the booster cookie and god pot are two of the most influential qol items, as it meant that sniping free splashes/paying guild tax was no longer necessary

Grinding dungeons
With the release of f5, my cata level and lack of gear would no longer cut it. At the time, I was around cata 10, and wanted to grind for cata 16 to use super heavy armor, the best tank set (outside of dungeonized perfect) at the time. I also bought a spirit sword to do a little more dps, but the grind was still painfully slow, as I was stuck doing f3 for cata xp (as it gave better rates than f4 for pfinder). I still had not learned secrets, so was mostly carried. However, I eventually got to cata 16 to use super heavy. I then worked towards cata 19 to use t8 perfect armor (dungeonized)

With the release of f6, my team got a completion with the endstone sword trick without me, leaving me to get a non-cheese completion. However, the next day, we completed f6. This was before the terracotta changes, meaning that you would have to wait for a solid minute for the terracotta phase, which combined with a more difficult clear, discouraged me from playing f6. I instead began grinding f5 to learn secrets, dropping a couple livid daggers along the way (still no sa chest tho, not mad).

The release of f7
On release, f7 was announced to be the final floor of the catacombs, despite there originally being 10 floors. Of my 4 irls who used to grind dungeons with me, one of the had quit, meaning that the old berserker bought a bonemerang archer setup, which was crucial for f7. With a combination of significantly harder clear, struggling to get crystals (before fly was discovered), being unable to crush/dying in stage 2, failing terminals, and not doing enough ranged dps, f7 was quite a struggle.

My team managed to clear it with 2 pf teammates, meaning that I was the only one left who needed a completion. To make matters worse, derpy had just been elected, meaning that mobs would have double hp. However, due to my teammates better understanding of the boss fight and a clutch pf random, I managed to get a f7 completion during derpy at cata 25 wearing necro lord with a perfect chest.

However, given the difficulty of the completion, I would only play f7 with my team (and we would fail most of the time), meaning that I continued to grind f5, eventually reaching cata 29/tank 29 with a combination of f5 and f7's at night with my team.

Switching classes
When I reached cata 29, I quickly realized how useless tank was, especially on f7. Thus, I decided to spend 200m (which was a lot back then) on buying necron and bonemerangs for an archer setup, which I used to grind f7. At around the same time, the irl friend that quit decided to return to skyblock, meaning that he had to catch up on gear. By building a nether wart farm and farming ~8 hours a day during online school, he quickly caught up, and became the first person in our team to obtain a hyperion. This was huge, since it opened a new possibility for our team: frag running.

By borrowing hyperion/storm, it was easy to do a frag run every 2 minutes, at the time generating over 15m/hour. This allowed our other team members to quickly grind coins for better setups, and eventually with a combination of diana and 2 handle drops (by two separate people, before 100 runs), we had 3 hyperions on our team, with me playing bonemerang archer, making f7 grinding quite quick for cata xp. Additionally, I would usually be able to borrow one of the hyperions to frag run/run f7 when the owner was not using it. To further push our team into lategame, another member of our team dropped a handle, meaning that 3/5 members dropped a handle before 100 runs.

Joining SBG + melon minions
After reaching rev 9, I had enough slayer xp to join sbg (skyblock gods), which is one of the top skyblock guilds. This exposed me to a guild for the first time, and a community of massive sweats. However, I never really connected with sbg, and only stayed as a member for around 3 months. In sbg, I continued to grind slayer, and began to also start grinding some skills.

I also finally invested in a melon minion setup, after seeing @rm_rf_slash talk about how good they were for farming xp. Thus, I also began to afk on my island for 20+ hours a day, dramatically increasing my playtime.

At this point one of my irl's quit, which turned out to be for good. He essentially gave me an infinite loan on his hyperion, which I would return to him if he every came back. I still have that hype (well its a scylla now) to this day.

The overflux grind + rev 9
At this point, I stopped playing dungeons at around cata 3o, and began to shift my focus to slayer. At the time, the overflux capacitor was the rarest and most expensive slayer rng, so I set my eyes on that goal. Using a set of borrowed superior and a livid dagger (eventually upgraded to necron), I grinded svens in the castle (because of howling cave congestion) for many weeks, mostly during aatrox, and finally dropped an overflux at 660k sven xp, which also meant sven was my first lvl 8 slayer.

After dropping an overflux, I decided to set my eyes on rev 9, which had the added benefit of being a good source of combat xp. Using a storm set and fs/ink wand, I was able to 1-shot t4 revs relatively easily, meaning that I was able to grind 60k xp/hr with aatrox. On February 18, 2021, I obtained my first level 9 slayer: rev 9 (the last boss is on my youtube channel).

Hotm 5
The dwarven mines update brought a whole new island and progression system to explore. Since lower ranks were given lower priority on release day, I spent much of the afternoon watching screenshares of sbg guild members on discord, who were exploring the new island.

At first I found the hotm system quite tedious, but I eventually reached hotm 3, unlocking drills (at the time tita pick wasn't really meta yet). This really catapulted my interest, as I was able to do comms somewhat quickly, allowing me to reach hotm 5 in about 2 weeks. Though I wasn't aware, this was also my first real skill grind, as by the time I was hotm 5 I had grinded to around mining 43.

Rose running + combat 60 + enchanting 60+ 999 slayer
By now I had reached hotm 5, and began my first (intentional) skill grind in skyblock: combat 60. The dwarven mines update had introduced ghost farming, which was one of the best sources of combat xp and coins. However, after trying it for a bit, I realized how much I hated it. Thus, I turned to an even more efficient method, rose running. Rose running is essentially a f6 frag run, where you enter the boss, kill the golems, and leave. At the time, this method made around 1m combat xp/hour (with wolf pet) and 8m/hr, so I did it for many hours, reaching combat 50, and after combat 60 was released, I continued to rose run for combat 60.

The new spider den area also made tara slayer much faster, and by using a borrowed edrag, i could 1-shot them, meaning that I got tara 9 quite fast. Sven 9 followed right behind. I also would do t5 revs for combat xp while also building up slayer xp and overflow senither weight.

Despite the enchanting update being out for a while, I had been lazy with experiments, so I did not reach enchanting 60 until technoblade. Additionally, with a combination of slayer and rose runs, I reached combat 60 in April 2021.

Going back to in person school + joining SBF
In late March 2021, I was able to return to in person school. This meant that I would have less time to play skyblock, so I decided to join SBG's sister guild, SBF. In this guild I met a lot of people that I'm still friends with to this day, which is why I am still in SBF. I would say that SBF was my first real introduction to people in the skyblock community, which I guess you could count as a turning point in my experience.

