Guide The Wynnic Archives - A Comprehensive History Of Wynncraft

WithTheFish · Dec 20, 2020

Disclaimer: this is not an official guide to Wynn's history that is 100% accurate. It is simply a side project made by me, and there may be some inaccuracies present. If you find any mistakes, please tell me in the comments.

Wynncraft has been around for over seven years, and it has blossomed from a niche Minecraft community into a server with over a million unique players. So much has changed since this ambitious project first launched, and I am here to show you just how much this place has grown.

Welcome to the Wynnic Archives, a massive guide dedicated to showcasing Wynncraft's past, present, and evolution. If you ever wanted to know what Wynncraft was like long ago, this thread is for you.

Needless to say, this thread is utterly massive, and is split into 3 separate posts. For your convenience, I have also included a table of contents.

❋ Table of Contents

POST 1:

Timeline of Wynncraft - A simple timeline of all major events that have occurred on the server.

How to Read This Thread - Self-Explanatory

The Basic History of Wynncraft: The Early Years - A more detailed look at Wynncraft’s launch and it’s first few major updates.

The Basic History of Wynncraft: The Gavel Era - A more detailed look at the year leading up to Gavel, and the aftermath of its release.

POST 2:

The Basic History of Wynncraft: The Revamp Era - A more detailed look at the major updates that occurred after Gavel was released.

The Basic History of Wynncraft: The Era of Professions - A more detailed look at the major updates in 2019 and onwards.

POST 3 (if you've read my previous thread, check out this section first!):

Fun Facts About Wynncraft's History - Miscellaneous and mostly entertaining info about Wynncraft's past.

Standout Forum Threads - Some of most notable threads on the forums history, compiled in one spoiler.

What Was the Pre-Gavel Item System Like? - Wynn's original item system was so different from what it is today that it deserves its own section

A History of Dungeons - Dungeons have changed a lot since Wynncraft first was made public.

How Mobs Changed Over Time - The history of mobs in Wynncraft, and how they've become better over the years.

The Evolution of Quests - How Wynncraft quests have gotten more advanced over time.

The Games That Inspired Wynncraft - A look at all the games that have inspired Wynncraft.

The History of Wynncraft's Community - How the community changed over time. My personal favorite part of this project.

Credits and Sources

❋ Timeline of Wynncraft

[4/30/13] - Wynncraft Publicly Launches.
[6/29/13] - Pet Update/1.5 Released, which adds more endgame content, pets, and swarms.
[7/6/13] - Wynncraft posts its first trailer on Youtube.
[9/13/13] - The Quest Update/1.9 is released, which added quests and skill points.
[10/30/13] - The Ocean Update/1.10 is released, which added much more content.

Forum Host Switches to Xenforo. - [11/25/13]
The Wynncraft Wiki is created. - [12/2/13]
The Spell Update/1.10 is released to public, which revamped all spells. - [1/24/14]
1.11.1 Released, which added the door to Gavel. - [3/5/14]
The Wynncraft Build Team starts publicly recruiting players. - [4/5/14]

[5/2/14] - The Wynncraft GM Team starts publicly recruiting players.
[7/14/14] - Beta testing for the Mob Update/1.12 begins.
[8/1/14] - 1.12 released to the public. Mojang updates and starts enforcing Minecraft's EULA.
[8/12/14] - /fixquests is added to the game.
[9/10/14] - Wynncraft's forums receive many new sections, such as the Planning Parlor.

Gavel Week occurs, bringing us livestreams and many teasers. - [10/18/14]
A minigame called Wizard Fortress is introduced (I'm not making this up). - [10/31/14]
The Wynnter Update/1.13 is released, which added guilds. - [12/22/14]
Relics are finally implemented. - [1/20/15]
The WynnExcavation questline concludes. - [6/2/15]

[9/3/15] - The Gavel hype trailer is shown.
[9/7/15] - All forum threads got wiped.
[12/21/15] - The Gavel Update/1.14 is released, which adds... take a guess.
[1/1/16] - Veteran player Sovreigner becomes the first level 100 player.
[1/13/16] - Admins Crunkle and HiMyNameIsAJ leave Wynncraft.

Raw Spell Damage gets nerfed, since it was technically bugged beforehand. - [3/25/16]
GM Tantibus teases Corkus under the guise of an April Fools joke. - [4/1/16]
Moderator Broettinger becomes the first level 101 player. - [4/1/16]
The Class Builds section is added to the forums. - [8/3/16]
Pretzule becomes Wynncraft's community manager. - [8/20/16]

[8/28/16] - The Gameplay Update/1.14.1 is released, which fixes issues and adds content.
[9/20/16] - Mojang updates their EULA once again.
[10/27/16] - The Hallowynn Update/1.14.2 is released, which adds crates and the HERO rank.
[11/20/16] - Grian livestreams the CT's work on the Corkus update.
[12/17/16] - The (other) Wynnter Update/1.15 is released, which adds a temporary event.

The Wynncraft Discord server is created. - [12/24/16]
The Corkus Update/1.16 is released, which adds... Corkus. - [4/7/17]
Grian teases the 1.17 update. - [6/27/17]
Wynncraft sets a world record for the largest Minecraft MMORPG - [7/4/17]
Former admin jpresent begins his bugfixing spree - [11/24/17]

[11/30/17] - The way IDs are rounded gets changed, affecting every build.
[12/15/17] - The Dungeons and Discoveries Update/1.17 is released.
[7/13/18] - Event Manager Pepo attempts a complex ARG event called "The Factions".
[9/2/18] - Road to Dern is revealed to NOT be the next update.
[12/5/18] - Beta testing for 1.18 begins.

The Economy Update/1.18 is released to the public, which added professions. - [1/15/19]
Wynncraft releases a new (and updated!) trailer. - [3/25/19]
Grian shows said trailer on Hermitcraft, causing a popularity surge for Wynn. - [4/2/19]
The Hardcore, Ironman, and Craftsman gamemodes are added in 1.18.1. - [6/7/19]
1.19 is revealed to be the Silent Expanse Update. - [10/27/19]

[11/11/19] Beta Testing for 1.19 begins.
[12/8/19] The Silent Expanse update is released to the public.

❋ How to Read This Thread

((Name of thing that happened))

((Detailed Description. Dates are in bold and color, as of September 20th¹))

Maybe a list, depending on the topic.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

((Name of other thing that happened))

((Stuff))

¹ - ((Link to Source))

❋ The Basic History of Wynncraft: The Early Years

The History of CM

CM is an abbreviation for CraftedMovie, a former minecraft server and inactive youtube channel. We owe a lot to CM, because without it, there would be no Wynncraft.

The first CraftedMovie video was posted in 2011, and you can recognize Salted, a founder and administrator in Wynncraft, as one of the actors in it.

The CraftedMovie would go on to create many skits and videos, with a very notable one being the Misadventure on the Sea trilogy, which included a villainous mooshroom man named Peppered. You may also see a guy with a Link skin in several of CM's video thumbnails: that is actually Grian, before he switched over to a plain red shirt.

Craftedmovie also had a survival server by the name of... CraftedMovie, and as far as I remember, you had to be whitelisted to join. This led to a smaller, but more tight-knit, community. I was never on CraftedMovie myself, but there is a thread with screenshots of the server here. From what I can tell, the place had a rather vibrant community, worthy of its own history thread written by someone far more knowledgeable than me.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

The Creation of Wynncraft

One day, Salted got the idea to make a full-on MMORPG in Wynncraft. This was an incredibly ambitious idea, and one that he managed to rope Grian, and the developers Jumla and Crunkle, into doing. He also got two web developers by the names of Tama63 and HiMyNameIsAJ to help him. They're both currently retired from Wynncraft work, and they also both had pig-themed skins, which is kinda odd.

The people I've listed so far weren't enough to make an entire MMORPG on their own, however. They needed help. So they enlisted the people of CraftedMovie to build an overworld and a few dungeons for them. Some builders even got towns named after them: Nemract for instance is named after a guy named Cartmenezzz. Salted himself has actually compiled the birth of Wynncraft in this now-archived thread, and I highly recommend you give it a look. I was shocked to find some very familiar faces in the chat.

While the builders worked, Crunkle and Jumla coded, and gradually, Wynn's basic features were created. From very early on, the same trade system used today was made, which goes to show that some things never really do change.

Wynn's old map was very simple, both in terms of what you could explore, and the builds themselves. There were only 3 dungeons and five cities. Beta testing began in March, hence why some players have March 2013 as their join date in the stats page. The official release happened on April 30th, 2013. Unless you were active in CM's community, you probably didn't even know Wynncraft was a thing. A video about the server wasn't even posted on CM's youtube channel. The number of players on the server at first had to have been low, but that didn't matter. Wynncraft was one of the most ambitious experiments in Minecraft, and testing was about to begin.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

Wynncraft's Launch

2013 Wynncraft had minimal content in comparison to 2020 Wynncraft. Banks, Soulpoints, spells, and trading were the only real features around at the time. Even Identifying wasn't added until May 28th. There were only 5 cities (Ragni, Detlas, Nemract, Almuj, and Nesaak), and a few smaller towns like Maltic. Those smaller towns were essentially useless, as there were no quests, no spawnpoints outside of cities, and no special potato merchants. They were cool things to discover though. Content consisted of killing mobs for XP and emeralds, and every now and then a mob would drop an item that was stronger than your current gear.

There were only four classes available when Wynncraft launched: Warrior, Archer, Mage, and the donator-only Assassin. Wynncraft needed funding through donations to survive, so the perks for donating were pretty good. In addition to a 4th class (and a 4th class slot!), you got double XP, and supposedly, access to the donator-exclusive areas of the Desert and Nesaak Tundra. That last feature is unconfirmed, but I remember people saying that at first, level 30+ areas were indeed locked off to non-donators. There was also a VIP town, but I don't know if it was added upon release, or a later update in the first few months. There wasn't even anything in the town first, aside from some cool cyan Adventurer's Armor you could buy.

The max level at first was 70, but reaching it was basically impossible since content ended at level 40 and the strongest items were level 45ish. Getting chain armor back in the day was a legitimate achievement due to the unbearable grind.

In the end, the most iconic part of old Wynn had to be the constant lag spikes. Those persisted for a really long time, but despite this many players stuck with this small minecraft server.

I'll finish this section by showing a picture of the tiny lobby, which only had 3 portals and some parkour.

Wynncraft's first ever lobby

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

The First Updates

One of the best parts of 2013 Wynn was its frequent updates. In the beginning we mostly got bugfixes and QoL changes, but on May 16th, we got the brand-new Zombie Dungeon, and the Pigball arena. The zombie dungeon was located under a colossal tree (which is now removed), and required you to fight hordes of zombies, and eventually the dreaded Charon himself. You can probably guess which modern day dungeon replaced the Zombie Dungeon. Pigball was a fun minigame that was essentially soccer with a pig. And then just two weeks, later the Silverfish Dungeon was added, and it would be the last dungeon added for over a year. Like I said above, identifying was finally added to the game, and that iconic hut on the Emerald Trail cam along with it.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

The Pet Update

A month after the Silverfish Dungeon was added, Wynncraft got its biggest update yet. It launched on June 29th under the title "The Pet Update". This was due to the fact that pets were added to the online store, but the update contained so much more than that.

Early Wynncraft pets were very different from today's pets, but also similar in a few ways. You would purchase each one individually from the online store, and you would be able to summon it whenever you wanted. As armorstands didn't even exist in Minecraft at the time, each pet was just a vanilla minecraft mob. To compensate for their average appearance, every pet would be able to attack enemies.

When people think of old Wynncraft, the Pet Update is probably what they think of. This was the update that revamped the lobby, and increased the number of servers from 3 to 18. It was iconic for having these giant statues, and plenty of "odd" easter eggs that may get me demoted if I list them. All in all, it was pretty impressive, and proved that Wynncraft was trying to grow beyond some tiny CM spinoff.

Apart from pets, swarms and dueling were the other big new features. We all know what dueling is, but some newer players may not know what swarms are, as they no longer exist in the game. Basically, a horde of zombies would invade a city, and tons of players would fight them off. Everyone participating the swarm would get XP, and lot of it. Being a party would also increase the amount of XP gained, and according to some rumor, standing very close to other players would increase your XP reward even more. This meant that during the final moments of a swarm, tons of players would be screaming "GET TO THE BANK" in chat. Good times.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

Wynncraft's First Trailer

While Wynncraft was growing in content, it didn’t have a massive playerbase yet. That all changed when CraftedMovie released an official trailer on July 6th:

Today, this trailer is antiquated. But at the time, it depicted Wynncraft perfectly, and it was a great way for new players to discover the server. If you ask someone from 2013 how they found Wynncraft, they’ll probably say that they saw this video. The server got many new players thanks to this, allowing it to reach the average player counts it has today!

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

Legends of the Past

It took a while, but finally a player had managed to reach level 70, the max level at the time. They were an assassin by the name of Wortho27. This was a momentous achievement, and for a while you could find a NPC named Worthington in the jungle, presumably named after him.

Abandonedbank, Acer78, and EgyptianSDS were the first players to get the other three classes to level 70, but then the community started thinking bigger. What if someone got ALL FOUR classes to level 70? Seems insane, right? But a player named samabizzle actually did it, and will be remembered as the first player to fully level up all their classes.

But samabizzle didn't stop there. He found a glitch that allowed him to level up past level 70, so he continued grinding until he got a class to level 71. Doing so required the same amount of XP as it took to go from level 1 to 70, so this was a momentous achievement. At one point his level 71 glitch was patched and he was sent back to level 70, but his achievement will forever be a part of Wynncraft's history. Nowadays, there's always one bonus level (such as level 106 today), which requires the same amount of XP as all previous levels to be reached. That bonus level is very likely to be based on samabizzle's achievement!

The Quest Update

By the end of summer, all of Wynncraft was waiting for the next and biggest update yet: 1.9. It seemed huge with its addition of a new town (Troms), and several long-awaited systems (Skill Points and Quests)

1.9 finally released on September 13th to a very rocky start. Servers were down for most of the day, and the lag was more unbearable than usual. There were probably tons of bugs too with all the quests. In the end though, 1.9 ended up being pretty successful, and its primary features have continued to play a huge role in the server.

