The driving force behind this update was our desire to make dyes more accessible to the general player base while still maintaining their position as a particularly prestigious cosmetic type. As such, we first needed to assess what exactly we wanted to do with dyes - whether it was a matter of simply adjusting the numbers or something more complex:
Approaching the Issue of Content Relevancy
It is commonly known that many dyes are extremely rare. To give some specific context, many dyes have dropped less than 100 times over the last year, with some not even having dropped once.
While one simple way to make dyes drop more commonly would be to inflate the drop rates of all dyes across the game, it should first be noted that some already drop at a rare but consistent rate. For example, the Mango Dye (1/10M from cutting wood in The Park) has dropped 1,970 times within the last year, which equals out to slightly more than five times a day, whereas several other dyes drop significantly less often, despite having a higher drop chance on paper. For example, the Brick Red Dye (1/2M from killing Redstone Pigmen) has only dropped 118 times in the last year.
While a discussion can most certainly be had with regard to optimal rates for grinding towards these dyes, meaning these chances aren’t reflective of their true rarities (e.g., you can use a Treecapitator to roll for multiple Mango Dyes in the time it takes to kill a single Redstone Pigman), the more pertinent issue we would like to discuss is one of content relevancy with regard to dyes, causing some dyes to be far rarer than others despite having similar drop rates.
Let’s take a look at the two dyes previously mentioned:
- The Mango Dye drops from cutting any tree in SkyBlock’s designated Foraging zone - The Park. Whether you need certain wood-related collection items or just want to level up your Foraging skill, chances are you’ll have spent a significant amount of time in The Park breaking logs and thus had a chance of dropping a Mango Dye.
- The Brick Red Dye drops from Redstone Pigman, who are only found in a single zone on an early-game mining island. With redstone being easier to grind elsewhere, there is no reason to revisit the Pigmen’s Den outside of completing your Bestiary, and many players will only ever have spent a couple of minutes there.
What we’re getting at here is that, while the Mango Dye drops from core content that has its own progression systems and related items, the Brick Red Dye drops from niche, early-game content, partially explaining its rarity while also illustrating two key issues with it:
1) The Pigmen’s Den, an area of the game that was designed as short, early-game content, now receives its own long-term grind. By grinding said content, you are hoping for a dye drop to make your time investment worthwhile, as you are not benefitting in other core areas of the game at a rate that cannot be easily surpassed on more later-stage islands, such as the Dwarven Mines (for Redstone) or Crimson Isle (for Combat XP)
2) By grinding said early-game content, you are oftentimes competing for resources with early-game players.
With these issues having now been identified, it is clear that something along the lines of simply buffing the Brick Red Dye’s drop rate from 1/2M to, let’s say, 1/500k would not solve the issue of players embarking upon long, fruitless grinds that frustrate themselves and sometimes inconvenience newer players.
Targeting the Issue of Content Relevancy
Having explained the previous section in-depth, you’ll be glad to hear that this section is much simpler! To solve the Brick Red Dye’s problems, it is important to move it to a section of the game that satisfies the following criteria:
- Rewards long-term time investment, so even if you don’t drop a dye you’ll have something to show for the time you put into that area of the game. Some examples can be found below:
- Is a core part of SkyBlock that we want players to interact with on a long-term basis.
Examples of areas of the game that satisfy these two criteria include areas like the Crystal Nucleus, Dungeons, and Slayers, where you’ll make significant progress within a large-scale area of the game with clearly mapped-out progression even if you don’t drop a dye. The Pigmen’s Den, as nice as it is, does not offer this same progression that rewards the time players invest, meaning that the question of whether your time investment was worth it or not ultimately comes down to the binary yes/no of “Did you drop a dye?”, since there are no other meaningful and measurable parameters of success, such as other rare drops or slayer XP.
As such, the decision was made to move the Brick Red Dye to Spider Slayer’s Tarantula Broodfather boss. Players grinding Spider Slayer now have another rare drop added to the pool, and players specifically hunting for the dye will gain Spider Slayer XP and sometimes drop other rare rewards, such as Flycatchers, while hunting for the dye, both of which makes time feel less “wasted” if that lucky dye doesn’t drop.
While we focused on the Brick Red Dye in this specific explanation, you’ll come to notice that many dyes received similar changes, being moved from niche content without a meaningful progression system to something players interact with on a more frequent basis. Each specific slayer, dungeon secrets, the crystal nucleus, and more progression systems all now have a dye they can drop! The mechanic of Vincent’s Masterpiece, which makes three random dyes more common each year, will also satisfy the itch of dedicated dye grinders in a way that takes them through several areas of content as the optimal dyes change with each passing year, rather than having them complete the same content over, and over, and over.
Thanks for reading, and we hope that provided you with a little bit of insight into our goals here. Please let us know if this was something you found useful.