Additionally, returning in person to school meant that my playtime was much more limited, which began a decline in my progression, but my desire to play the game still remained.

Enderman Slayer
In between updates, I had been mostly just been grinding pelts and revs. However, when enderman slayer dropped, it provided the most difficult non-dungeon content released thus far. On release day, I was able to do t1's relatively easily using necron's + giant's sword/valk, and was able to do t2's with remnants outside of the void sepulture (it turns out the reason I was dying was because I didn't know about the beacon insta-kill). Unfortunately, I didn't find out about the suffocation glitch to kill t4's until after it was patched. By about day 3 of the update, I had successfully done a t3 enderman by using gs/necron/venom's touch/yeti by filling my inventory with remnants and pure dps bashing it. However, due to the immense cost and effort that it took to do one t3, I grinded t2's until enderman slayer 5. At enderman slayer 5, you unlock the vorpal katana, which combined with 3/4 fd/warden, a better knowledge of boss mechanics, and necromancy, I began grinding t3 endermen until I reached enderman slayer level 6.

Contraband
This is a bittersweet part of my skyblock journey. Of the 4 irl friends that originally played sb, 2 had already quit, and the remaining 2 (in the same coop) were quickly losing interest due to fortnite and valorant. Within about a week, they both decided to quit. The first decided to irl trade away his networth, and bought another monitor with the roughly $600 he got from selling his nw (for the record, I DO NOT recommend irl trading). The second decided to give me his gear, which amounted to roughly a billion coins of items, some of which I kept (like some recombed talis). Using the extra money, I fully recombed and enriched my talisman bag, which was a massive stat boost.

The 2x xp event
While hypixel was down, I grinded on a guild SMP, which quickly went downhill and became an anarchy server with mods who would troll people. When hypixel was reopened, there was 2x skill xp which lasted for around a week. During this time, I set my eyes on mining and fishing as the two skills I would grind. During the first couple of days, I spent a lot of time fishing, going from fishing 33 to 37 in a few days. However, I quickly realized that I wanted instead to devote my time to reaching mining 60, which would be a relatively fast grind with 3x xp. Thus, I began to mithril mine. Since I had kept up with daily comms, my hotm tree was pretty well progressed, with around eff miner 85/mining speed 20. With the 2x xp event, I was making about 2m xp an hour mining gray blocks while levelling pets (specifically a leg rock and leg whale). In about 5-6 days, I went from mining 56 to 60, achieving my 4th maxed skill. I also grinded a little catacombs during this time, going from cata 33 to 34.

Early summer 2021
During July of 2021, I was trying to progress as much as possible in skyblock before the school year, as I wouldn't have time to play when school started. However, being a rising 11th grader in the US, I had much less time than expected, as I spent much of my summer doing things to boost my college applications and doing extracurricular work. During the summer, with the anticipation of the crystal hollows, I spent a lot of time mithril grinding, keeping up with daily comms and reaching efficient miner lvl 100, as well as getting around 40m overflow mining xp in the process. I also spent a good amount of time grinding t5 revs in hope of dropping a warden's heart (which still hasn't happened btw), which gave me a lot of overflow slayer xp and senither weight.

The crystal hollows
When the crystal hollows dropped, I quickly realized that my hotm progress was largely useless (due to efficient miner being kinda bad). I was also quite confused by the update mechanics, but with the help of some helpful youtube videos, I quickly figured it out. With nothing better to do, I grinded hotm, reaching hotm 6 by day 3, and hotm 7 + max gemstone collection by the first week. However, I didn't really play the update afterwards, since I didn't feel like powder grinding or investing in a gemstone setup. However, I would quickly return to the crystal hollows for my next big project.

Fishing 50 + Enderman slayer
Towards the end of July, SBF introduced guild contests, which gave a coin prize to the player in the guild which gained the most skill xp/weight (depending on contest) during the allotted time. The first contest was for fishing xp, so I began to grind fishing in hopes of getting the 25m prize and for motivation to level up fishing. After trying out barn fishing for a while, I discovered a much better fishing method: lava fishing. Lava fishing is insanely op for xp, and with ~90 scc/dolphin I was making 400-450k xp/hour, which is significantly better than barn fishing. I also found a consistent location to not gain heat (more details can be found here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGCQc8eXKrU ). This allowed me to gain more fishing xp than people in my guild, and combined with t11 fish minions (from contraband), I was gaining about 1m fishing xp/day. Derpy's election + hyper catalysts made my minions gain a ridiculous amount of xp, which further pushed me ahead in the guild contest. I finished the 2 week contest with 12.9m xp gained, with second place at less than 5m.

At this point I was around fishing 43, and decided that I would push towards fishing 50. A senither weight guild contest futher motivated me, since fishing gives a large amount of senither weight. I also invested in an ammonite pet, which boosted my xp rates to over 600k xp/hour. At the end of the 2 week weight contest, I had gained over 1.1k weight from fishing, and was at fishign 49. In a few more days, I reached fishing 50, ending a roughly month long grind.

The grind took longer than expected because I agreed to carry a guild member to eman 7 for a handsome sum of money (and he carried me on a good number of m3's and an m5), so I spent about an hour a day killing his t4 eman bosses. This was due to the terminator change which made its slayer req actually work.

Eman 7 + terminator
I had begun building up a large amount of money, so I decided to grind to eman 7 and a terminator. I had bought a tb edrag for the eman carries, so I pretty much had all the gear needed to grind t4 emans. I grinded t4 emans for about a week to reach eman 7, which along with a massive amount of passive income from forge/bz flipping, I had around 800m by the time I reached eman 7. I decided to sell my ofa giant's sword, and obtained a terminator with the intention of grinding mastermode. I spent a week or two doing m3's for cata xp, but with the start of preseason athletics and school, as well as the ability to go outside again, I was quickly losing motivation.

The end of my journey (at least for now)
By the time school started, I never had a drive to play skyblock. All I would do was log on to my island and afk melon minions (which I still do btw), so that I could eventually reach enough xp for farming 60. With a combination of school work, sports, and the opportunity to socialize irl, I effectively quit the game. Though I am still active in my guild discord and occasionally check the forums, this is the end of my journey for the time being. I want to look back at my skyblock journey and think about what productive things I have done during my time, but I don't regret my progress. I had fun when I played skyblock, and connected with people who I wouldn't have otherwise met amist a global pandemic.

Signing off
-Hammerkit

Click to expand...

whentheissus said:

200m still takes 30 hours for average players to get

Click to expand...

Hammerkit said:

I have recently stopped playing hypixel skyblock due to a combination of school, irl things, and lack of interest, so I thought I'd make this post to document all the time I spent on this game that we all love. My memory might be a bit hazy, but I'll do my best.