The new quests did have a notable problem: there weren't enough of them. XP was so hard to get at the time, and the community was probably expecting quests to save them from a torturous grind. But in the end, 1.9 only added 5 quests in the level 35-70 level range.

But while there weren't many high-level quests, we got two endgame grinding spots so level 70 could be more realistically reached. The first was a cave filled with Dead Miners outside Troms, and it actually still exists today. The other spot was a room in the Temple of the Legends where level 70 silverfish called Trained Corrupteds spawned at an absurd rate. Also added in 1.9 was a set level 67-70 endgame legendary armors and weapons.

The subjective "best" quest that was added was probably Temple of the Legends, which ended with a battle against the level 100 Corrupter of Worlds. The old CoW was very hard to fight, and could be compared to Legendary Island difficulty wise. It took a team of six to finally beat this foe and gain access to the titular temple. Jungle Fever was also a standout quest, since at the time, navigating the emerald labyrinth was one of the game's greatest challenges.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

The Ocean Update

After an update that added revolutionary features, the Wynncraft team decided to focus on a content-based update. To do this, the ocean was expanded dramatically. Back when Wynn first started out there were only two islands on the ocean, but 1.10 raised that number to fourteen!

Many new quests and items were added, along with a level cap raise to 75 and a new superboss: Bob’s Reincarnation. Like the Corrupter of Worlds, Bob was first defeated by a team of players, but over time people learned to solo him. If you beat both of Wynn's superbosses, you could now obtain Bob's Mythic Weapons, the ultimate endgame weapons at the time.

1.10 also added Horses, Gold Coins (currency for cosmetics that you would buy for IRL money) and a PvP arena called the Nether. Level 75 Players would go there and fight each other for glory… and a spot on the new online leaderboards!

One of the islands added in the Ocean Update (from Glitch496)

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

Forum and Website Updates

With the Wynncraft server getting improvements, the web developers decided it would be a good time to update the website as well. A leaderboard for the new Nether PVP was added, replacing the previous total level leaderboards, and a lot of the artwork was changed too. This marked our first time seeing the iconic eye in Wynn’s logo.

The forums got an overhaul too in November; where it switched over from the Vanilla host to Xenforo, a new host that has served us well for nearly six years! It was quickly filled with many threads from the old forum, as well as some cool new ones, such as Grian’s legend of Bob lore.

The Forums, circa mid 2014. R.I.P the original light theme.

On November 2nd, the Wynncraft Wiki was also created. Just like today, it was run by the community. If I recall correctly, there were plans for a special "Wiki Cap" item to be given to players who contributed a lot to the wiki, but I do not think this item exists ingame.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

Merry Craftsmas!

Holiday quests have always been a tradition in Wynncraft, and they've been around since December 9th, where a quest simply titled "Craftsmas Quest" was temporarily added to the game. The quest was an extremely basic fetch quest, but it did have a limited-edition reward in the form of Santa's Pants.¹

Also included in the first Craftsmas update was a special snowman pet. There is 0 way to obtain it today (you can't even buy it with gold coins through the /gc command), so owning one is the mark of a Wynncraft veteran.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

The Spell Update

Prior to 1.11, all updates had added new things rather than revamping outdated stuff. That changed when 2014 kicked off with a large update, which would change every spell in the game completely. Before this update, a lot of them kinda sucked. Bash and Meteor were basically the same thing. Arrow Shield didn’t exist, instead there was some weird spell called Stone Shield. Ice Snake didn't exist either, but a similar spell called Ice Barrier did (it was basically a faster meteor that froze enemies). Smoke Bomb was laggy as hell. Uppercut wouldn't launch mobs into the air 90% of the time, and when it actually did work, the mob would be flung all the way to the sky level. Thankfully, they all got replaced with the spells we take for granted today.

1.11 also added scrolls (both the teleportation type and skill reset type). Interestingly enough, this was also the first ever update where VIPs would get the opportunity to beta test. Said testing went on for about a week, with many balance changes made to spells. And even still, some issues slipped through, such as Multihit doing 2000% of your weapon’s damage, which wasn’t fixed until Gavel.

On January 24th, the update was released along with the new Nether. What made it new exactly? Your stats didn’t count. Every player had 100 Health and 4 Spells, and it was a fast-paced fight to death. Now, even people without the endgame gear could participate, and as long as you had all four spells upgraded you could put up a good fight. A few days later Gold Coins were added as a reward for performing well in a five-minute match. The Nether ended up being a great competitive post-game activity... until Gavel came and made stats matter again, causing the Nether's audience to change into one of only a few players with top-tier builds.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

Lag Spikes and Gavel Hype

Unfortunately, something was happening to Wynncraft shortly after 1.11 released. Lag spikes were at an all-time high. The staff had to close down nine of the eighteen servers that you could join. It turns out that Jumla would have quickly fixed this, but he had a power outage at his home.

On March 5th the lag finally got fixed, and we were also treated to the 1.11.1 update. It brought a revamped Nesaak Forest, which became the best build in the game at the time. Two quests were also released. The first one was Beneath the depths, a level 60 quest that finally bridged the massive quest gap between The Passage and ToL. The other quest was The House of Twain, Wynn’s biggest puzzle-based quest so far. It was added not long after Grian posted a lore thread about the Twain family (which can now be read in the Lusuco discovery). Unfortunately the quest didn’t add much in terms of additional lore.

Missions were also added to the game, and they were the precursor to today’s Daily Objectives. They were notorious for being very imbalanced, and you would often be given absurd tasks like “kill 24 Witherheads” or “Duel 3 players”, all for a paltry amount of XP. They were removed sometime in 2016.

Oh wait, this update added one extra thing to the game. A large door at the opposite end of the ocean, and the age of Gavel hype had begun.

The old door to Gavel (From Glitch496)

A month later, Grian posted the Gavel Hype Train thread, where he talked about all the content that would come to Gavel, like grind spots.² Sadly the thread kind of died out after a while, but it was a good source of hype for a while. Judging by the thread, the Gavel update may have been much more ambitious. It talks about stuff such as dungeon revamps (1.12), and the guild hall (1.13), both of which were released before Gavel in the end.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

The Arrival of Youtubers... and Squiggles the Squid

At this point in time, Wynn had a decent amount of players, but not a ton. That all changed when famous minecraft youtuber Inthelittlewood decided to do a video on Wynncraft. Their video soon cascaded and more youtubers started making Wynncraft videos. Soon enough, Wynn had thousands of players online at once. The number of available servers went all the way up to 36 to accommodate the new players.

The surge of new members was met with mixed reviews from the existing playerbase, many of whom considered the newcomers to be “cringy” and “noobish”. Others believed it was our duty to help them out. The playerbase has since died down in numbers, but I’m sure many of the people who joined in late March are still here today.

Turns out these newcomers joined at an interesting time. On April 1st, Wynn had its first ever April fools joke, which involved a squid named Squiggles following you around everywhere. Not everyone was too pleased about Squiggles, and it certainly must have confused all the new players. He was removed the next day for anyone wondering, but the memory of him lives on.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

Join the Content Team Today!

In early April, Grain finally opened up build team applications to the public. This was unexpected, and many players applied in an attempt to join the build team. Some wanted to help out the server. Others wanted to see what the next update was. One thing’s for certain; very few people got accepted. The build team applications got a lot of attention, but not as much as the GM applications that were posted a month later.

At the time, there were only two Gamemasters: Salted and Dakotafiles. Nearly everyone had no clue what a Gamemaster did until today, but hearing “you get to make quests” was all people needed to hear in order to apply. The application was a lot smaller at the time, and instead of coming up with your own quest the plotline had to revolve around a troll losing his socks. Getting accepted to the GM team was very hard; by July 2014 only 5 people had been added to the team.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

Other Events From Early 2014

Wynncraft had gone a few months without a big update, but that didn’t mean nothing was going on. On April 16th, the Wynncraft OST was made public, so you could listen to Wynn’s melodies on the go!

But what about ingame stuff? Well… Salted had something insane planned: a double XP weekend. This was the first time (I think?) that Wynncraft had done one of these. But this DXP weekend was very special, because it gave QUADRUPLE XP players with VIP.³ This was never done again, and its just as busted as it sounds.

New Admins & 1.12 Teasers

For almost all of Wynn’s first year, the server and its website had been run by the same six admins. However, as Wynn grew more admins started appearing.

The first newcomer was a coder guy named @rmb938 , who wore iconic 3D Glasses. He arrived sometime in April and did a lot of server related stuff. You know how the amount of available servers depends on the amount of players online? We can thank rmb938 for that feature, which was pushed out at the end of April along with a cool new lobby.

Another admin arrived in June, named @MrTwiggy. He had no forum activity aside from making an introduction, and I’m not exactly sure what he did.

And then there's the @King of Ragni , who still has his tag. Oh wait, it isn't quite time to talk about him yet...

At this point in 2014, Wynn was entering its largest update drought yet. Wynncraft was working on something, and whatever it was, it had to be huge. We got our first teaser for 1.12 sometime in either May or June. It showed a revamped Detlas wall, and we quickly figured out that update would revolve around a remade Wynncraft map. Seems like pretty simple stuff, right?

And then out of nowhere, the King of Ragni posted a thread featuring lore for the upcoming update.⁴ While the thread was very cryptic, it seemed pretty dire lore-wise. A little bit later another build teaser was posted, but the Wynn-logo was a bit corrupted. What on earth is going on? This string of teasers continued for a month or so, and many theories were made about what would happen.

Eventually, these teasers concluded and an announcement thread was made for the next update. Shortly afterwards, VIP-exculsive beta testing began on July 14th. I’ll talk about what that update included in a bit, for now I need to talk about something more serious in the game’s history.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

The EULA

An interesting thing about Wynncraft is that it’s inside Minecraft. It’s basically a video game of it’s own, yet it uses another game to contain it. And that means it must obey all rules set for server creators in Minecraft.

So when the EULA's rules on server monetization were changed, the entire community was filled with dread. Buying ingame currencies and letting people pay for advantages would be against the rules, and that would affect stuff like double XP and pets that could fight.⁵ If things such as these were removed, would anyone bother supporting the server? For a few days the community discussed this topic, until Grian responded by saying that everything would be okay.

And in the end, everything was okay. On August 1st, the day the EULA changes went into effect, the store was completely changed. Pets were now purchased through Gold Coins, which would no longer be rewarded in Nether matches. All of VIP’s features were made to be cosmetic, and bombs and the VIP+ rank were added. I’ll get into more detail about the store changes’ effect on the game when I talk about 1.12.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

The Mob Update

At long last, 1.12 was here, and it was one of those updates that changed everything. Not only had 99% of the map been redone, but so had the mob system. Mobs could cast one spell each now, and be any sort of block or entity. Sure, that isn’t much compared to today’s mob system, but it was cool at the time. Other features included more quests above level 60, the new mesa area + Rymek, and more lore and secrets.

Gameplay was changed a bit too due to the EULA changes. VIPs no longer had any permanent double XP to rely on, and had to search for servers with the new Double XP Bombs if they wanted an XP boost. At the time quests were affected by XP modifiers, so it wasn’t uncommon for people to wait for an XP bomb before turning in quests. Furthermore, donators now had more classes to grind via the new reskins. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this yet, but class slots didn’t exist yet. You only had a limited amount of classes: non-donators had one assassin, archer, mage, and warrior. That was one of the reasons to buy a rank at the time (it still is a reason today); so you could play on more classes.

The Mesa was one of the new areas added in 1.12 (From Glitch496)

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

Post-1.12 Updates

With 1.12’s successful release Wynncraft was on a roll, and for a while they continued to release cool updates. The first one came on August 12th, and it added the /fixquest command. It’s hard to believe that it didn’t always exist and that people had to suffer without their quest items. But after a popular petition for a way to return quest items made by well-known member Fibunny, we finally got a way to get back the corrupted potatoes that we ate.

Two weeks later, they released a proper update in the form of 1.12.1. It added a revamped Zombie dungeon and revamped swarms, two updated features that weren’t present in 1.12’s original launch. I have to say, these new swarms were a massive improvement. There was now a most kills scoreboard, and a way for mobs to actually win the fight. Once again, this was likely partially inspired by one of Fibunny’s popular suggestion threads.

Much later, on October 27th, Wynncraft got its first ever Hallowynn update, notable for adding the quest “Macabre Masquerade”. If you did the quest during Halloween season in 2014, you would get an exclusive pumpkin mask.

The final update I’ll mention is forums related. On September 10th, Tama added many new sections to the forums, such as the “Planning Parlor” and “Other Games”. Yet perhaps the most important feature added was the “New Profile Posts” on the main forums page. Finally, the forums had a better chance of seeing your cool profile post!

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

Gavel Week

On October 11th the forums got an unexpected announcement. Grian posted a thread saying that Gavel was 50% done (which turned out to not be the case), and that there would be a week-long event to celebrate it. The event was called Gavel Week, and it would feature streams from Grian about the progress of gavel, in-game community events, and pictures of Gavel posted on the forums.⁶

These pictures of Gavel were pretty vague. They mostly showed some terrain and that was it, although the final picture was an awesome render of Llevigar. In-game events were a lot more successful, with the winners earning a cosmetic helmet called the Seeker’s Aid. The main highlight though were Grian’s gavel streams. They showcased tons of cool stuff, but you were forbidden to leak anything from them. Butince the event is long gone, I feel like I am allowed to say this about them though: many of the streams featured the staff building mysterious castles in some snowy region. What could those builds possibly be for?

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

Wizard Fortress

Those builds turned out to be for a Wynncraft minigame named Wizard Fortress.

Yes, I said minigame. You aren’t hallucinating.

