Survival has grown considerably throughout Season 2, and today’s update is focused on making those features easier to discover, understand and engage with.
We’re introducing a new tutorial for getting started, Contracts to give you more ways to progress, and Atlas, our new in-game assistant.
There’s quite a bit to get through, so let’s get started!
A Better Start
MenaceMC has grown considerably over time.
Workers, custom enchants, spawners, collectors, guilds, PvP, streaks and plenty more have all been added over the course of Survival. That’s great once you know your way around, but it can make those first few minutes rather intimidating.
We’ve now introduced a proper New Player Tutorial.
Rather than throwing a wall of information at you the moment you join, the tutorial takes you through the important parts of the server step by step.
It isn’t designed to explain absolutely everything.
Instead, it covers what you need to know to get started, points you in the right direction, and then leaves you to discover the rest of MenaceMC naturally.
Existing players aren’t left out either. The tutorial can still be revisited if you’d like a refresher.
Open the tutorial at any time with /tutorial.
Contracts
Ever logged in wanting to play, but weren’t quite sure what you actually wanted to do?
Contracts are designed to solve exactly that.
You’ll now receive a selection of objectives based around ordinary Survival gameplay, including activities such as gathering resources, farming, hunting and more.
Complete a Contract and you’ll be rewarded for your time.
Simple enough!
Fairer Rewards
Contract rewards scale with the work involved.
Larger objectives pay more than smaller versions of the same task, while slower activities are balanced around the amount of time they realistically take to complete.
Killing mobs, for example, isn’t expected to compete with harvesting crops at exactly the same raw numbers when mobs simply can’t be produced at the same speed.
The goal is simple:
More effort should mean more reward.
Progression
Contracts also grow alongside you.
As you complete them, you’ll progress through increasingly demanding tiers:
Novice → Apprentice → Journeyman → Expert → Master
Novice Contracts are quick, accessible objectives designed to give newer players an additional source of useful early-game cash.
As you progress, Contracts become larger and take longer to complete, but the rewards increase alongside them.
Higher tiers aren’t simply there to make numbers bigger. They’re intended to provide established players with objectives that remain worthwhile much later into their progression.
You’ll also have multiple Contracts available at once, so you’re free to focus on the objectives that suit how you want to play.
Master Contracts
Eventually, you’ll begin encountering Master Contracts.
These are larger, longer-term objectives designed to sit alongside your normal Contracts rather than replace them.
Think of them as something to steadily work towards while you’re already playing.
Complete Contracts, progress through the tiers, and you may also encounter some of the rarer rewards available through the system.
View your active Contracts with /contracts.
Meet Atlas
MenaceMC has a lot of features.
Enough that even experienced players sometimes have to stop and remember exactly how something works.
Rather than expecting everyone to dig through old announcements, ask around in chat, or somehow memorise every system we’ve added, we’ve introduced Atlas.
Atlas is MenaceMC’s new in-game assistant, built specifically to answer questions about the server.
Wondering how Workers work?
Not sure where a particular item comes from?
Forgot how to unlock something?
Confused about a server feature?
Ask Atlas.
Atlas has been given extensive knowledge of MenaceMC and can explain systems conversationally rather than simply throwing another menu or wiki page at you.
The idea isn’t for Atlas to play the server for you.
It’s there for those moments where you know what you want to do, but don’t quite know how MenaceMC expects you to do it.
Ask a question with /ask <question> or /atlas <question>.
Full Answers with Menace+
Atlas is available to everyone, but Menace+ members also have access to Full Answers.
Full Answers allow Atlas to go into considerably more detail when a quick response just isn’t enough.
Instead of only giving you the essentials, Atlas can provide a deeper breakdown of the system you’re asking about, including more context, extra details and a more complete explanation where needed.
It’s designed for those questions where the answer is a little more complicated than a few lines in chat.
The standard Atlas experience remains available to everyone. Menace+ simply gives you the option to ask Atlas to go further.
Built for MenaceMC
Atlas isn’t intended to be a generic chatbot dropped into Minecraft.
Its knowledge is centred around MenaceMC itself.
As the server changes, Atlas’ understanding of it will continue to grow alongside it.
There will inevitably be occasions where Atlas gets something wrong, particularly as brand-new features are introduced, so we’ll continue improving its knowledge over time.
For now, try asking it something.
You might be surprised by just how much it knows.
Putting It All Together
These might look like three separate additions, but they’re ultimately trying to solve different parts of the same problem.
The New Player Tutorial helps you understand where to begin.
Contracts give you meaningful objectives once you’re playing.
Atlas helps when you don’t know what to do next.
MenaceMC is continuing to grow, and we don’t want the solution to that growth to be making the server smaller or simpler.
Instead, we want to make a feature-rich server easier to understand.
Jump on, try the new systems out, and let us know what you think.
Good luck with your Contracts, and say hello to Atlas for us.