Note: Not all the sections will be in perfect chronological order, I'll try to keep it mostly the same, but I'll group some things together

Making my profile
The reason why I am separating this from my start on skyblock is because I actually didn't play skyblock for more than an hour or two before summer of 2020. I created my profile on July 14, 2019 (for context, this is the summer before I started high school), after seeing a video by technoblade on the gamemode. At first I didn't really understand what the point of the gamemode was, and I almost treated it like a vanilla skyblock experience with the added bonus of minions. I played for maybe a few hours but didn't really play anymore, since at this point I was still playing a singleplayer mc world and didn't play much hypixel. From what I remember, I had a few minions, including a dark oak, pig, iron, gold, and cobblestone minion which would sit full for almost a year.

The start
I really started playing skyblock after being unbanned (security) around early June, 2020 (based on item tags from skycrypt). I don't really remember what made me want to play the game again, but I'd guess it was a combination of nothing to do because of covid and technoblade's videos. I logged back in to some full minions that I'd placed all those months ago, but still had no idea what to do. As I had with many other games, I immediately searched for the hypixel skyblock wiki, which was a huge source of information for me at the time. Being a new player in 2020, when many players had already obtained items such as superior dragon armor and the 50 million midas, I was quite far behind. My first grind on hypixel skyblock consisted of me grinding for full lapis armor, which took around half an hour and was a massive grind for me back in the day (the footage is one of the first videos on my youtube channel). I did this grind using full unenchanted diamond armor and an undead sword, meaning that I died many times to the lapis zombies. At this point I didn't know about the custom enchantment system or reforging. Also, I was scammed for the first time at this point, since a player offered me 100k for my crab hat, which I took since 100k was a lot back then. Looking back it was dumb, but that 100k helped me progress through the start of the game.

Early game
At this point I had a full set of lapis armor, but still didn't know how to reforge. Using the wiki, I found the golem armor and golem sword, which I set my sights on due to their high stats (I obviously didn't know about the much cheaper hardened diamond). Thus, I placed down iron minions to grind for these items, and also saved up coins to buy a fully enchanted golem sword from the auction house. After obtaining golem armor and being able to naenae the deep caverns mobs, I turned to young dragon armor, as I wanted the speed and heard from many people that it was the best armor for zealot farming, the best money making method at the time.

By this point I had discovered a few skyblock youtubers, namely speedsilver, whose early game guides helped me out a lot back then. Thus, following his advice, I obtained a common enderman pet for free from a nice person, and with the help of an eff 5 gold axe/haste 3 farmed spruce wood for money. At the time foraging was not as toxic as it is now, as not many people had treecaps and I was foraging one of the less competitive wood types. Using the money from foraging, I invested in a jungle axe, and eventually began to buy young dragon pieces from the auction house, until I had the full set.

However, I got scammed again, as a player asked to borrow my young armor for zealot farming, and I took a treecap in collat. However, being a naive early game player, I didn't check the price of treecaps to see that they had fallen by almost 1m since I had last checked, meaning that i lost about 1m in total value. However, armed with my treecap, I was able to forage much more efficiently, and used it to grind back the coins I had lost.

The quest to 1-shot zealots
At the time, zealot farming was the best money making strategy so obviously I wanted to do it. however, zealots had 13k hp, which was quite difficult to obtain. Thus, I grinded for strong dragon armor and a raider axe, which I thought would be enough to one-shot zealots. However, I had not gotten my fairy souls or many talismans, so I still lacked lots of basic understanding of the game. Rather than getting talismans and reforging them, I instead saved up for an aotd to try to squeeze out enough damage for zealots. It was around this time that I discovered that some of my irl friends from my old school played skyblock, meaning that I would join discord calls with them at night and play skyblock together. We were also trying to prepare for dungeons (at the time released on the alpha), and I had been selected to play the tank class, so had to eventually get perfect armor. My friends also pushed me to get my fairy souls, which I finally completed, giving me a very helpful stat boost.

Midgame
At this point I had reached the midgame (for the time of course), meaning that I had a set of strong and young dragon armor with an aotd. At the time skills/slayer weren't really a concern, as my gear was the most important thing. This was around the time that I joined free splash servers to get god splashes, as I was not in a guild and didn't want to pay taxes. These splashes enabled me to grind slayer (especially sven) more efficiently, which was huge for my progress in slayer. Using mastiff and a pooch sword, I was able to reach sven 5, and with my other gear quickly got 6-5-5 slayer.

I began to set my sights on doing t4 slayers, so I grinded for the scorpion foil to do t4 tarantulas. This took a considerable amount of time to reach tara 6, but I was able to do tarantula t4's making them my first t4 slayer. Afterwards, I did sven t4's by cheesing them using water, which were not too difficult. However, I struggled to do t4 revs, since it was mostly a dps race with the boss. After unlocking the mana flux, however, I was able to do all t4 slayers.

Release of Dungeons
With the release of dungeons, my irl friends and I, naturally, tried to do them together. Using our gear, we were able to clear entrance and f1, with a handful of f2 completions. However, on release, I didn't find much fun in dungeons, likely because I didn't know secrets or what was going on tbh. I will admit, for the beginning of dungeons, I was getting hard carried by my irl friends, as I played tank, thus doing to dps, but also didn't know secrets.

When f4 was released, my team and I of course tried to do it. We had all watched the hellcastle&furryeboy video on the mechanics of the boss, so we kind of knew what we were doing. However, we didn't do enough dps as a team, as our tank (me), healer, and archer had bad gear and did little damage, and our mage had a newly nerfed bonzo staff. Thus, on our first 2 attempts, even with fire abuse, we timed out of the boss fight because of low dps, missing thorn, and teammates having to leave due to irl things. however, on our 3rd try, we managed to complete the boss fight after around 50 minutes. I got super lucky and dropped a spirit wing within my first 5 completions, and sold it to our mage for around 5m profit. However, this would be the last time for a while that I would play dungeons.

The first slayer grind
While my irls and I would still play dungeons at night, we would go our separate ways during the day. While they mostly played dungeons, I grinded slayer. My first level 7 slayer was tarantula, which I got after grinding t4's with a scorpion foil. Shortly afterwards I got sven 7, and then rev 7. This gave me access to all the slayer items, but I was still too broke to use any of them.