I don’t think anyone expected this. After all, Wynn was a MMORPG server, not a minigame server! And so on Halloween, people were putting off their quests and grinding to play Wynn’s first and only minigame. Wizard Fortress, hereby abbreviated as WF, was pretty simple. There are red and blue teams that are both trying to earn points by capturing each other’s flag. The team with the most points at the end of each game wins. Players would collect wands with unique and special abilities throughout a large yet fun map and try to defend or capture said flags.

Did I mention that this was a minigame server on a MMORPG yet? Compared to what Wynn currently had, WF seemed so outlandish. Sure, the Nether wasn’t exactly connected to the main game, but at least it was based around your normal Wynn stats and had a place in Wynn’s lore. WF on the other hand was just there. It had nothing to do with your existing levels or the existing lore.

Some people started to worry that Wynn would eventually end up as a minigame server, but Grian told those people not to worry. And in the end, WF just… died out. With no rewards for playing, there wasn’t much incentive to dedicate time to this minigame. About a year later, it was removed and there are no plans for it to return.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

The Wynnter Update

After an uneventful November, the King of Ragni returned to the forums to tease the next update. That update was 1.13, which finally added guilds. Guilds were a really popular suggestion on the forums, comparable to today's housing.

Guilds may have been the main feature, but the update also added the Dernel Jungle, the Ice Canyons, and many late-game quests including The Tower of Ascension. Minidungeons were another addition, although they didn’t have much replayability. The whole point of 1.13 was to add more end-game content, and it was successful in that regard, mainly due to guilds.

Another feature, and a very unexpected one, was Armor Skins (which aren’t in the game anymore). Out of all the features added to Wynn, this may have been the most controversial one apart from guilds; Armor Skins visually replaced actual armor and would instead change your Minecraft skin to be an armored individual. They had plenty of issues though; for instance, you were automatically re-logged every time your armor changed. They've been turned on and off several times throughout history, but as of today they've been disabled for years.

“1.13” also added Relics, but they were released a bit later than the rest of the update.

Various Armor Skins (From JuicedBananas)

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

Relics

On January 20th, Relics were finally added to the game. Technically, their builds had existed since 1.13 came out, but they just didn’t give you any items. Since they were removed in the later Dungeon’s & Discoveries update, let me explain what they are to newer players first.

There were two types of Relics: Shrines and Secret Relics. The shrines were found in somewhat easy to find locations, and they gave powders to anyone who discovered them (which could be done an infinite amount of times on a cooldown). Secret Relics on the other hand were extremely well hidden. If you managed to work out where to find them you would be given an exclusive item as your reward.

When relics were released a new rule was added: any posts explaining the location of the Secret Relics would be removed. The intent of this rule was to make finding those relics a challenge. However, some people had figured out the relic locations before the rule was added, so maybe it wasn’t that much of a challenge after all.

Relics were eventually removed in 1.17.

¹ - https://wynncraft.gamepedia.com/Craftmas_Quest
² - https://web.archive.org/web/2014100...craft.com/threads/the-gavel-hype-train.16099/
³ - https://web.archive.org/web/2014071...s/double-xp-weekend-quadruple-for-vips.31902/
⁴ - https://web.archive.org/web/2014062...raft.com/threads/to-the-heroes-of-wynn.35460/
⁵ - https://web.archive.org/web/20140625110540/https://mojang.com/2014/06/lets-talk-server-monetisation/
⁶ - https://web.archive.org/web/2014101...nnouncing-gavel-week-18th-25th-october.60437/

❋ The Basic History of Wynncraft - The Gavel Era

Gavel Hype Grows

We are now entering the time period where not much happens aside from the wait for Gavel. The community was hyped for this new update, and to retain this hype, the admins posted numerous teasers. Although many of them have been lost to time, I’ll try to explain what they were:

Let’s start with Salted’s teasers about the new item system. Every now and then he would post minor stuff, like an elemental symbol or a new ID. As time passed he revealed more and more about the system, eventually concluding with a post that flat-out explained the elements and what they did. I’m pretty happy that he posted those, as they helped a lot of players understand what would be a new system.

Then there were Grian’s videos. He planned on posting a video about Gavel every month, but only four were ever created. Here’s a list of them:

[January] Aldorei Valley Build Timelapse

[March] An Iron Heart Pt. 2 Walkthrough

[April] Lore Teaser (with Outdated Lore)

[June] Gavel Q&A

All other videos can be found on Wynn's twitter

The Wynncraft Twitter had plenty of teasers too, such as the first glimpse at the texture pack and airship feature:

Last but not least, there was the bizarre Wynnic teaser. If you’ve done all of the Plains Discoveries, you should know that Wynncraft has its own language called Wynnic, created by artist LoveLusting. The language originated in a teaser posted in the summer of 2015, which featured a picture of Bak’al’s face (no one had any clue who Bak’al was at the time), with Wynnic text above them. I don’t know how people managed to translate the Wynnic symbols into letters of the alphabet, but once we managed to do so we were able to translate plenty of other teasers posted at later dates in Wynn’s history.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

The Wait For Gavel

Update 1.13.1 was released in June, and it included the conclusion to the WynnExcavation questline and added Thieving Rodents. Thieving Rodents was a low-leveled quest that required you to kill a boss called the Giant Rat. That boss became a meme in the community due to how powerful it was for its level. It was removed in 2017 and replaced with “Poisoning the Pest”. On the other hand, the last two Wynn-Excavation quests were extremely well-received. The final Wynn-excavation quest granted you a token that can be traded for a Royal Amulet. In the quest's last piece of dialogue, the king said that a merchant from Gavel would be arriving this summer who you could give the token to.

And that was the biggest problem with Gavel hype. The staff kept giving promises as to when it came out and it just got delayed, which led to the community becoming more and more irritated. There simply wasn’t much to do in game anymore. Guilds were slowly beginning to have more and more issues, and many players had gotten every class to Level 75. The only unique and entertaining thing to do at the time was to participate in these lobby events HiMyNameIsAJ hosted, but those didn’t have much to do with Wynn’s gameplay.

The Herb Cave, which was previously a popular grinding spot, got nerfed in 1.13.1. It's actually still a popular grind spot as of 2019. (From JuicedBananas)

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

The Gavel Trailer

With Summer ending and Gavel still not out yet, the admins needed to preserve hype. To do this, they released a pretty cool trailer.

It’s more of a teaser when you compare it to stuff like the 1.18 video and Grian’s Gavel videos, but it looks amazing! That worm boss! Those cutscenes! Is that a dragon?

Unfortunately, most of the things from the trailer didn’t make it into the game. There is no worm boss that can tunnel into the ground, and no mob has mechanics remotely like it. In today’s lore, the corruption war shows no sign of ceasing. Ragnar was never added to the game as an NPC, and Bak’al was added to the game 2 years after the trailer was released. Judging by this trailer and other teasers, Gavel was originally going to have much more stuff that never made it into the game.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

The Forum Wipe of September 7th

As mentioned at the top of this thread, 9/7 was when all threads were wiped from the forums, but what exactly happened that day. I have no idea, and I don’t know if I ever will, but I’ll explain what the community saw that day.

Some point during the day, an Admin named Admintest1 appeared on the forums. They had a million posts, likes, and points. After they joined ALL threads on the forums slowly disappeared, the forums then went down for a bit, and then they came back, with Admintest1 gone. To this day they are one of Wynn’s greatest mysteries.

Admintest1. Note that Tantibus has more posts pre-9/7 than he does now.

When the forums came back up Grian made a news post. He said that every thread was gone, but we could still rebuild the forums. Besides, with Gavel coming out it wasn’t a bad idea to have a fresh start. What Grian did not say, however, was how every thread got deleted. And after a joke posted by Salted, everyone started to make memes about Jumla being the cause of 9/7, thanks to him spilling his coffee on the server.

The forums may have reset, but did the culture there really change? I’m not sure if it did, but there were some rule changes: on September 29th, it was announced that players were not allowed to cheat the 10-character limit. This was likely a way to curb low-effort content.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

Gavel Hype, Continued

After the trailer dropped, hype needed to be preserved still. So the admins continued with teasers and streams, showing us stuff like new Quality of Life features and NPCs such as The Guardian of the Forest. At the same time, Salted started to recruit people to make item models and provide artwork for the ingame paintings. Between all this in the trailer, it became apparent how massive of an undertaking Gavel was.

In late November, Grian announced that beta testing would begin, and that certain people would be chosen to visit the villagers' province in advance.¹ This was it. Gavel would finally come this year. This time around, testers would be hand-picked, although you could win the chance to beta test in some Twitter contests.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

Countdown to Gavel

The end of the long wait for Gavel began with a tweet saying that the map was done. For the first time ever, we got clarification that a part of Gavel was finished. A few days later, pictures of creatures and areas from Gavel were posted on the Wynncraft twitter, with the words “X days” above each picture. It seemed like Wynncraft was counting down to something...

Later, Salted did an AMA on the forums, where he answered several Gavel-related questions among other stuff.²

After a long wait, Gavel was finally here. To explain this new update, the admins hosted a special Gavel stream that was shown to the public when it was done. It showcased all of Gavel‘s features like its cool builds and quests, and all the changes to mechanics that would be in the update. Gavel’s lore was vaguely revealed too. And that texture pack! It was finally shown to the public and was well-received. At the end of the stream there was an awards ceremony for the Content Team, where all the active members on the team got an award for their work.

A render of the content team members that worked on Gavel.

Gavel was officially released on December 21st.

Gavel's Release

Gavel was the biggest update Wynn had so far; with double the amount of content, a graphics overhaul, and a complete redo of the item system. The classes were also changed too, I guess. Assassin's 2000% damage multihits were patched, and the addition of extra health made healing with Mages and potions actually viable. The tables had turned in Wynncraft, and many people thought Mage was good while Assassin was garbage. It didn't help that some spells didn't even function in the first few days of Gavel.

Not a lot of people cared about items in the first week though; there was so much to explore! Update 1.14 added fifty quests, some of which, like Memory Paranoia, became instant hits within the community. There were countless locations to explore, and players searched every nook and cranny to discover what was hidden. Despite there being countless bugs, plenty of people still enjoyed the update even with its flaws.

And for people who liked exploration and quests, there was something that combined the two: ???. When that quest was released with Gavel it was very different from what it is today. To complete it you needed to drop three different meteor shards in a hopper outside a giant white meteor, and then you needed to solve a puzzle. The reward was just Altum Spacium and XP, although there was some additional lore regarding Sohso that you could find after the quest. You were not allowed to discuss the original ??? quest in public. Any minor references to it would be deleted, and spoiling a part of the quest would be a bannable offense.

One of Gavel's quests involves searching for a Volt Goat. (From Glitch496)

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

The Race to Level 101

Another thing that was added in Gavel was a raised level cap. At long last, the level cap became roughly what it is today, although no one knew about level 101 yet. But still, with such a large increase in the max level, several players immediately embarked on a journey to reach it first.

Leveling up when Gavel was released was the most hellish thing you could imagine. The highest leveled quest was the level 90 Fantastic Voyage, and the highest leveled dungeon was the level 63 Jungle Minidungeon that gave next to no XP. There was no Glowbulb or Demon Cave either, so how did players level up?

It turns out that they just needed a little help from Salted, who blessed the server on Christmas day with a Double XP WEEK. Quests were affected by XP back then, so by use of Triple XP players could get into the level 90 range pretty quickly. For the last few levels people would help players with The Qira Hive quest, and then party up with players to gain some of their XP earned from turning in said quest. That turned out to be a very helpful exploit, but it got removed in the end. Alternatively, you could grind Freezing Heights or the Thanos Vaults (a grinding spot severely nerfed a few weeks after Gavel released).

On January 1st, former Moderator Sovereigner (aka J6Unlimited/Zuikaku_) reached level 100 as Assassin. With the help of a ton of XP bonus he was able to sacrifice sleep in exchange for going down in history. A few other level 100s arrived shortly after. (Their forum names are as follows: TheDollarBill, DodoBird, Kokaga, SeanThomas2, Gartato, and Hanky)

Afterwards, almost no one tried to get level 100 for a few months. With the double XP week over, there was no way anyone could put in enough effort.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

The Secrets of Gavel

??? wasn’t the only mysterious thing added to Gavel, there were plenty of other secrets to uncover and post on the forums. Many lore threads were made to decipher all the mysteries related to lore and quests, and multiple threads popped up relating to hidden places and easter eggs. There were also two major “secret hunts”, which I’ll detail here.

The first major secret to be found was @Lotem ’s Clock Puzzle. It started when many members of the community found clocks in the various cities and towns of Gavel. There were eight clocks total, but no one knew what to do with them until player MarkedForDeath found a hidden arena in the Pre-Light Forest. There, in exchange for your clocks, you could battle eight bosses in exchange for a Golden Clock. A few patches later, a hidden Clock Merchant was added which would trade you armor and accessories in exchange for the golden clock. AlexisPlay made a thread to compile this journey in case you want to solve it yourself.

After the clock mystery was solved, the exploration-based part of the community shifted their focus to Gale. Gale is one of the bosses in the Qira Hive quest, and has always been mysterious due to not being one of Qira’s creations. The lore of the wand “Ohms’ Wish” had additional lore about Gale; it mentioned that she had a grave somewhere. With Selvut283’s encouragement, the community went on a massive hunt for Gale’s Tomb, which is chronicled here.

People searched everywhere for Gale’s Tomb but found nothing. It turned out that it wasn’t accessible originally, and a patch had to be made to let people find it. A player/former CT member named Averine decided to search through the Qira Hive after the patch and found it.³ But the mystery wasn’t over yet. It appeared that there were hoppers under Gale’s grave, and people started throwing items (by items, I mean crazy stuff like Gale's Force) into it to reveal something. Players also found the entrance to Ohms’ laboratory, but there was nothing inside except a hallway and useless button. To this day Gale’s grave and Ohms’ lab remain an unfinished mystery.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

Mythics

I don’t know who found the first mythic. But at some point in the first week of Gavel, people became aware that there was now another tier of items that were rarer and stronger than Legendaries. At the time, mythic weapons were the only type of mythics to exist, and not all of them were in the game yet. There were still a ton of mythics though, and it took awhile for the community to find them all.