The election update
The election update was probably one of the most controversial updates to skyblock ever released, adding a p2w aspect to the game. After reading the patch notes, I was in support of the update, as stats cannot be bought with coins, and it meant less illegal irl trading and more updates. Also, the booster cookie and god pot are two of the most influential qol items, as it meant that sniping free splashes/paying guild tax was no longer necessary

Grinding dungeons
With the release of f5, my cata level and lack of gear would no longer cut it. At the time, I was around cata 10, and wanted to grind for cata 16 to use super heavy armor, the best tank set (outside of dungeonized perfect) at the time. I also bought a spirit sword to do a little more dps, but the grind was still painfully slow, as I was stuck doing f3 for cata xp (as it gave better rates than f4 for pfinder). I still had not learned secrets, so was mostly carried. However, I eventually got to cata 16 to use super heavy. I then worked towards cata 19 to use t8 perfect armor (dungeonized)

With the release of f6, my team got a completion with the endstone sword trick without me, leaving me to get a non-cheese completion. However, the next day, we completed f6. This was before the terracotta changes, meaning that you would have to wait for a solid minute for the terracotta phase, which combined with a more difficult clear, discouraged me from playing f6. I instead began grinding f5 to learn secrets, dropping a couple livid daggers along the way (still no sa chest tho, not mad).

The release of f7
On release, f7 was announced to be the final floor of the catacombs, despite there originally being 10 floors. Of my 4 irls who used to grind dungeons with me, one of the had quit, meaning that the old berserker bought a bonemerang archer setup, which was crucial for f7. With a combination of significantly harder clear, struggling to get crystals (before fly was discovered), being unable to crush/dying in stage 2, failing terminals, and not doing enough ranged dps, f7 was quite a struggle.

My team managed to clear it with 2 pf teammates, meaning that I was the only one left who needed a completion. To make matters worse, derpy had just been elected, meaning that mobs would have double hp. However, due to my teammates better understanding of the boss fight and a clutch pf random, I managed to get a f7 completion during derpy at cata 25 wearing necro lord with a perfect chest.

However, given the difficulty of the completion, I would only play f7 with my team (and we would fail most of the time), meaning that I continued to grind f5, eventually reaching cata 29/tank 29 with a combination of f5 and f7's at night with my team.

Switching classes
When I reached cata 29, I quickly realized how useless tank was, especially on f7. Thus, I decided to spend 200m (which was a lot back then) on buying necron and bonemerangs for an archer setup, which I used to grind f7. At around the same time, the irl friend that quit decided to return to skyblock, meaning that he had to catch up on gear. By building a nether wart farm and farming ~8 hours a day during online school, he quickly caught up, and became the first person in our team to obtain a hyperion. This was huge, since it opened a new possibility for our team: frag running.

By borrowing hyperion/storm, it was easy to do a frag run every 2 minutes, at the time generating over 15m/hour. This allowed our other team members to quickly grind coins for better setups, and eventually with a combination of diana and 2 handle drops (by two separate people, before 100 runs), we had 3 hyperions on our team, with me playing bonemerang archer, making f7 grinding quite quick for cata xp. Additionally, I would usually be able to borrow one of the hyperions to frag run/run f7 when the owner was not using it. To further push our team into lategame, another member of our team dropped a handle, meaning that 3/5 members dropped a handle before 100 runs.

Joining SBG + melon minions
After reaching rev 9, I had enough slayer xp to join sbg (skyblock gods), which is one of the top skyblock guilds. This exposed me to a guild for the first time, and a community of massive sweats. However, I never really connected with sbg, and only stayed as a member for around 3 months. In sbg, I continued to grind slayer, and began to also start grinding some skills.

I also finally invested in a melon minion setup, after seeing @rm_rf_slash talk about how good they were for farming xp. Thus, I also began to afk on my island for 20+ hours a day, dramatically increasing my playtime.

At this point one of my irl's quit, which turned out to be for good. He essentially gave me an infinite loan on his hyperion, which I would return to him if he every came back. I still have that hype (well its a scylla now) to this day.

The overflux grind + rev 9
At this point, I stopped playing dungeons at around cata 3o, and began to shift my focus to slayer. At the time, the overflux capacitor was the rarest and most expensive slayer rng, so I set my eyes on that goal. Using a set of borrowed superior and a livid dagger (eventually upgraded to necron), I grinded svens in the castle (because of howling cave congestion) for many weeks, mostly during aatrox, and finally dropped an overflux at 660k sven xp, which also meant sven was my first lvl 8 slayer.

After dropping an overflux, I decided to set my eyes on rev 9, which had the added benefit of being a good source of combat xp. Using a storm set and fs/ink wand, I was able to 1-shot t4 revs relatively easily, meaning that I was able to grind 60k xp/hr with aatrox. On February 18, 2021, I obtained my first level 9 slayer: rev 9 (the last boss is on my youtube channel).

Hotm 5
The dwarven mines update brought a whole new island and progression system to explore. Since lower ranks were given lower priority on release day, I spent much of the afternoon watching screenshares of sbg guild members on discord, who were exploring the new island.

At first I found the hotm system quite tedious, but I eventually reached hotm 3, unlocking drills (at the time tita pick wasn't really meta yet). This really catapulted my interest, as I was able to do comms somewhat quickly, allowing me to reach hotm 5 in about 2 weeks. Though I wasn't aware, this was also my first real skill grind, as by the time I was hotm 5 I had grinded to around mining 43.

Rose running + combat 60 + enchanting 60+ 999 slayer
By now I had reached hotm 5, and began my first (intentional) skill grind in skyblock: combat 60. The dwarven mines update had introduced ghost farming, which was one of the best sources of combat xp and coins. However, after trying it for a bit, I realized how much I hated it. Thus, I turned to an even more efficient method, rose running. Rose running is essentially a f6 frag run, where you enter the boss, kill the golems, and leave. At the time, this method made around 1m combat xp/hour (with wolf pet) and 8m/hr, so I did it for many hours, reaching combat 50, and after combat 60 was released, I continued to rose run for combat 60.

The new spider den area also made tara slayer much faster, and by using a borrowed edrag, i could 1-shot them, meaning that I got tara 9 quite fast. Sven 9 followed right behind. I also would do t5 revs for combat xp while also building up slayer xp and overflow senither weight.

Despite the enchanting update being out for a while, I had been lazy with experiments, so I did not reach enchanting 60 until technoblade. Additionally, with a combination of slayer and rose runs, I reached combat 60 in April 2021.

Going back to in person school + joining SBF
In late March 2021, I was able to return to in person school. This meant that I would have less time to play skyblock, so I decided to join SBG's sister guild, SBF. In this guild I met a lot of people that I'm still friends with to this day, which is why I am still in SBF. I would say that SBF was my first real introduction to people in the skyblock community, which I guess you could count as a turning point in my experience.

Additionally, returning in person to school meant that my playtime was much more limited, which began a decline in my progression, but my desire to play the game still remained.

Enderman Slayer
In between updates, I had been mostly just been grinding pelts and revs. However, when enderman slayer dropped, it provided the most difficult non-dungeon content released thus far. On release day, I was able to do t1's relatively easily using necron's + giant's sword/valk, and was able to do t2's with remnants outside of the void sepulture (it turns out the reason I was dying was because I didn't know about the beacon insta-kill). Unfortunately, I didn't find out about the suffocation glitch to kill t4's until after it was patched. By about day 3 of the update, I had successfully done a t3 enderman by using gs/necron/venom's touch/yeti by filling my inventory with remnants and pure dps bashing it. However, due to the immense cost and effort that it took to do one t3, I grinded t2's until enderman slayer 5. At enderman slayer 5, you unlock the vorpal katana, which combined with 3/4 fd/warden, a better knowledge of boss mechanics, and necromancy, I began grinding t3 endermen until I reached enderman slayer level 6.

Contraband
This is a bittersweet part of my skyblock journey. Of the 4 irl friends that originally played sb, 2 had already quit, and the remaining 2 (in the same coop) were quickly losing interest due to fortnite and valorant. Within about a week, they both decided to quit. The first decided to irl trade away his networth, and bought another monitor with the roughly $600 he got from selling his nw (for the record, I DO NOT recommend irl trading). The second decided to give me his gear, which amounted to roughly a billion coins of items, some of which I kept (like some recombed talis). Using the extra money, I fully recombed and enriched my talisman bag, which was a massive stat boost.

The 2x xp event
While hypixel was down, I grinded on a guild SMP, which quickly went downhill and became an anarchy server with mods who would troll people. When hypixel was reopened, there was 2x skill xp which lasted for around a week. During this time, I set my eyes on mining and fishing as the two skills I would grind. During the first couple of days, I spent a lot of time fishing, going from fishing 33 to 37 in a few days. However, I quickly realized that I wanted instead to devote my time to reaching mining 60, which would be a relatively fast grind with 3x xp. Thus, I began to mithril mine. Since I had kept up with daily comms, my hotm tree was pretty well progressed, with around eff miner 85/mining speed 20. With the 2x xp event, I was making about 2m xp an hour mining gray blocks while levelling pets (specifically a leg rock and leg whale). In about 5-6 days, I went from mining 56 to 60, achieving my 4th maxed skill. I also grinded a little catacombs during this time, going from cata 33 to 34.

Early summer 2021
During July of 2021, I was trying to progress as much as possible in skyblock before the school year, as I wouldn't have time to play when school started. However, being a rising 11th grader in the US, I had much less time than expected, as I spent much of my summer doing things to boost my college applications and doing extracurricular work. During the summer, with the anticipation of the crystal hollows, I spent a lot of time mithril grinding, keeping up with daily comms and reaching efficient miner lvl 100, as well as getting around 40m overflow mining xp in the process. I also spent a good amount of time grinding t5 revs in hope of dropping a warden's heart (which still hasn't happened btw), which gave me a lot of overflow slayer xp and senither weight.

The crystal hollows
When the crystal hollows dropped, I quickly realized that my hotm progress was largely useless (due to efficient miner being kinda bad). I was also quite confused by the update mechanics, but with the help of some helpful youtube videos, I quickly figured it out. With nothing better to do, I grinded hotm, reaching hotm 6 by day 3, and hotm 7 + max gemstone collection by the first week. However, I didn't really play the update afterwards, since I didn't feel like powder grinding or investing in a gemstone setup. However, I would quickly return to the crystal hollows for my next big project.

Fishing 50 + Enderman slayer
Towards the end of July, SBF introduced guild contests, which gave a coin prize to the player in the guild which gained the most skill xp/weight (depending on contest) during the allotted time. The first contest was for fishing xp, so I began to grind fishing in hopes of getting the 25m prize and for motivation to level up fishing. After trying out barn fishing for a while, I discovered a much better fishing method: lava fishing. Lava fishing is insanely op for xp, and with ~90 scc/dolphin I was making 400-450k xp/hour, which is significantly better than barn fishing. I also found a consistent location to not gain heat (more details can be found here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGCQc8eXKrU ). This allowed me to gain more fishing xp than people in my guild, and combined with t11 fish minions (from contraband), I was gaining about 1m fishing xp/day. Derpy's election + hyper catalysts made my minions gain a ridiculous amount of xp, which further pushed me ahead in the guild contest. I finished the 2 week contest with 12.9m xp gained, with second place at less than 5m.

At this point I was around fishing 43, and decided that I would push towards fishing 50. A senither weight guild contest futher motivated me, since fishing gives a large amount of senither weight. I also invested in an ammonite pet, which boosted my xp rates to over 600k xp/hour. At the end of the 2 week weight contest, I had gained over 1.1k weight from fishing, and was at fishign 49. In a few more days, I reached fishing 50, ending a roughly month long grind.

The grind took longer than expected because I agreed to carry a guild member to eman 7 for a handsome sum of money (and he carried me on a good number of m3's and an m5), so I spent about an hour a day killing his t4 eman bosses. This was due to the terminator change which made its slayer req actually work.

Eman 7 + terminator
I had begun building up a large amount of money, so I decided to grind to eman 7 and a terminator. I had bought a tb edrag for the eman carries, so I pretty much had all the gear needed to grind t4 emans. I grinded t4 emans for about a week to reach eman 7, which along with a massive amount of passive income from forge/bz flipping, I had around 800m by the time I reached eman 7. I decided to sell my ofa giant's sword, and obtained a terminator with the intention of grinding mastermode. I spent a week or two doing m3's for cata xp, but with the start of preseason athletics and school, as well as the ability to go outside again, I was quickly losing motivation.

The end of my journey (at least for now)
By the time school started, I never had a drive to play skyblock. All I would do was log on to my island and afk melon minions (which I still do btw), so that I could eventually reach enough xp for farming 60. With a combination of school work, sports, and the opportunity to socialize irl, I effectively quit the game. Though I am still active in my guild discord and occasionally check the forums, this is the end of my journey for the time being. I want to look back at my skyblock journey and think about what productive things I have done during my time, but I don't regret my progress. I had fun when I played skyblock, and connected with people who I wouldn't have otherwise met amist a global pandemic.

Signing off
-Hammerkit

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ExistingLoan said:

This is such a ****post wth stop spamming the forums with your ****posts!

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WynnterMiku said:

another one bites the dust

goodbye hammerkit

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Hammerkit said:

I have recently stopped playing hypixel skyblock due to a combination of school, irl things, and lack of interest, so I thought I'd make this post to document all the time I spent on this game that we all love. My memory might be a bit hazy, but I'll do my best.