Mythics quickly became some of the most expensive items in the game, being priced higher than most cosmetic items had been in the past. This might have been due to LE inflation though, since Gavel's original quest rewards led to players getting rich quickly.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

Class Builds

Thanks to a brand new item system designed with innovation in mind, players were able to make a whatever builds they wanted. Early on, common builds included walkspeed archers, mages with 15/4s mana regen, and super slow melee warriors. If you had a mythic you could probably use that too, although they were very rare at the time. Many builds utilized lifesteal early on, because it bug caused it to unintentionally trigger upon dealing spell damage or inflicting poison damage, but that was fixed eventually.

Soon after, builds utilizing raw spell damage and or +tier became very popular, and the reason for this was because both those IDs were bugged. Any raw spell damage would be added onto your base damage when casting a spell, allowing you to deal absurd damage. Just about every decent spell build contained Third Eye and Memento, because those were items with high spell damage and mana regen. Your weapon didn’t matter either as long as it was fast. Ethereal and Cerid’s Dynamo became popular wands due to this bug because they were Very/Super Fast, and Pure was simply one of the best weapons in the game. Depressing weapons were legitimately viable if you had enough raw spell damage. This bug was finally fixed in March to the complaints of many, because lots of people will abuse anything to gain an advantage.

Despite this, the server’s meta was not saved. For one, increasing your attack speed through IDs didn’t only affect melee damage at the time, but it also affected spell damage too. I think this was also bugged, but it didn’t get fixed for a long time. Another notorious build from back in the day was the Cactus build, because it was a nightmare to play against in PvP (IDs and skill points mattered in the Nether after Gavel), and it gave you the ability to AFK grind.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

The Ancients Depart

On January 13th the community was met with sad news. Two of Wynn’s original admins; Crunkle and HiMyNameIsAJ, were departing. Crunkle had put a lot of coding work into Wynn, and HiMyNameIsAJ was known for frequently interacting with the community, so players were sad to see them go. For the first time in Wynn’s history, some of the server’s original founders had departed, although the contributions will not be forgotten. Tama also left many months later.

However, as you can probably see if you check the list of staff today, one of these admins came back...

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

The Origins of Corkus

Sometime in March, Grian posted a thread saying that Wynncraft has decided to incorporate a suggestion from the community into the game. Everyone was excited, because the General Suggestions section on the forums was full of good ideas that seemed to be ignored by the admins. Could Item Locks or Skill Point Perks finally be added? But in the end, the suggestion incorporated into the game turned out to be Corkus.

Corkus was originally a suggestion by MrCoffeeTime. It was a very simple suggestion for a massive new location, which consisted of the areas Relos, Legendary Island, and the Corkus Mainland. For whatever reason, Wynn’s content team loved the suggestion and would joke about it multiple times.

On April Fools Day, Gamemaster Tantibus posted a fake Corkus Changelog in the news section of the forum.⁴ While the post had some lies (such as swearing being bannable), it ended up teasing some aspects of Corkus. Most people didn’t take the news thread seriously, despite Tanti’s efforts to convince everyone otherwise. None of us believed him until the Gameplay Update, where Corkus became an actual part of the lore.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

Level 101

On what was coincidentally April Fools day, (now former) Moderator Broettigner posted a thread about him reaching level 101. And according to Wynn’s API, he was that level. So how did he reach it? Turns out that at level 100 all his quests got reset due to a bug, so he did them all over again with Triple XP and XP bonus gear to reach level 101.

Not only did a player accomplish something this extraordinary, but with the max-level finally achieved, the staff decided to reveal the XP requirements for each level. This is something we take for granted each day, but during the early years, we were in the dark about this stuff.

Could level 101 be reached without having your quests reset? A player by the name of Motoki1 decided to try. He spent a ton of time grinding in the Tower of Ascension, which was the best endgame grinding spot at the time before 1.14.1. A month or so later he did it, and became the first (known) legitimate level 101.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

Where's the Next Update?

Gavel did not include a lot of the features that were planned to be included, such as powders and a main storyline. The admins reassured us that these would come in a follow-up update though. In fact, Salted said in January that powders would be returning to Wynn (old powders were removed 1.14) in about 1-2 weeks.⁵ That obviously didn’t happen. Flash forward half a year and none of those things were here yet. Needless to say, the community was starting to get a bit frustrated.

A reason for this was because the Gavel update had some clear problems. There was no real content after level 90. Cactus builds were running rampant in the Nether. And worst of all, there was a bug that would delete your items upon logging in, at random. This bug was due to your items with skill point requirements not registering that your character has skill points invested, so those items would be sent into your inventory, or get thrown on the ground if you didn’t have enough space. It was eventually fixed after a few months but many players had already been affected.

Despite all these bugs, Salted and the content team repeatedly reassured us that Wynncraft would have a bright feature, and he slowly started posting teasers of the next update. But I think the community had grown cynical after the long wait for Gavel, and the hype from teasers wasn’t what it used to be.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

Zentrela

Let me get basic definitions out of the way: Zentrela was another Minecraft MMORPG that emerged in the summer of 2016. Wynncraft has never been the only Minecraft MMORPG: other servers like Dungeonrealms and Mythros had been made known to the community at this point. But Zentrela seemed different, and some people wondered if it could compete with Wynncraft. A common opinion on the forums was that even though the server was starting out, in a year or so it could be a strong competitor to Wynncraft. Interestingly enough, Misaka, the owner of Zentrela, actually visited our forum to clarify some info about their server.⁶

In the past, Wynncraft had viewed other Minecraft MMORPGs as rivals, but Zentrela seemed different. Plenty of Wynncrafters were actually playing on there, and the reason for this was simple: Wynncraft had not been updated in a very long time. In fact, I believe that public opinion of Wynncraft, at least on the forums and shoutbox communities, was starting to decline…

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

Community Changes

Gonna make this section brief, since there was a lot of forum drama around this time that I would rather not dig up. Basically, parts of the community thought there were some big issues going on related to the demotion of certain moderators, and other forum members believed the community was rapidly going downhill. This all culminated in a large community rant thread. It ended up deleted, but not before people in the community started to realize that they needed to bring about change.

These events also led to Grian posting a thread which cleared some stuff up, such as the roles of the moderators. Around the same time, Pretzule became Wynncraft's first ever community manager! He acted as a link between the admins and community, and hosted numerous entertaining events for the community, with the first one being an hide-and-seek event in early August.

Around this time, the forums also got the Feedback and Class Builds sections, which have both been pretty important to the community. With all this happening, and a highly-anticipated update being released soon, it appeared that Wynncraft may be entering a golden age.

¹ - https://forums.wynncraft.com/threads/just-around-the-corner.94912/
² - https://forums.wynncraft.com/thread...e-game-design-shenanigans-in-wynncraft.96760/
³ - https://forums.wynncraft.com/threads/the-search-is-over-gales-tomb-found.112428/
⁴ - https://forums.wynncraft.com/threads/announcing-1-15-the-corkus-update.119823/
⁵ - https://forums.wynncraft.com/threads/when-is-the-follow-up-update-coming-out.105131/#post-1137050
⁶ - https://forums.wynncraft.com/threads/opinions-of-zentrela.137205/

WithTheFish · Jun 29, 2020

❋ The Basic History of Wynncraft: The Revamp Era

The Gameplay Update

Around July, Salted and Grian started posting changeblogs to hype the community up for the next update. Changeblogs were basically smaller changelogs dedicated to a specific aspect of the update, such as quests or powders. Despite being well-recieved, changeblogs haven’t been done for any other updates.

1.14.1 aimed to solve many criticisms of Gavel; with the addition of higher leveled quests, new builds, revamped quests and dungeons, more items, bugfixes, better balance, and general QoL fixes. The main storyline or worm boss weren't coming this update, but powders would finally be re-added to the game. Other notable parts of 1.14.1 included a revamped ??? quest and the adorable Wybels, which instantly became a hit with the community. There was even a secret orange Wybel boss! But the most important feature added was a sprintbar, a feature which, interestingly enough, was already present in Zentrela.

After a week of beta testing, the gameplay update was released to the public. The update went very smoothly, although there was one area in the quest “The Fortune Teller” that let you spawn tons of high-XP mobs upon pressing a button. By the time that was fixed, there had been a sharp increase in the amount of level 101s.

??? was also released after the beta, and people had quite the adventure figuring out how to do stuff. This time around, discussing ??? wasn't bannable and we were actually encouraged to talk about it! Wynncraft has always had a dedicated community of theorists, codebreakers, and explorers, so the quest may have been easier than Grian expected. In the end, it only took us about 2 weeks to finish the new ???, which was around the time its creators predicted it would take.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

More EULA Changes

On September 15th, Grian had some bad news to talk about. Minecraft’s EULA had once again been updated, this time banning virtual currency such as Wynncraft’s gold coins. Player riding was also being removed, which meant the death of Player Towers (which were 5+ players stacked on top of each other using that feature). The community was angry at Microsoft/Mojang for doing this, but just like last time Grian reassured us that things would be alright, and new store features would come.

The solution to the EULA problem came in Wynn’s next major update: 1.14.2. In compliance with the EULA, Wynncraft changed their shop and added all the store features that we see today, such as crates and the Hero Rank. Bombs and Pets were no longer purchasable with Gold Coins, but were rather something to buy on the store. The community reacted positively to this new store, mainly because we finally got Mob Totems and Wybel Pets. Still no Wynncraft merchandise, which Grian actually polled the community on¹, unfortunately.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

Hallowynn Returns

1.14.2 didn’t just add store changes - after all, it was called the Hallowynn update! Naturally, it included a Halloween themed quest called A Grave Mistake, which had been teased by the Wynncraft twitter for the past few weeks. If you completed the quest during the Halloween season of 2016, you would be given the special Trick and Treat rings. The other quest added was 1000 Meters Under, which has consistently been very well-received in the community.

The last thing 1.14.2 added were grind spots in Molten Heights, most notably the Demon Cave. It still exists to this day, but the demons there wish they were as popular as they were in 2016. It turned out that in combination with Party XP boosts and Double XP, the Demon Cave was REALLY good for leveling. It was at the point in time where people started getting all ten of their classes to level 101. Throughout the month of November, DCave and Mob Totems were hit with several nerfs, and it’s no longer an ultra-easy way to level up. Interestingly enough, DCave was buffed, and then nerfed again, when the Economy Update released.

A 2016-era DCave party (From Glitch496)

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

Corkus Hype & 1.15

There were a few tidbits of lore in the Gameplay update that mentioned a steampunk island called… Corkus. That’s right. Tantibus’ April Fools thread was actually a secret teaser.

And the Corkus hype only grew when Grian did a special Corkus stream, which the playerbase was allowed to talk about this time around. Turns out Corkus actually is a steampunk island with mechs! Although the stream showed many cool builds, the highlight had to be when Grian joked about two provinces called Bloomi and Morgor. Bloomi was a hypothetical joke province, and Morgor was likely a mispronunciation of Mordor. And for whatever reason the community joked about those meme provinces for the next year, saying things like “Bloomi will be the next update!” and “I hate Dern, when’s Morgor coming!” Naturally, with Corkus being a real thing now, the community had to switch to new memes.

In the 1.15 Wynnter update, we finally got our first look at Corkus, or at least its coastline. Grian also posted a Lore Thread for Corkus at the end of the year, which talked revealed pieces of lore such as the Avos, and how the Corkians escaped from Fruma. With all this Corkus hype, 2017 looked like it was going to start out with a cool update.

1.15 was also notable for adding an ingame event known as the Wynnter Fair. The fair consisted of minigames that could be played for prizes, and was the first real instance of an update adding a temporary event. The Wynnter Fair has only returned once; in the winter of 2019-2020.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

Discord

According to Wikipedia, Discord was created in 2015. So what did the Wynncraft community use as their secondary meetup place beyond the forums? The answer is Teamspeak, which my younger self never used and therefore I cannot tell you about it.

On April 24th of 2016, Jumla hosted a poll asking players if they wanted to get rid of their Teamspeak server and replace it with a Discord server.² Discord got over 60% of the votes in that survey, but in the end, the staff decided to stick with Teamspeak. For now.

Towards the end of December, Wynncraft hosted another poll on their Twitter which asked the community whether or not they preferred Discord or Teamspeak. Discord, which had only been further rising in popularity, got 2/3 of the votes. That same day, Wynncraft discontinued Teamspeak and switched over to Discord. To this day the discord server has remained very active and popular, and many new channels (such as #class-builds) have been added to it since it was released.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

The Corkus Update

2017 didn’t really have much going on at first, until the Corkus trailer was posted in March. Finally, we got a better idea of what was coming in the next update, apart from Corkus of course. Sure, we weren’t getting Dern or the main storyline, but Corkus was finally the endgame content update people were asking for, and a lot of the new additions seemed really cool.

After an April Fools joke which stated that Corkus wouldn’t actually come out, the update was officially released on April 7th. For a while, Corkus was packed with every high-level player. On the first day, the new quests and dungeon were all completed, and unfortunately those made up most of the content. Legendary Island, which arrived in this update, also took minimal time to conquer, since many people already had optimized builds. Still though, the update included some stuff that took a while to find, such as the hidden Necklace of a Thousand Storms and the new mythic Warp.

Welcome to Corkus!

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

The Rise of CSST

CSST stands for Corrupted Sand Swept Tomb, and for all of 2018 and most of 2017, it was the easiest way to level up. By far. While this corrupted dungeon was added in the Corkus update, it didn’t rise in popularity until dungeon bombs were added to the store a few weeks later. Now, massive groups were able to enter this tomb without using up a key.

What made CSST so good was how easy it was to complete. Sure, Fallen Factory probably gave more XP on it’s own, but it takes a lot longer to complete considering it has parkour and a conveyor belt segment. In CSST, you could just walk forward and have other players do the dirty work for you. Because of this, many people complained about CSST, saying that it was just a way to skip the game from level 71 (the minimal requirement to access the dungeon at the time) onward.