Note: Not all the sections will be in perfect chronological order, I'll try to keep it mostly the same, but I'll group some things together

Making my profile
The reason why I am separating this from my start on skyblock is because I actually didn't play skyblock for more than an hour or two before summer of 2020. I created my profile on July 14, 2019 (for context, this is the summer before I started high school), after seeing a video by technoblade on the gamemode. At first I didn't really understand what the point of the gamemode was, and I almost treated it like a vanilla skyblock experience with the added bonus of minions. I played for maybe a few hours but didn't really play anymore, since at this point I was still playing a singleplayer mc world and didn't play much hypixel. From what I remember, I had a few minions, including a dark oak, pig, iron, gold, and cobblestone minion which would sit full for almost a year.

The start
I really started playing skyblock after being unbanned (security) around early June, 2020 (based on item tags from skycrypt). I don't really remember what made me want to play the game again, but I'd guess it was a combination of nothing to do because of covid and technoblade's videos. I logged back in to some full minions that I'd placed all those months ago, but still had no idea what to do. As I had with many other games, I immediately searched for the hypixel skyblock wiki, which was a huge source of information for me at the time. Being a new player in 2020, when many players had already obtained items such as superior dragon armor and the 50 million midas, I was quite far behind. My first grind on hypixel skyblock consisted of me grinding for full lapis armor, which took around half an hour and was a massive grind for me back in the day (the footage is one of the first videos on my youtube channel). I did this grind using full unenchanted diamond armor and an undead sword, meaning that I died many times to the lapis zombies. At this point I didn't know about the custom enchantment system or reforging. Also, I was scammed for the first time at this point, since a player offered me 100k for my crab hat, which I took since 100k was a lot back then. Looking back it was dumb, but that 100k helped me progress through the start of the game.

Early game
At this point I had a full set of lapis armor, but still didn't know how to reforge. Using the wiki, I found the golem armor and golem sword, which I set my sights on due to their high stats (I obviously didn't know about the much cheaper hardened diamond). Thus, I placed down iron minions to grind for these items, and also saved up coins to buy a fully enchanted golem sword from the auction house. After obtaining golem armor and being able to naenae the deep caverns mobs, I turned to young dragon armor, as I wanted the speed and heard from many people that it was the best armor for zealot farming, the best money making method at the time.

By this point I had discovered a few skyblock youtubers, namely speedsilver, whose early game guides helped me out a lot back then. Thus, following his advice, I obtained a common enderman pet for free from a nice person, and with the help of an eff 5 gold axe/haste 3 farmed spruce wood for money. At the time foraging was not as toxic as it is now, as not many people had treecaps and I was foraging one of the less competitive wood types. Using the money from foraging, I invested in a jungle axe, and eventually began to buy young dragon pieces from the auction house, until I had the full set.

However, I got scammed again, as a player asked to borrow my young armor for zealot farming, and I took a treecap in collat. However, being a naive early game player, I didn't check the price of treecaps to see that they had fallen by almost 1m since I had last checked, meaning that i lost about 1m in total value. However, armed with my treecap, I was able to forage much more efficiently, and used it to grind back the coins I had lost.

The quest to 1-shot zealots
At the time, zealot farming was the best money making strategy so obviously I wanted to do it. however, zealots had 13k hp, which was quite difficult to obtain. Thus, I grinded for strong dragon armor and a raider axe, which I thought would be enough to one-shot zealots. However, I had not gotten my fairy souls or many talismans, so I still lacked lots of basic understanding of the game. Rather than getting talismans and reforging them, I instead saved up for an aotd to try to squeeze out enough damage for zealots. It was around this time that I discovered that some of my irl friends from my old school played skyblock, meaning that I would join discord calls with them at night and play skyblock together. We were also trying to prepare for dungeons (at the time released on the alpha), and I had been selected to play the tank class, so had to eventually get perfect armor. My friends also pushed me to get my fairy souls, which I finally completed, giving me a very helpful stat boost.

Midgame
At this point I had reached the midgame (for the time of course), meaning that I had a set of strong and young dragon armor with an aotd. At the time skills/slayer weren't really a concern, as my gear was the most important thing. This was around the time that I joined free splash servers to get god splashes, as I was not in a guild and didn't want to pay taxes. These splashes enabled me to grind slayer (especially sven) more efficiently, which was huge for my progress in slayer. Using mastiff and a pooch sword, I was able to reach sven 5, and with my other gear quickly got 6-5-5 slayer.

I began to set my sights on doing t4 slayers, so I grinded for the scorpion foil to do t4 tarantulas. This took a considerable amount of time to reach tara 6, but I was able to do tarantula t4's making them my first t4 slayer. Afterwards, I did sven t4's by cheesing them using water, which were not too difficult. However, I struggled to do t4 revs, since it was mostly a dps race with the boss. After unlocking the mana flux, however, I was able to do all t4 slayers.

Release of Dungeons
With the release of dungeons, my irl friends and I, naturally, tried to do them together. Using our gear, we were able to clear entrance and f1, with a handful of f2 completions. However, on release, I didn't find much fun in dungeons, likely because I didn't know secrets or what was going on tbh. I will admit, for the beginning of dungeons, I was getting hard carried by my irl friends, as I played tank, thus doing to dps, but also didn't know secrets.

When f4 was released, my team and I of course tried to do it. We had all watched the hellcastle&furryeboy video on the mechanics of the boss, so we kind of knew what we were doing. However, we didn't do enough dps as a team, as our tank (me), healer, and archer had bad gear and did little damage, and our mage had a newly nerfed bonzo staff. Thus, on our first 2 attempts, even with fire abuse, we timed out of the boss fight because of low dps, missing thorn, and teammates having to leave due to irl things. however, on our 3rd try, we managed to complete the boss fight after around 50 minutes. I got super lucky and dropped a spirit wing within my first 5 completions, and sold it to our mage for around 5m profit. However, this would be the last time for a while that I would play dungeons.

The first slayer grind
While my irls and I would still play dungeons at night, we would go our separate ways during the day. While they mostly played dungeons, I grinded slayer. My first level 7 slayer was tarantula, which I got after grinding t4's with a scorpion foil. Shortly afterwards I got sven 7, and then rev 7. This gave me access to all the slayer items, but I was still too broke to use any of them.

The election update
The election update was probably one of the most controversial updates to skyblock ever released, adding a p2w aspect to the game. After reading the patch notes, I was in support of the update, as stats cannot be bought with coins, and it meant less illegal irl trading and more updates. Also, the booster cookie and god pot are two of the most influential qol items, as it meant that sniping free splashes/paying guild tax was no longer necessary

Grinding dungeons
With the release of f5, my cata level and lack of gear would no longer cut it. At the time, I was around cata 10, and wanted to grind for cata 16 to use super heavy armor, the best tank set (outside of dungeonized perfect) at the time. I also bought a spirit sword to do a little more dps, but the grind was still painfully slow, as I was stuck doing f3 for cata xp (as it gave better rates than f4 for pfinder). I still had not learned secrets, so was mostly carried. However, I eventually got to cata 16 to use super heavy. I then worked towards cata 19 to use t8 perfect armor (dungeonized)

With the release of f6, my team got a completion with the endstone sword trick without me, leaving me to get a non-cheese completion. However, the next day, we completed f6. This was before the terracotta changes, meaning that you would have to wait for a solid minute for the terracotta phase, which combined with a more difficult clear, discouraged me from playing f6. I instead began grinding f5 to learn secrets, dropping a couple livid daggers along the way (still no sa chest tho, not mad).

The release of f7
On release, f7 was announced to be the final floor of the catacombs, despite there originally being 10 floors. Of my 4 irls who used to grind dungeons with me, one of the had quit, meaning that the old berserker bought a bonemerang archer setup, which was crucial for f7. With a combination of significantly harder clear, struggling to get crystals (before fly was discovered), being unable to crush/dying in stage 2, failing terminals, and not doing enough ranged dps, f7 was quite a struggle.

My team managed to clear it with 2 pf teammates, meaning that I was the only one left who needed a completion. To make matters worse, derpy had just been elected, meaning that mobs would have double hp. However, due to my teammates better understanding of the boss fight and a clutch pf random, I managed to get a f7 completion during derpy at cata 25 wearing necro lord with a perfect chest.

However, given the difficulty of the completion, I would only play f7 with my team (and we would fail most of the time), meaning that I continued to grind f5, eventually reaching cata 29/tank 29 with a combination of f5 and f7's at night with my team.

Switching classes
When I reached cata 29, I quickly realized how useless tank was, especially on f7. Thus, I decided to spend 200m (which was a lot back then) on buying necron and bonemerangs for an archer setup, which I used to grind f7. At around the same time, the irl friend that quit decided to return to skyblock, meaning that he had to catch up on gear. By building a nether wart farm and farming ~8 hours a day during online school, he quickly caught up, and became the first person in our team to obtain a hyperion. This was huge, since it opened a new possibility for our team: frag running.

By borrowing hyperion/storm, it was easy to do a frag run every 2 minutes, at the time generating over 15m/hour. This allowed our other team members to quickly grind coins for better setups, and eventually with a combination of diana and 2 handle drops (by two separate people, before 100 runs), we had 3 hyperions on our team, with me playing bonemerang archer, making f7 grinding quite quick for cata xp. Additionally, I would usually be able to borrow one of the hyperions to frag run/run f7 when the owner was not using it. To further push our team into lategame, another member of our team dropped a handle, meaning that 3/5 members dropped a handle before 100 runs.

Joining SBG + melon minions
After reaching rev 9, I had enough slayer xp to join sbg (skyblock gods), which is one of the top skyblock guilds. This exposed me to a guild for the first time, and a community of massive sweats. However, I never really connected with sbg, and only stayed as a member for around 3 months. In sbg, I continued to grind slayer, and began to also start grinding some skills.

I also finally invested in a melon minion setup, after seeing @rm_rf_slash talk about how good they were for farming xp. Thus, I also began to afk on my island for 20+ hours a day, dramatically increasing my playtime.

At this point one of my irl's quit, which turned out to be for good. He essentially gave me an infinite loan on his hyperion, which I would return to him if he every came back. I still have that hype (well its a scylla now) to this day.

The overflux grind + rev 9
At this point, I stopped playing dungeons at around cata 3o, and began to shift my focus to slayer. At the time, the overflux capacitor was the rarest and most expensive slayer rng, so I set my eyes on that goal. Using a set of borrowed superior and a livid dagger (eventually upgraded to necron), I grinded svens in the castle (because of howling cave congestion) for many weeks, mostly during aatrox, and finally dropped an overflux at 660k sven xp, which also meant sven was my first lvl 8 slayer.

After dropping an overflux, I decided to set my eyes on rev 9, which had the added benefit of being a good source of combat xp. Using a storm set and fs/ink wand, I was able to 1-shot t4 revs relatively easily, meaning that I was able to grind 60k xp/hr with aatrox. On February 18, 2021, I obtained my first level 9 slayer: rev 9 (the last boss is on my youtube channel).

Hotm 5
The dwarven mines update brought a whole new island and progression system to explore. Since lower ranks were given lower priority on release day, I spent much of the afternoon watching screenshares of sbg guild members on discord, who were exploring the new island.

At first I found the hotm system quite tedious, but I eventually reached hotm 3, unlocking drills (at the time tita pick wasn't really meta yet). This really catapulted my interest, as I was able to do comms somewhat quickly, allowing me to reach hotm 5 in about 2 weeks. Though I wasn't aware, this was also my first real skill grind, as by the time I was hotm 5 I had grinded to around mining 43.

Rose running + combat 60 + enchanting 60+ 999 slayer
By now I had reached hotm 5, and began my first (intentional) skill grind in skyblock: combat 60. The dwarven mines update had introduced ghost farming, which was one of the best sources of combat xp and coins. However, after trying it for a bit, I realized how much I hated it. Thus, I turned to an even more efficient method, rose running. Rose running is essentially a f6 frag run, where you enter the boss, kill the golems, and leave. At the time, this method made around 1m combat xp/hour (with wolf pet) and 8m/hr, so I did it for many hours, reaching combat 50, and after combat 60 was released, I continued to rose run for combat 60.

The new spider den area also made tara slayer much faster, and by using a borrowed edrag, i could 1-shot them, meaning that I got tara 9 quite fast. Sven 9 followed right behind. I also would do t5 revs for combat xp while also building up slayer xp and overflow senither weight.

Despite the enchanting update being out for a while, I had been lazy with experiments, so I did not reach enchanting 60 until technoblade. Additionally, with a combination of slayer and rose runs, I reached combat 60 in April 2021.

Going back to in person school + joining SBF
In late March 2021, I was able to return to in person school. This meant that I would have less time to play skyblock, so I decided to join SBG's sister guild, SBF. In this guild I met a lot of people that I'm still friends with to this day, which is why I am still in SBF. I would say that SBF was my first real introduction to people in the skyblock community, which I guess you could count as a turning point in my experience.

Additionally, returning in person to school meant that my playtime was much more limited, which began a decline in my progression, but my desire to play the game still remained.