And for some people, doing CSST wasn’t enough, and they glitched the dungeon in order to get more XP. This led to mass bans on entire CSST parties, and even if you didn’t activate the glitch and still benefited from it you would still get banned. This resulted in a ton of community frustration, but people were able to get unbanned if they appealed correctly.³

Your average CSST run.

Wynncraft’s World Record

Did you know Wynncraft has a world record for being the world’s largest MMORPG server on Minecraft? Yes, I know it sounds like a ridiculous record but it’s still cool that we accomplished this! Proof of this accomplishment can be found on Wynncraft’s twitter. We even made it into one of their books!⁴

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

Another Pause in Updates

It all started when Grian posted a teaser showing a rebuilt Troms entrance.⁵ In that thread he said that 1.17 would be coming in at least two months, and a lot of the community ignored the "at least" part. This led to plenty of disappointment when October came and there was still nothing. Combine this with the numerous bugs the game was facing, and a lot of the community was starting to lose hope. In years following this teaser, the staff have been careful not to give estimates as to when the next update will come out.

Additionally, an “exploit” was beginning to become known in the community: AFK-grinding boss mobs such as Amadel’s minions. At the time, it wasn’t a punishable offense, and AFK-grinding was very divisive among the community due to how players could gain an economic advantage while being AFK.⁶ On October 2nd, after a recent thread about making Amadel-farming bannable had generated lots of discussion, AFK-grinding was declared to be against the rules.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

Item-Related Stuff

In nearly every multiplayer game, balance changes occur. Wynncraft is obviously no exception, although items weren’t really changed until Gavel arrived with its revamp of item system.

On April 10th, Selvut posted a brief thread stating that a few endgame items would be changed, and these changes would likely break builds. What started out as a simple post eventually grew into the first ever item rebalance changelog. But that wasn’t the only-item related thing that happened in 2017. In September, the item team was finally created, although it was kept a secret until 1.17 launched. Prior to the item team’s creation, Selvut and Salted were the only true item creators and rebalancers, although GMs such as Tantibus would occasionally add a few items to the game.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

Jpresent's Bugfixes & 1.17

Jpresent had been an admin for a year or so at this point in Wynn’s history, but no one had seen him around much. One day, he appeared out of nowhere and fixed a major bug with guilds. Before this fix, players were unable to leave guilds if they changed their username inside said guild. The community was shocked at this sudden, yet very positive, event.

Jpresent didn’t stop there however. He went on a bugfixing spree, and resolved issues such as double negatives with identifications, invincible warriors, and other class build-related issues. He also made Loot Bonus affect chests, which helped popularize lootrunning more. The community started worshipping this guy as a god, because at long last Wynncraft’s most infamous issues were being resolved. He even added an iconic suggestion to the game: reducing lag.⁷

Another thing he fixed/changed was how item ID rounding worked. Before this, items like the Chestplate of Ineptitude could give +2 Tier Attack Speed, because the maximum 1.3x ID multiplier was somehow rounded to 2x. Now, it would round to 1x, making only +1 Tier possible. This was one of the biggest rebalancing changes yet, and pretty much every build was affected.

During the holiday season, the community got a very special treat: a new update! 1.17, aka the Dungeons and Discoveries update, was very well-received. This is in part due to its content, and the prior bug-fixes that put the game in a more playable state. It also added two highly requested features: larger banks and better quest books.

It was also the first update to feature beta testing for only HEROs. Due to how complex the quests were, the CT wanted to make sure they wouldn't break.

The Dungeons and Discoveries update was filled with secrets and lore.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

Guild Updates & Potatoes

In February, jpresent fixed several bugs relating to guild wars and added minor improvements to them as well. It's around this time where Guilds start becoming revitalized among the community, along with warring itself. Guilds could now be considered the server's true endgame content.

A 2018-era guild war (From PikaLegend)

Around the same time, mysterious potatoes started to appear in each territory all around the map. What did they mean? It turns out that they were a part of some strange ARG event, which ended up being a teaser for the guild banners you can find around the map.⁸ It was an interesting idea for an ingame event, but probably very confusing for new players.

This is what the potatoes looked like at one point.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

The Factions...

In July, Pepo, who was now hosting Wynncraft’s events, created Wynn's most bizarre event yet. It was an ARG even bigger than the Potatoes which will take forever to explain... so I'll just talk about what the ARG led to. Eventually, it was revealed @The Phone (the account that ran the ARG) was Pepo's alt, and it was a set up to an event called The Factions. This event, which never actually took place, involved splitting the community into four teams that would do tasks to compete against each other.

Despite countless people signing up for The Factions, it kept getting delayed. One day, current IM jptheflip decided to post "The Factions" in the #the-factions discord channel, and for whatever reason the rest of the community did the same thing. As of right now that channel is closed, and saying "the [insert whatever here]" over and over again has become a meme.

The Factions actually returned for a bit with more ARG stuff after 1.18, but now that Pepo is no longer hosting ingame events, The Factions are in limbo.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

The Update Drought of 2018

2018 was the only year (so far) without the release of a major update. The biggest updates we got were 1.17.5, which rebalanced the heal spell and added 4 new mythics, and 1.17.7, which added new class slots for HEROs and special icons for your classes in the class selection screen. The current lobby was also added to Wynncraft at the start of the year. This was Wynncraft’s fourth lobby iteration, and it replaced the one added back in 2014 (I couldn’t find a place to mention the 2014 lobby on my first post, but if you’re a Wynncraft veteran you definitely remember that lobby).

In addition to all of this, Wynncraft turned five years old on April 30th, 2018! It surely has come a long way. To celebrate, Wynncraft had another DXP weekend, and those guild banners I mentioned earlier were added to the game.

Plenty of things happened in the community during this drought. Salted did an AMA on the Wynncraft subreddit, and the IM rank was publicly unveiled, with applications for the team opening on June 29th. But the biggest event was probably Pretzule resigning from the role of community manager, and leaving the server as a whole.⁹ Pretz still stops by on the forums every now and then though.

Pretzule’s role of Mod Manager was passed on to moderators Salkasm and JuicedBananas, and the role of Event Manager to Pepinho. The roles have switched even more since then, with Salkasm and Naraka00 being today’s Mod Managers, and there is no longer an official event manager.

¹ - https://forums.wynncraft.com/threads/i-want-your-opinion-potential-wynncraft-merch.130562/
² - https://forums.wynncraft.com/threads/teamspeak-vs-discord-poll.123676/page-4
³ - https://forums.wynncraft.com/threads/what-happened-over-the-weekend.189098/
⁴ - https://forums.wynncraft.com/threads/look-what-i-found-in-the-guinness-book-of-records-2019.234721/
⁵ - https://forums.wynncraft.com/threads/an-update-on-the-1-17-update.194506/
⁶ - https://forums.wynncraft.com/threads/make-amadel-farming-bannable.204722/
⁷ - https://forums.wynncraft.com/threads/reduce-lag.104298/page-5#post-2543038
⁸ - https://forums.wynncraft.com/thread...so-stop-making-threads-about-them-ffs.218900/
⁹ - https://forums.wynncraft.com/threads/thank-you-and-goodbye.230098/

❋ The Basic History of Wynncraft: The Era of Professions

1.18 Hype

For the entire year so far, we thought that the next update (1.18) would be Road to Dern. On September 2nd, Grian announced that this wasn't the case. RtD was delayed in favor of the Economy Update, but the community didn't know that at the time. All we knew was that it had been nine months since a major update, and we had no idea what was coming instead of Dern because the admins were intentionally being vague. The good news was that the community took this change of events in a generally calm manner, and more teasers for the economy update came in following weeks. And oh boy, were they some odd teasers.

The first teaser arrived sometime in April, and it showed a fish being crushed by a piston. No one had any clue what it meant. The second teaser was even more of a meme. It just showed some tasty berries, and tons of people made theories about the deeper meaning of these fruits.¹ The next few teasers showcased some new textures and mob models, but the community felt as if Salted’s posts were hiding something. With 1.18 now released, I can now identify the link between the first four teasers: each one showcased a different gathering profession.

Another thing the teasers did was a countdown to the next update. Every teaser had one less emerald than the last. For instance, the first teaser had seven emeralds, and the fifth teaser (a showcase of a revamped Detlas), had 3 emeralds in Wynncraft's logo briefly flash.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

The Economy Update

After a very, very long wait, the next update was revealed to be the Economy Update in a trailer. It's an absolutely massive update too, with the addition of professions, crafting, a redo of most of the map, cool new mobs, and long-awaited features like a Molten Heights questline.

The update changelog was posted December 3rd, and a HERO Beta arrived shortly after. The beta lasted for over a month, so the HEROs were able to get a good grasp of crafting and find all the cool ingredients for it. Despite that, we still had no clue what the secret feature was...

1.18 had plenty of cool and interactive new features.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

1.18's Release

After a month of beta testing, we finally got to see 1.18's secret feature: an ingame marketplace!

This confirmed several theories the community had about the feature being an auction house or something economy-related, and the marketplace would hopefully solve issues such as inflation and difficulties in buying the items you need. 1.18 itself was released a few days later too! This was Wynncraft's biggest update in a long time, and many players returned for a bit (or longer) to check out the new professions and quests. A few days after the update, there were 2000 players online at one point!

There was a massive amount of grinding added in 1.18 due to professions. Sure, you could craft cool weapons that might rival mythics, but you needed to spend a lot of time leveling up your professions to do so. There is a way to sort of alleviate this though, and that's by using profession XP and speed bombs. Those two bombs were added along with the secret feature, and if you use both of them you can level up your professions at a 4x rate. With enough motivation, you could get to level 100 in a profession very fast. Karen_Kujou, the first person to reach level 100 in any gathering skill, did so in around 48 hours! But to be fair, Prof Bomb parties were a lot more common at the update's launch.

Players started reaching level 100 in crafting skills a bit later, mainly because they needed to gather the ingredients first, and no one knew where the best ingredient grinding spots were yet. Many strong items were crafted in the first month, and the strategy of flipping (using ingredients with -100%+ effectiveness to negate or reverse material effects and durability) was a popular way to make crafted items. For weapons, players were able to use powders to craft gear with ridiculous amounts of damage. In the end, the IMs deemed both of those crafting strategies to be too overpowered. As of today, they have been nerfed.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

Feedback and Frustrations

1.18 was a massive update that changed, added, and removed a lot of things. The Wynncraft a lot of players were used to since Gavel had become altered, and not everyone was the biggest fan of 1.18's grindiness.

The biggest upset came from the fact that your XP gained after level 101 would only take you to level 102, and no further. If you spent hours upon hours running CSST, a majority of these hours would be all for nothing. Some people argued that there was never intended to be a reward after level 101, while others said that time and money was wasted. In the end jpresent decided to add a star next to the names of everyone who got Level 101 before 1.18, and that discussion pretty much ended.

Then, a few days later, former IM bloww posted a thread titled "Wynncraft isn't what it used to be". It mainly criticised the divide between the CT and community, and the fact that long awaited features (stuff teased in 2015, endgame features) still aren't out yet. Other things were discussed in the main post and comments too; such as the community and whether or not Wynn should be treated as an Indie or AAA game.³

Eventually, Salted himself finally replied to the thread. He explained all sorts of things, like why it takes so long for updates to come out though, and why the Gavel update wasn't as grand as everyone expected.² He also said that the team is trying to improve responding feedback, which is evidenced by the new #feedback channel on Wynn's discord.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

The Modern Trailer

Remember that ancient trailer shown at the start of this thread? It's horrendously outdated, so Salted went and made a new one.

It was well received among the community. But it didn’t lead to Wynn getting many new players, at least at first...

Then, youtube started showing the trailer to more viewers. That gave us some publicity, which led to more players joining the server, and a Russian youtuber named MrUnify doing a video on Wynn. Our player count jumped by quite a bit. But those two things weren't nearly as impactful as Grian showing it to his youtube audience.

If you don't know, Grian has a huge youtube channel, where he does non-Wynn related videos like building tips and the Hermitcraft Minecraft SMP. In one of those Hermitcraft videos, he showed the Wynncraft trailer to a massive audience, giving us ridiculous publicity.⁴

As of today, the trailer has over a million views!

So many players online!

By May, the player count returned to normal, but many of these new players are continuing to play, and new people are always still joining. Say hi to them!

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

Uncertain Times

Unfortunately, the spike in players came with a downside. To accommodate having more normal servers, war servers had to be shut down. Much to the community's frustration, they remained down. The marketplace was also temporarily shut down in Spring for undisclosed reasons, and as weeks passed both features weren't coming back. This became a dark time for the Wynncraft server. Not only had many of the new players left, but high-leveled players were leaving too due to some of the only endgame content being unavailable. The forum community wasn’t faring too well either: on February 10th, the Shoutbox, a special chatbox on the forums, was removed. It was a place where many memories were made for lots of people, so plenty of members of the forums community were upset about this.

Then one day, Crunkle, one of Wynn’s original developers, returned. He quickly brought back wars and added 1.14 compatibility. Given that Crunkle still has his red name to this day, I'm assuming he'll be around for a while longer. Unfortunately, we also learned that jpresent is... gone. To quote Salted "I wasn't hiding it, him quitting wasn't originally planned and is fairly recent" [Source].

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

Looking for a Challenge?

With Crunkle returning, the marketplace returned as well. They hosted a few hero betas to test it out, and on June 7th it finally returned in update 1.18.1. Hooray!

But that's not everything 1.18.1 added or brought back. The update added the /skiptutorial command, a way to please all the players who were sick of doing the 1.18 edition of King's Recruit quest countless times. Considering how newcomer-centered and time consuming it was compared to all other quests, King's Recruit quickly got repetitive.

The other new feature was the new Hardcore, Ironman, and Craftsman gamemodes. This was a relatively simple addition, but it proved to be a good feature for many players who wanted a greater challenge or something new to do. The point of these gamemodes was to make the game harder, and there was no better way to do this than to make a class with all three gamemodes active. This became known as the HIC Challenge (Hardcore/Ironman/Craftsman), where you have one life, can't trade, can only use crafted items, and you only have access to 29 inventory slots and 8 armor and accessory slots.