Enderman Slayer
In between updates, I had been mostly just been grinding pelts and revs. However, when enderman slayer dropped, it provided the most difficult non-dungeon content released thus far. On release day, I was able to do t1's relatively easily using necron's + giant's sword/valk, and was able to do t2's with remnants outside of the void sepulture (it turns out the reason I was dying was because I didn't know about the beacon insta-kill). Unfortunately, I didn't find out about the suffocation glitch to kill t4's until after it was patched. By about day 3 of the update, I had successfully done a t3 enderman by using gs/necron/venom's touch/yeti by filling my inventory with remnants and pure dps bashing it. However, due to the immense cost and effort that it took to do one t3, I grinded t2's until enderman slayer 5. At enderman slayer 5, you unlock the vorpal katana, which combined with 3/4 fd/warden, a better knowledge of boss mechanics, and necromancy, I began grinding t3 endermen until I reached enderman slayer level 6.

Contraband
This is a bittersweet part of my skyblock journey. Of the 4 irl friends that originally played sb, 2 had already quit, and the remaining 2 (in the same coop) were quickly losing interest due to fortnite and valorant. Within about a week, they both decided to quit. The first decided to irl trade away his networth, and bought another monitor with the roughly $600 he got from selling his nw (for the record, I DO NOT recommend irl trading). The second decided to give me his gear, which amounted to roughly a billion coins of items, some of which I kept (like some recombed talis). Using the extra money, I fully recombed and enriched my talisman bag, which was a massive stat boost.

The 2x xp event
While hypixel was down, I grinded on a guild SMP, which quickly went downhill and became an anarchy server with mods who would troll people. When hypixel was reopened, there was 2x skill xp which lasted for around a week. During this time, I set my eyes on mining and fishing as the two skills I would grind. During the first couple of days, I spent a lot of time fishing, going from fishing 33 to 37 in a few days. However, I quickly realized that I wanted instead to devote my time to reaching mining 60, which would be a relatively fast grind with 3x xp. Thus, I began to mithril mine. Since I had kept up with daily comms, my hotm tree was pretty well progressed, with around eff miner 85/mining speed 20. With the 2x xp event, I was making about 2m xp an hour mining gray blocks while levelling pets (specifically a leg rock and leg whale). In about 5-6 days, I went from mining 56 to 60, achieving my 4th maxed skill. I also grinded a little catacombs during this time, going from cata 33 to 34.

Early summer 2021
During July of 2021, I was trying to progress as much as possible in skyblock before the school year, as I wouldn't have time to play when school started. However, being a rising 11th grader in the US, I had much less time than expected, as I spent much of my summer doing things to boost my college applications and doing extracurricular work. During the summer, with the anticipation of the crystal hollows, I spent a lot of time mithril grinding, keeping up with daily comms and reaching efficient miner lvl 100, as well as getting around 40m overflow mining xp in the process. I also spent a good amount of time grinding t5 revs in hope of dropping a warden's heart (which still hasn't happened btw), which gave me a lot of overflow slayer xp and senither weight.

The crystal hollows
When the crystal hollows dropped, I quickly realized that my hotm progress was largely useless (due to efficient miner being kinda bad). I was also quite confused by the update mechanics, but with the help of some helpful youtube videos, I quickly figured it out. With nothing better to do, I grinded hotm, reaching hotm 6 by day 3, and hotm 7 + max gemstone collection by the first week. However, I didn't really play the update afterwards, since I didn't feel like powder grinding or investing in a gemstone setup. However, I would quickly return to the crystal hollows for my next big project.

Fishing 50 + Enderman slayer
Towards the end of July, SBF introduced guild contests, which gave a coin prize to the player in the guild which gained the most skill xp/weight (depending on contest) during the allotted time. The first contest was for fishing xp, so I began to grind fishing in hopes of getting the 25m prize and for motivation to level up fishing. After trying out barn fishing for a while, I discovered a much better fishing method: lava fishing. Lava fishing is insanely op for xp, and with ~90 scc/dolphin I was making 400-450k xp/hour, which is significantly better than barn fishing. I also found a consistent location to not gain heat (more details can be found here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGCQc8eXKrU ). This allowed me to gain more fishing xp than people in my guild, and combined with t11 fish minions (from contraband), I was gaining about 1m fishing xp/day. Derpy's election + hyper catalysts made my minions gain a ridiculous amount of xp, which further pushed me ahead in the guild contest. I finished the 2 week contest with 12.9m xp gained, with second place at less than 5m.

At this point I was around fishing 43, and decided that I would push towards fishing 50. A senither weight guild contest futher motivated me, since fishing gives a large amount of senither weight. I also invested in an ammonite pet, which boosted my xp rates to over 600k xp/hour. At the end of the 2 week weight contest, I had gained over 1.1k weight from fishing, and was at fishign 49. In a few more days, I reached fishing 50, ending a roughly month long grind.

The grind took longer than expected because I agreed to carry a guild member to eman 7 for a handsome sum of money (and he carried me on a good number of m3's and an m5), so I spent about an hour a day killing his t4 eman bosses. This was due to the terminator change which made its slayer req actually work.

Eman 7 + terminator
I had begun building up a large amount of money, so I decided to grind to eman 7 and a terminator. I had bought a tb edrag for the eman carries, so I pretty much had all the gear needed to grind t4 emans. I grinded t4 emans for about a week to reach eman 7, which along with a massive amount of passive income from forge/bz flipping, I had around 800m by the time I reached eman 7. I decided to sell my ofa giant's sword, and obtained a terminator with the intention of grinding mastermode. I spent a week or two doing m3's for cata xp, but with the start of preseason athletics and school, as well as the ability to go outside again, I was quickly losing motivation.

The end of my journey (at least for now)
By the time school started, I never had a drive to play skyblock. All I would do was log on to my island and afk melon minions (which I still do btw), so that I could eventually reach enough xp for farming 60. With a combination of school work, sports, and the opportunity to socialize irl, I effectively quit the game. Though I am still active in my guild discord and occasionally check the forums, this is the end of my journey for the time being. I want to look back at my skyblock journey and think about what productive things I have done during my time, but I don't regret my progress. I had fun when I played skyblock, and connected with people who I wouldn't have otherwise met amist a global pandemic.

Signing off
-Hammerkit

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Fodbey said:

mucho texto

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LQ1915 said:

i read up to hotm5 then just died

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MrEevee7 said:

Dang nice, u might pass me in playtime soon

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Hammerkit said:

still afking like 10-16 hrs a day

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MrEevee7 said:

Oh no u will get me

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Stormster said:

This thread probably has more words than my essay

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Hammerkit said:

its only shorter than 1 thing in my google drive for school lol

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Stormster said:

why are you putting more effort into the forums than school

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