A player by the name of Yorgose was able to level up his HIC class to level 97. For a while he was leading the pack, until he died. Then a player named CowsHateMoos made it to level 103 a short while later, fulfilling one part of a challenge Salted set for HIC players. This challenge required you to reach level 103, complete all quests and dungeons, and finish LI while dealing with the insane conditions of HIC. After Cows hit level 103 the challenge sort of died out for a few months, but if you continue reading you'll find that it was recently revived...

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

The Elemental Revamp

In June, the IM team started teasing their biggest item update yet. As it turned out, "biggest" was an understatement.

On June 28th, the IM team announced a revamp of pretty much every piece of armor and many weapons too. Most armors would now fall under 10 tri-elemental build archetypes, hive items would be reworked, certain playstyles would be more or less viable, and items would give less skill points and mana regen.

5 mythics would also be added, but for the first time ever the community really didn't care about that. They were all talking about the possibility of change to items that had remained the same for a while. There were many differing opinions regarding these changes, and because of this the IM team aimed to release a changelog as soon as possible. After all, this was a pretty controversial update. Some people thought this would usher in a new era of buildmaking and fix current issues with the item system. Other people didn't want the build they spent money on to be ruined.

On July 8th the changelog was released, and the community was able to state their opinion in a google form. The feedback they gave probably doesn't matter anymore, because the Elemental Revamp ended up cancelled.⁵ Still, some parts of the update, such as new hive items and mythic boots were eventually added to the game, and elemental combinations are given clearer purposes.⁶

1.19 Hype

When the Elemental Revamp was cancelled, we also got our first piece of information about 1.19. The update would add "Major IDs" to certain items, which are basically passive abilities like a stronger arrow storm. People seem to like the teaser a lot though, since it's a cool addition and we finally learned at least one tidbit about the next update.

The next teaser, called "Noisy Silence" was a lot more cryptic. It shows Salted, or some other CT member, walking through an eerie landscape, where they discover a mob with an eerie armorstand model is chasing them. Many theories were posted about the video, and like usual, many of them were probably not right.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

Legends of the Modern Era

Professions had been out for many months by now, but it took over half a year for a player to reach level 130 in any of them. On August 22nd, a player named awesommme achieved level 130 in farming. There's no real use for this level other than bragging rights, but he didn’t even stop there. He continued leveling up his farming profession, and it was revealed that there was actually a secret level 131 and 132 for professions! He reached both those levels, and holds the top leaderboard spot as of May 2020.

While awesommme was farming crops, another player named YYGAMER was leveling up multiple professions in his HIC run. He was taking the challenge very slowly, and was determined to complete all of Salted's goals. As a player with level 100 professions in another class and countless LI runs under his belt, he had a lot of experience with the game. And finally, he beat LI as a level 103 HIC class. The community celebrated his victory, and Salted even gave him a special forum rank. The only other player to complete HIC so far is a player named linnyflower, meaning that beating this challenge is still a very rare thing to see someone accomplish.

Join HIC Gang!

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

The Road to the Road to Dern

Just like many of the previous updates, 1.19 got a trailer that showed all the numerous features the update had. And boy, that was one hell of a trailer. It not only showed the new endgame content, but it also gave us new fabled items and a very large rat. The endgame content seemed really cool, with creepy new armorstand mobs, a giant eye perched on a tree, a new dungeon, and a new region with a much more eerie name than “Road to Dern” . Oh yeah and a 5th class was announced.

That's right. After roughly 6.5 years, we would finally be getting a brand new class: the Shaman. This came completely out of the blue, as Salted had said earlier that adding a new class would be extremely difficult, and worth an update in it's own right.² New classes have been suggested since the dawn of Wynn, and there was even a very popular Shaman suggestion on the forums created by user xKindredKinesis.⁷ The excitement for this addition may have exceeded that of the silent expanse, but it's worth noting that the community still did not know much about this new class just by looking at the trailer.

For those who may have missed some of the info provided in the video, a special website section was created for the update: https://wynncraft.com/1.19. The info on that page was still pretty basic, so we had to wait for the changelog for more info. 1.19 marks the first time a special part of the website was dedicated to an upcoming update.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

The Silent Expanse

The changelog for 1.19 dropped not long after the trailer, and it revealed many surprises. All classes were getting reworked in one way or another, and their spells would also get updated effects, courtesy of a player named Novalescent.⁸ The update also would add eight new quests, and a special PVP mode unlocked after completing one of them.

The HERO-exclusive beta launched a few days later, but not with every feature. New mythics and droppable fabled items weren't in the game yet, and two of the highest-level quests couldn't be played yet. Still, there was plenty of new content to find, and players started doing a variety of activities (usually beginning with a run of A Journey Beyond). Class changes were tested, shaman playthroughs began, and feedback about the new quests and dungeons was posted.

Beta testing lasted for almost an entire month, making it one of the longest testing periods in Wynncraft's history. And the month was put to good use too. Countless bugs were fixed, and the power levels of classes were re-adjusted. I think pretty much every aspect of Shaman got buffed at one point. The beta was also opened to the public a couple of times, usually for testing lag or whatnot.

1.19 officially launched on December 8th, and with a special new feature too: player ghosts! These "ghosts" were basically players from other worlds that you could talk to. It was a pretty unexpected feature, and also one that was very interesting. Player worlds had a cap of 50 players for the past year, so ghosts helped make the world feel more alive.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

Modern Wynn

As expected, it didn't take long for players to reach the end of the silent expanse. After several ordeals (including the meme-fuel that is Aledar's cart), players found their way to the Eldritch Outlook, where they fought none other than The Eye. Yes, I'm talking about the eye that's been on the logo since 2013. It wasn't just some normal mob either - it was an intense battle with unique mechanics unlike any others in the game.

The Eldritch Outlook proved to be a challenge on par with the Legendary Island, so naturally people started doing all sorts of challenges there. Many players also tried out HIC + Hunted runs, and YYGAMER managed to complete one of those as well.⁹

If the Eldritch Outlook didn't interest you, there were many other things to do. 1.19 added mythic reliks and new mythic boots, and players quickly scrambled to find them. It didn't take them long to find both them and all of the new fableds. There was also a brand-new class to level up, new ingredients to find, new discoveries to discover... and players to fight.

Probably one of the most interesting additions of the update is the Hunted gamemode, which boosts combat and profession XP in return for enabling PVP. PVP has always been a minor part of the server, with duels not being too important, and nether declining in popularity to the point where it was removed. But with the Hunted gamemode, Wynncraft PVP has become a larger part of the endgame.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

The Growing Popularity of Professions

Upon their release, a common complaint about professions was that they were too grindy. There were a few changes made to the system after professions were released, such as allowing players to use six ingredients in a crafting recipe without needing to be level 90 first, but that wasn’t enough. 1.19 aimed to make professions more accessable, with profession miniquests and a 1.5x XP multiplier for gathering professions if hunted mode is enabled. Suddenly, grinding professions became a bit less painful.

While more casual players tended to stick away from this feature, or only grind one or two professions to level 100/110, some players took the more hardcore route, and got several of their professions to level 132. One player, named Pododang, even got level 132 on ALL TWELVE of his professions! Still, while having hunted mode enabled gives you an advantage, it comes at a price. Anyone farming profs was at risk of being hunted down by someone else in hunted mode, and it isn’t uncommon for players to wander the world looking for profession grinders to kill. Upon dying in hunted mode, you have a higher chance of losing items upon death, so both hunters and profession grinders would only use Mythics and Untradables. The mythic item Toxoplasmosis is especially powerful in hunted mode currently.

In addition to this, a new ID called Loot Quality made crafting items much more important. Loot Quality increased the chances of finding higher-tier items, the ID was only found on level 100+ materials. And Loot Quality was good. Really, really good. Mythics became a lot more common after 1.19 was released, and Loot Quality has been nerfed twice as of May 2020. To this day, crafting and selling an item with Loot Quality can fetch you plenty of money.

One day in April, alongside a standard item patch, new identifications were added to the game which boosted profession XP and Speed. Much like Loot Bonus, these IDs were only available on ingredients, and therefore Crafted Items as well.

An ingredient with Gathering XP Bonus. Posted by weirdo1093 on the Prof Tryhard Discord server.

Almost right after these IDs were added, they were removed from the game. The reason for this was because they were unintentionally patched into the game alongside item balance changes.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

Present Day

Wynncraft was in an interesting spot after 1.19. For years, we had awaited the arrival of RTD, but now that it's arrived, we have zero clue what will come next. At least there have been a few item balance patches since 1.19’s release, and major network changes such as the addition of proxies.¹⁰ There was also an update to the tutorial, which added an explanation as to how identifying and loot chests work. The playerbase has also been able to stay entertained through new endgame content, and community events such as Wynncon 2020.

And so, with these musings of the future, the story of Wynncraft comes to a pause. Who knows what the rest of 2020 will hold?

¹ - https://forums.wynncraft.com/threads/tasty-berries.227673/
² - https://forums.wynncraft.com/threads/wynncraft-isnt-what-it-used-to-be.243357/
³ - https://forums.wynncraft.com/threads/wynncraft-isnt-what-it-used-to-be.243357/page-7#post-3000678
⁴ - https://forums.wynncraft.com/threads/the-history-of-the-wynncraft-server.240983/page-3#post-3030184
⁵ - https://forums.wynncraft.com/threads/elemental-revamp-update-1-19-teaser.254141/
⁶ - https://forums.wynncraft.com/threads/what-has-the-item-team-been-up-to.264926/
⁷ - https://forums.wynncraft.com/threads/✧-class-idea-✧-the-shaman-now-in-the-game-but-only-by-name.120801/
⁸ - https://forums.wynncraft.com/thread...deo-demonstrations.254610/page-4#post-3115511
⁹ - https://forums.wynncraft.com/threads/hich-challenge-completed-hich-legendary-island-eo.261588/
¹⁰ - https://forums.wynncraft.com/threads/what-we-changed-today.267823/

❋ A Video About Wynncraft's History
Don't feel like reading all of this? Then check out @Kmaxi 's video about the history of Wynncraft! It may not cover every topic listed here, but a ton of work went into it and it still provides plenty of information.

WithTheFish · Jun 1, 2020

❋ Fun Facts About Wynncraft’s History

Prior to 1.12, when the entire map was revamped, the Jungle region didn’t even use minecraft’s jungle biome, but rather minecraft’s mountains biome.

Before the ocean update, one of the original islands was a stone castle devoid of content. When the ocean update dropped, the castle was removed from its original location, and put in the background of Bob’s Reincarnation’s arena.

The forum section “Nemract’s Bar” used to be called “Non-minecraft”. Prior to this change, next to no Wynncraft-related content was posted there.

After the forum incident of 9/7 occurred, Salted manually gave himself custom Post, Like, and Trophy Point counts. This means that Salted has more trophy points than is legitimately obtainable.

Until recently, mythics weren’t explicitly mentioned by name on the Wynncraft website.

The Gavel Update was the update that finally brought human mobs to Wynncraft. Beforehand, towns were only populated by villagers, and our characters (and Bob I guess) were the only humans.

Star Thief is the only quest in Gavel that has been reworked.

❋ Standout Forum Threads

The Swarm Tracker (by AbyssalMelody13) - Everyone wanted to join swarm servers, but how would you even find them? In this thread, players would reply with the numbers of servers that were about to have imminent swarms. It ended up being by far one of the most popular threads in the forum’s history, even though swarms were only a thing for about a year.

Level 300 and 225 Leaderboard (By AbyssalMelody13) - Getting all your classes to level 75 (aka getting level 300/225) was incredible accomplishment before update 1.12. Anything who accomplish this goal would earn a spot on this thread.

Pre-Gavel Skill Building Guide (original thread by filifolia) - Even before Gavel, players would still need a decent skill build to compete in the endgame. Filifolia compiled all of the most popular builds here. The thread was reposted after 9/7 by GlitchedSlayer.

What’s The Stupidest Thing You’ve Heard in Wynncraft? (by Eduard0) - One of the most popular old threads on the forums, and it garnered lots of posts of people saying absurd things in Wynncraft. Reposted after 9/7.

Items! (by Dakota) - Back in 2014, there were a lot of suggestions for new item names. Dakota made a megathread for people to post them. Not sure how many of them made it into the game.

The Slayer Club (by fibunny, scroll down a bit to find it) - The pre-gavel website actually had achievements, which included the hard-to-obtain Slayer IV and V, which required one to kill 100K or 1 million mobs respectively. Anyone who got those achievements would be listed on the thread.

The Mythical Gear Thread (by RemRin) - Originally used as a thread to compile all newly discovered mythics, it eventually expanded into a place to share the best mythics in the game.

Build Server Best Moments (by Lotem) - Wynncraft’s build server has had… some interesting scenarios, and CT members would always post them here. Sadly, it was locked, but there’s another CT best moments thread that was currently running.

Mini-Events (by Pretzule) - In addition to larger events like secret santas and hide-n-seeks, Preztule hosted a bunch of smaller events, which would be announced here.

Wynn News (by pillowpet) - A series of threads talking about recent events in Wynncraft, similar to a news channel. This series went on for a very long-time, and provides a good look at the Gavel-era community.

Item Locks (by thatswhatido) - Everyone hates losing items, so thatswhatido suggested a solution. It gained a ton of support, and item locks were implemented in many unofficial Wynncraft modpacks. As of 1.18, Item Locks are an official feature!

Better Quest Books (by Lotem) - Another suggestion that rose in popularity much like Item Locks. It was also added to the game, but a year earlier than Item Locks.

Void Rift (by Exhivius) - This isn’t exactly related to Wynncraft, but I’m putting here because it is incredibly impressive. Void Rift is an ongoing forum RP with over ONE MILLION VIEWS and 77 THOUSAND POSTS. This just goes to show how unlikely sub-communities can spring up in Wynncraft.

Skill Point Perks (by Nepeta Leijon) - As shown by its 1500+ supporters, this is an extremely popular suggestion for a relatively simple feature. Unlike the other suggestions here, it hasn’t been added to the game, but the thread is still open so feel free to support Nepeta’s idea!

List of Places to Gather Materials (by Kokaga) - Created during the 1.18 beta, this has been the go-to guide for players looking for the best spots to grind professions.

Wynncraft Meme Thread (by Druser) - Wynncraft meme threads have come and gone, and this is the most modern one.

How Damage is Calculated (by motoki1) - It was never publicly revealed how damage was calculated in Wynncraft, so Motoki decided to find the answer himself. Their findings were incredibly beneficial to the endgame and class building communities, and out of all threads listed here, I personally think this is the most important one.

Wynndata (by dukioooo) - Less of a thread and more of an external website, but let's face it: if you’re active in the endgame Wynncraft community, you’ve probably heard of Wynndata. I can’t not include it here.

❋ What Was the Pre-Gavel Item System Like?

The item system was radically different before Gavel changed everything. The most obvious difference was that when you found a higher-level item, it was almost guaranteed to be better than any item before it. It would always have higher damages or defences (armor provided health instead of defence back then), and it would probably have better or at least similar IDs as well. The only instance where you wouldn’t use the highest-leveled thing available was if you needed XP bonus.

Elemental damage and defense did not exist. Powder slots did not exist, and there were only three types of powders, with two tiers each. Green powder would give weapons sharpness and armor thorns. Blue powder would give weapons knockback and armor feather falling. Red powder would give weapons Fire Aspect and armor blast (knockback?) resistance.

There were only seven identifications back in the day, and negative IDs weren’t a thing. These IDs were as follows:

XP Bonus

Loot Bonus

Spell Damage % (Melee damage didn’t exist, because no one used melee damage to fight enemies in the endgame back then)

Health Regen

Life Steal

Mana Regen (Max mana regen was 1/4??? Not sure)

Mana Steal

Mana Steal and Life Steal were beyond busted, since before Gavel, spell damage would activate them. This gave Assassin and Archer a massive advantage on the battlefield. Mage’s heal and potions were useless in comparison.

An interesting aspect of the old system was that you had to identify an item more than once to get all of its IDs. Since IDs could vary, unidentified “clean” items were often sold.

A clean Adamantite. Before Gavel, this was the best chestplate in the game.

❋ A History of Dungeons

Dungeons have always been an important part of Wynncraft. When the server first released, completing them was the only form of content available apart from grinding mobs or exploring. Given their importance to the server, dungeons have changed to fit each era of the game’s history.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

The Original Dungeons

The first five dungeons were all named and based after one or more of minecraft’s mobs:

Skeleton Dungeon - precursor to the Decrepit Sewers

Spider Dungeon - precursor to the Infested Pit

Animal Dungeon - precursor to the Lost Sanctuary

Zombie Dungeon - precursor to the Underworld Crypt

Silverfish Dungeon - precursor to the Sand-Swept Tomb

Much like today’s dungeons, you would fight mobs, do parkour, and fight a boss at the end. These dungeons sometimes often have puzzles too, with the Animal Dungeon being notable for requiring multiple players to solve Bob’s Tomb-esque challenges. There were also no sections where the player was forced to kill mobs and collect tokens. In fact, no hoppers or command blocks were used at all: just basic redstone for things like the doors to the boss arena.

A guide to all pre-1.12 dungeons, made by DarkDino006!

Upon completing these dungeons, you would earn some XP, and gear and emeralds would rain down from the ceiling much like today. While I can’t speak for everyone, I found these dungeons to be very challenging at their intended level, and conquering them was very rewarding.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

1.12-Era Dungeons

1.12 changed practically the entire map, and dungeons were no exception. They were all moved off the map and given incredibly grand builds. Some of these builds, like the tree in the Lost Sanctuary/Animal Dungeon, are still around today. Command blocks and teleporters were now actually utilized. Puzzles were still around, but dungeons no longer required more than one player to solve them.

But the biggest change didn’t happen to the dungeons themselves, but rather how one entered them. For 1.12 was the update that added keys to the game - previously you could just waltz into dungeons whenever you wanted. Keys didn’t drop from guardians; you had to either buy them from a merchant, or get them as a reward from completing the dungeon preceding it. For example, completing the Skeleton Dungeon gave you a key to the Spider Dungeon.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

Minidungeons

The Wynnter Update added a new feature: Minidungeons. Three were added in total, but eventually they became a full-scale dungeon.

Ice Minidungeon --> Ice Barrows

Ocean Minidungeon --> Galleon’s Graveyard

Jungle Minidungeon --> Undergrowth Ruins

These dungeons didn’t require a key for entry, and were designed as a way to help players level up in the endgame. Unfortunately, if my memory serves me correctly, the minidungeons actually gave next to no XP.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

1.14-Era Dungeons

1.14.1 was the updately that finally changed dungeons to how they are today. Most of the old puzzles were removed, and replaced with interesting command-block based challenges like falling floors and boat rides. Token-grinding sections were added, meaning that players could no longer just run through dungeons. Keys were longer purchased from merchants, but rather gotten from key guardians. Yet all of these changes paled in comparison to something more important: actually lore for dungeons and their bosses.

Previously, dungeon bosses were usually generic “strong monsters”, or maybe even something goofy; the boss of the Silverfish dungeon was called the Sand-Witch. 1.14.1 either changed the bosses entirely, or gave them a bigger place in the lore. For example, the boss of the animal dungeon was a creature called the Lava Cow, but it got replaced by Garoth, a being who seemed to have ties to the corruption and who taunted you as you traveled through his domain.

The second most important change was proper dungeon rewards. Exclusive items now gave players an incentive to do dungeons for reasons other than XP. The only issue with dungeon-exclusive items was their price: I’m pretty sure getting even one item required a lot more runs than it would today. Fragments were also not very useful at the time, since tools didn’t exist yet.

Oh yeah, and corrupted dungeons also became a thing this update, I guess they’re kinda important.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

Modern Dungeons

This isn’t really a change, but I find it interesting how Wynncraft has continued to add more dungeons as more updates have gone by. The two most-recent dungeons: Fallen Factory and the Eldritch Outlook, are not only pretty different from the other dungeons in the game, but they also act as the “conclusion” or a “final zone” of the regions that they’re in.

1.17 added dungeon quests, which is a bit of a double-edged sword when you think about it. While these quests do provide dungeon bosses or the dungeon itself with more lore, it now meant that players had to complete a quest first if they wanted to do a dungeon on a class.

❋ How Mobs Changed Over Time

Mobs are the backbone of Wynncraft. Without them, there would be no bosses to fight, and no passive mobs to make the world feel more immersive. The mob system has come a long way since Wynncraft launched, so let’s dive into the history of one of Wynncraft’s most important features.

Initial Release:
Mobs in Wynncraft were very simple at first. They tended to be based off of their vanilla minecraft counterparts, so zombies would shamble towards you, blazes would barrage you with fireballs, etc. It seemed like some parameters could be customized though, such as speed, health, damage, and knockback. Whether or not a mob was hostile could also be customized; this allowed for harmless creepers in Creeper Infiltration, and hostile villagers in the Corrupted Village. There was also an “issue” where skeletons who dealt melee damage would do so at an obscene attack speed. Mobs like the Corrupter of Worlds who used the skeleton model were able to shred the player in seconds.

The Mob Update:
If you can’t tell by its name, the mob update changed how mobs work entirely. Instead of confined by their vanilla minecraft counterpart. You could now have a zombie mage who throws fireballs, for example. Mobs could also use any entity in Minecraft, such as end crystals or paintings. Passive mobs now had green nametags to set them apart from their deadly counterparts.

This was also the update that added mob spells. At the time, they felt less like spells and more like a special attack, since each mob would only have one spell to cast. Most enemies that could cast spells were dungeon or quest bosses. This may be the reason why some spells seem like they relate to specific bosses, such as the spider web spell for Arakadicus or Arrow Storm for Witherhead.

The Gavel Update:
The Gavel update changed mobs again. How mobs worked was completely re-written, and they were made to be less resource-intensive.¹ Mobs could now be neutral (yellow name) or defend the player (blue name). There were new basic mob attacks added, such as rapid-fire blasts or the shotgun attack used by the Psychomancer. Variations in basic mob AI were added too, so mobs could now “strafe” around players or run towards other mobs.

The Gameplay Update:
The gameplay update didn’t change mobs as much as the previous two updates, but it did lead to boss fights that were much more interesting. The push and pull spells were added, and mobs could now cast multiple different spells. Mobs also had different phases too, with newcomers getting an instant look at this cool new feature thanks to the Decrepit Sewers Guardians. With all of these new systems in place, there could be much greater variations in boss fights, and this was what likely led to Boss Altars.

The Silent Expanse Update:
This update didn’t really change much, aside from adding a new wave spell. But we did finally get a very unique boss: The Eye. The eye had proper stages that changed the entire battlefield, custom attacks, and more. The Eye is easily the most unique boss in the game, and it opens the door to equally cool fights in the future.

Sources:
¹ - https://forums.wynncraft.com/threads/the-gavel-expansion-changelog.97175/

❋ The Evolution of Quests

I’ve talked about dungeons and mobs, but now it is time to talk about something equally important. With every update, quests have evolved more and more, both in the systems used to make them, but also the philosophies of what a quest should be. Let’s start at the beginning.

The Quest Update:
The update that added quests (obviously). Originally, quests would require you to do all or any of the following: Get X of Y item, talk to person, or go to place. Today, these are referred to as fetch quests. But Wynncraft had an idea. Something that would make Wynncraft stand out from some generic adventure map: Quest Helmets. Yes, quest helmets were around before skill reset scrolls, teleporters, mob spells, and guilds. The quest update also had the concept of restricting areas off, such as Almuj’s bank, until one completed a quest.

The Ocean Update:
The ocean update was when Wynncraft started using offmap areas for their quests, with the biggest example of this being Bob’s Reincarnation’s Arena. This has been a very useful tool for making quests, but it wasn’t really used much at first.

The Wynn-Excavation Questline:
The Wynn-Excavation questline was maybe the most significant group of quests created before Gavel. It was the first true questline in the game, since unlike ToL or Reincarnation, each WynnExcavation quest led into the one that came after it. It also had a recurring character in the form of Amadel, even if he did only show up in the last two quests. Most importantly, the WynnExavation quests (along with Thieving Rodents) are notable for being the first ones to have NPC that you DON’T need to talk too in order to proceed with the quest. Sadly, these background NPCs were only confined to quests at first, but in the gameplay update they finally popped up all around the world.

The Gavel Update:
Gavel brought a whopping 50 quests with it when it arrived, but sadly none of them were higher than level 90. We did finally get cutscenes though, so that was pretty neat! Any quests with cutscenes became very popular among the community. Not only that, but the Gavel update was the first to have quest NPCs that weren’t villagers. Now, you could finally talk to humans or trees in order to learn what item you had to fetch next! And yes, while the cutscene quests were very cool, a lot of Gavel quests sadly fell into the category of “find that orc, and bring me his head” fetch quests.

The Hallowynn and Corkus Updates:
Cutscenes were pretty neat, but the GMs decided to go a step further with the next few updates. Some stuff changed in the code, and quests became a lot more “interactive”. The best example of what I’m talking about is that tree you see in the tutorial. The Corkus Update also added quest NPCs that could walk around and punch stuff, adding to immersion. All of these cool new features did come at a price: things could not break more easily, especially if the player crashed in the middle of a cutscene.

Quest Revamps and Removals:
The gameplay update started a new trend in Wynncraft updates: re-doing outdated quests. For example, the quest Potion Maker required the player to bring an NPC some items, and that was it. After the gameplay update, new stages were added where the player watches a cutscene and fights a boss. Some quests, like 1.10’s Prison Story, were even removed. Removing quests is not without controversy however. The Dungeons and Discoveries update removed the quest “Lord of the Clock”. While the quest hadn’t received praise on the same level of 1000 Meters Under, there were some people who were sad to see it go. Personally, I didn’t find that quest to be that outdated, but I understand that Mount Wynn needed to be used for something else.

❋ The Games That Inspired Wynncraft

Back in 2015, Salted listed a bunch of games that inspired Wynncraft. They are as follows: Diablo, Dofus, Runescape, and Binding of Isaac and Super Smash Bros for some small stuff. Salted himself actually replied to this thread, and explained how each game inspired him.

Salted said: ↑

I design systems and gameplay more than stories, and so when I mentioned these games I was talking more about that than anything else.

Diablo inspired the basic gameplay loop of Wynncraft and the "fight 1000 mobs at once" gameplay.

Dofus inspired the element system and guild territory wars, a little bit of the spell system too. Also by pure coincidence one of their game designer had a french game design blog where he often talked about game economies and that was quite useful for 1.18

Runescape (oldschool) inspired the quest system and professions

Binding of Isaac inspired the "laissez-faire" way of thinking for the item system, especially build making. Mostly in the sense that players can make some very busted stuff that generally, as a designer, you want to avoid because it makes balancing way harder. The first thing that always come to my mind when I think about this is the speed build archetype where we let players reach insane speeds

Smash inspired the combat gameplay and spell system. Wynn spells are very similar to abilities in fighting games when you think about it. Very spammable, cheap, few of them and high value. If you played a lot of MMORPG (in the 2000's at least) you soon realise they make a ton of filler abilities that goes something like: "gain 20% damage bonus for 10s, 300s cooldown" which I always hated. Like with the item system, it's a decision that makes balancing much harder but hey being able to fly practically forever is pretty fun at least
Click to expand...

❋ The History of Wynncraft’s Community

You may have noticed that in my Basic History of Wynncraft, I didn’t talk about the community much. That’s because I decided to dedicate a section to this part of the server here, because I truly think this is the most important part of Wynncraft at the end of the day. Keep in mind that compared to the rest of the thread, this section is based on my own experiences significantly more than any other parts.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

The Shitpost Era

Apologies for the language, but shitposts have always been a part of Wynncraft history. The only difference is that today’s shitposts actually seem to have effort put into them. Back in 2014, things were a bit more lawless. Anything which would be heralded as a profile post today would fly perfectly fine as a thread back then.

Naturally, not everyone agreed with posting everything. Active members such as ectoplasmaticgoo, fibunny, and JJTH believed in the “quality of quantity” mentality. Their influence and quality of their threads proved to the community that maybe spam-posting to hit Almuj poster wasn’t worth it.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

Wynn Theory and the Wynnluminati

Game Theory was pretty popular and possibly respected back in 2014, because keep in mind FNAF and Undertale weren’t things yet. One member, steelxawesome, decided to make a “Wynn Theory” about something, I don’t remember exactly what. But his post caught on with the community, and tons of other theory threads popped up. Topics ranged from the mystery behind potatoes to the value of a liquid emerald in real life. Wynn theories eventually died out, since there are only so many theories you can make before you can fall into modern Game Theory territory. Interestingly enough, a Wynn Theory guild was actually made when guilds were released, and it still exists to this day.

Wynn Theories died out around the same time the King of Ragni joined the forums in 2014. His cryptic messages led to yet another trend: the Wynnluminati, which capitalized on the trend of “Illuminati Confirmed!” memes. Plenty of threads were also made which roleplayed alongside the King’s message.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

Featured Wynncraftian

On July 7th, 2014, the Wynncraft moderation team decided to create a new series of threads: Featured Wynncraftian. Featured Wynncraft was an interview with a member of the community who had done something extraordinary to set themself apart from the rest. A list of all FWs can be found here on the Wynncraft wiki.

There have been five "seasons" of Featured Wynncraftians. The first took place throughout 2014, with 14 FWs total. The second season only consisted of Energyxxer's FW interview shortly after Gavel's release, and no one else. Seasons 3-5 took place in 2016, 2017, and 2018, respectively. In seasons 1-3, different moderators would be the interviewers each week, but only Pretzule was the FW host for season 4, and Pepinho/Pepo for season 5.

FW is not without controversy, and I'd say every FW had led to some dissent over whether or not they're qualified to have a thread and a temporary forum rank dedicated to them. In an attempt to alleviate these debates, a forum section was created for the community to nominate people for Featured Wynncraftian, but the threads there have lead to debates of their own.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

Forum Games

Forum Games is one of the more interesting forum sections. It’s fairly disconnected from the rest of the server, to the point where some people probably spend more time on the section than on Wynncraft.

This section didn’t always exist, and instead there was a forum games prefix in the Non-Minecraft section. On July 11th, 2014, Tama created the section, and moved all forum games to this section… where post counts didn’t matter. Active participants in forum games lost significant portions of their forum post counts, so Tama reset everyone’s forum trophies.

Today, the forum games section is a strange place, with excessive amounts of counting threads and too many roleplay threads to manage. Post quality isn’t cared about too much here. Interestingly, some forum games, such as the “Last Person to Reply Wins!” and “Void Rift” threads have been active for years.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

Guilds

Guilds were quite possibly the most requested feature in Wynn’s history, apart from maybe the ability to delete one’s classes. Guilds were finally added in the first Wynnter Update (1.13), and they came with an unexpected feature: guild territories. This probably came as a surprise to a lot of people, who may have expected guilds to be a permanent party. Territories created two things: endgame content and a competitive way for players to interact.

But with competitiveness, dissidence and rivalries came as well. Guilds may lead to new friends, but there is no doubt that wars have also led to ruined friendships. To some, Wynncraft has become more than a game for people thanks to guilds, and that may not be healthy.¹

It didn’t take long for entire guild alliances to pop up. Thanks to their manpower and levels, alliances have held vast portions of the map for long periods of time. Of course, alliances don’t last forever. Legio Praetoria, Ordo Malleus, Vesta, Federation (Fed), Valkyrie, Luna, and Artemis have all risen, fallen, or may even still be around to this day.

Guilds are possibly the server’s true endgame content. Friendships and the thrill of comp have kept plenty of people on this server, and I have no doubts that guilds and alliances will continue to shape parts of the community.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

nicefind.avi

IgbarVonSquid was a Wynncraft youtuber who was extremely famous and a former moderator, and one of his most well-known videos was nicefind.avi.

No, this was not the original video, but rather a John Cena meme. The original true nicefind.avi, which I cannot locate, was supposed to be a way of telling people who “discovered” well-known easter-eggs that the community doesn’t really care too much about their findings.²

You see, back in 2015, Wynncraft had many more eastereggs than it does now. It was common for people to post these easter-eggs on the forums under the assumption that no one found them yet. Nicefind.avi became a common response to them.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

Class Building

Wynncraft has had plenty of sub-communities: forum gamers, the Homestuck Ikimaru Cult, the guild community, and the class builds community, which is one of the more recent ones. Prior to Gavel, there was no need for anything more than proper skill-point allocation, but Gavel’s revamp of the item system meant that people would have to be creative in their item choices. However… that wasn’t the case at first, since raw spell damage and +tier attack speed affecting spells was so dominant at the time. Then rainbow builds became all the hype. Everything I’ve listed has been nerfed since then, but even during those times of below-expected creativity, class building started to rise.

I’d say class building really sprung up on August 3rd, 2016, where Salted created the class builds section on the forums. People started posting their builds or asking for builds much more frequently than in the past. And on September 23rd, 2017, #class_builds was added as a section on the discord. The discord section has a very active community of players making builds and helping others with builds, and it has become a very interesting subculture with its own bizarre memes.³

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

Private Community Discords

Prior to discord, private Wynncraft discord communities had always existed on skype. But somehow, discord caused these private communities to be a lot more accessible. In the recent year or so, community discords have popped up spanning nearly every niche: from servers dedicated to modpacks to specific giveaway. Some community discords, like one dedicated to tracking bombs, have reached over 4000 members! And don’t forget guild discords too, as they were by far the most common.

These discords would be advertised on threads dedicated to them, but they more commonly were advertised in shouts. That is, until the rules were updated to make advertising discord links no longer allowed.⁴

~ - ~ - ~ - ~

New Players

While most of this section has sort of followed a timeline, I’d say that this subsection sort of encompasses Wynncraft as a whole. It’s dedicated to new players. Newbies always arrive, especially when Wynncraft gains significant advertising. And I feel like people always take new players being unimportant for granted, because the next thing you know, they might be a famous merchant or the gamemaster who made that cool new quest.

Long ago, Wynncraft’s playerbase consisted mainly of CM players. Today, CM is a long-gone memory. In just seven years, the playerbase of Wynncraft has drastically changed. Hell, look at the content team: how many of the people in that render I showed earlier are still around?

Every month, it feels like more cool people leave, and maybe you’ve left too, and you’re just stopping by for old time’s sake. But what no one talks about is that it's up to you to fill the gap. Maybe that newcomer will become a close friend? Maybe they’ll make the next big community project? Maybe they’re suggestion will be the next one to make it into the game?

And honestly, that possibility is what I love about this server.

Where it all began.

Sources:
¹ - https://forums.wynncraft.com/threads/this-is-just-a-game-my-opinion.222155/
² - https://forums.wynncraft.com/threads/igbars-new-single.94569/#post-1041751
³ - https://forums.wynncraft.com/threads/class_builds-best-moments.263504/
⁴ - https://forums.wynncraft.com/threads/advertising-rules-update.263848/

❋ Credits & Sources

A huge thanks to @JuicedBananas , @Glitch496 , and @PikaLegend , who all let me use their screenshots in this thread.

All other images are from me or were taken from Wynncraft's twitter. Some of the images in this thread may have been cropped, but they haven't been edited in any other way.

Small text created with https://lingojam.com/TinyTextGenerator

Special thanks to Bast for helping with posting this thread.

An assorted list of threads and other stuff used to double-check information here.
https://forums.wynncraft.com/threads/admintest1.89201/
https://forums.wynncraft.com/threads/gavel-teaser-13.90551/
https://www.reddit.com/r/WynnCraft/...lted_one_of_wynncraft_owners_ask_me_anything/
https://forums.wynncraft.com/threads/wynn-news-hub.115152/
https://forums.wynncraft.com/threads/quest.99726/
https://forums.wynncraft.com/threads/race-to-level-100.98473/
https://forums.wynncraft.com/threads/♛-endgame-builds-♛.109608/
https://forums.wynncraft.com/threads/late-end-game-builds-discontinued.106305/
https://forums.wynncraft.com/threads/so-uh-this-happened-do-i-get-a-cookie.119856/
https://forums.wynncraft.com/threads/what-happened-over-the-weekend.189098/
https://web.archive.org/web/2014061...-some-old-screenies-d.6406/page-2#post-111062

Other major sources include Wynncraft's twitter and wiki.

I hope you enjoyed this thread, and a huge thank you to the Wynncraft team for making this server!

I have watched Aldorei since the day it was built. I have seen it grow, like a flower...

Skylaar · May 31, 2020

I accidentally misclicked on the poll and hit 2020 instead of the submit button

Cloud__ · May 31, 2020

Nvm now wynncraft have a GUINNES WORLD RECORD :D

Salted · May 31, 2020

WithTheFish said: ↑

Diablo - Diablo is a series of games where you pick a class and hack and slash your way through dungeons. You’re frequently getting better gear in these games as well. The setting of the series appears to revolve around the High Heaven, Burning Wells, and the sanctuary. Similar to Wynncraft’s realms of light and dark, the former two areas I listed have been at war with one another. Granted, everything I’ve listed so far isn’t exactly unique in video games. But Salted seems to be a fan of the series. I mean, one of the first few legendary wands was called Diablo!

Dofus - A MMORPG that was originally French. Standout features that may relate to Wynncraft are professions and an ingame marketplace.

Runescape - It’s a free-to-play fantasy MMORPG. You travel through a realm, leveling up and completing quests as you go. There are skills to level up, similar to Wynn’s professions. Players will lose some items upon death, but they can be recovered in a certain timeframe. There are plenty of ways to communicate and fight with players. Just by looking at the wikipedia page, it seems like this was probably the biggest inspiration for Wynncraft.

The Binding of Isaac (at least, I’m pretty sure this is what BoI stands for) - Salted himself explained this one: “Just a small thing, inspired me to make a system that can allow some pretty insane stuff.” Some items and item lores are also references to this series apparently.

Super Smash Bros - Still not sure about this one. I mean, they both have a world of light? Ehhh

Click to expand...

I design systems and gameplay more than stories, and so when I mentioned these games I was talking more about that than anything else.

Diablo inspired the basic gameplay loop of Wynncraft and the "fight 1000 mobs at once" gameplay.

Dofus inspired the element system and guild territory wars, a little bit of the spell system too. Also by pure coincidence one of their game designer had a french game design blog where he often talked about game economies and that was quite useful for 1.18

Runescape (oldschool) inspired the quest system and professions

Binding of Isaac inspired the "laissez-faire" way of thinking for the item system, especially build making. Mostly in the sense that players can make some very busted stuff that generally, as a designer, you want to avoid because it makes balancing way harder. The first thing that always come to my mind when I think about this is the speed build archetype where we let players reach insane speeds

Smash inspired the combat gameplay and spell system. Wynn spells are very similar to abilities in fighting games when you think about it. Very spammable, cheap, few of them and high value. If you played a lot of MMORPG (in the 2000's at least) you soon realise they make a ton of filler abilities that goes something like: "gain 20% damage bonus for 10s, 300s cooldown" which I always hated. Like with the item system, it's a decision that makes balancing much harder but hey being able to fly practically forever is pretty fun at least

Windfall_ · May 31, 2020

Wowo this is big pog. We be making history boys

WithTheFish · May 31, 2020

Salted said: ↑

I design systems and gameplay more than stories, and so when I mentioned these games I was talking more about that than anything else.

Diablo inspired the basic gameplay loop of Wynncraft and the "fight 1000 mobs at once" gameplay.

Dofus inspired the element system and guild territory wars, a little bit of the spell system too. Also by pure coincidence one of their game designer had a french game design blog where he often talked about game economies and that was quite useful for 1.18

Runescape (oldschool) inspired the quest system and professions

Binding of Isaac inspired the "laissez-faire" way of thinking for the item system, especially build making. Mostly in the sense that players can make some very busted stuff that generally, as a designer, you want to avoid because it makes balancing way harder. The first thing that always come to my mind when I think about this is the speed build archetype where we let players reach insane speeds

Smash inspired the combat gameplay and spell system. Wynn spells are very similar to abilities in fighting games when you think about it. Very spammable, cheap, few of them and high value. If you played a lot of MMORPG (in the 2000's at least) you soon realise they make a ton of filler abilities that goes something like: "gain 20% damage bonus for 10s, 300s cooldown" which I always hated. Like with the item system, it's a decision that makes balancing much harder but hey being able to fly practically forever is pretty fun at least
Click to expand...

Thanks for sharing this info Salted, I'll add this to the post!

Novalescent · May 31, 2020

Gotta get my FIRST PAGE SPOT
--------------------------------------
It's honestly inspiring of how far Wynncraft has come. I can't say the game is in perfect balance and is fun all the time, but from where it had originally started, it has come a very long way. The server in its entirety is the prime example of an RPG world in Minecraft AND a pinnacle for advanced plugin magic.

I hope that it keeps going uphill from here!

Also I'ma keep trying to get on this page more formally because I want to be a legend too D:

SmileyAlec · May 31, 2020

It took me 2 hours to read through everything but thank you for making me realise that, no matter what I might say about wynn, I will still always enjoy hanging around this server

qraq · May 31, 2020

WithTheFish said: ↑

In early April, Grain finally opened up build team applications to the public
Click to expand...

GRAIN

Druser · May 31, 2020

2014 gang!

Mistrise Mystic · May 31, 2020

Druser said: ↑

2014 gang!
Click to expand...

ayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy

Linnyflower · May 31, 2020

Druser said: ↑

2014 gang!
Click to expand...

only two votes for 2015 ;(

this is really cool though, great read tyvm

Mistrise Mystic · May 31, 2020

WithTheFish said: ↑

. That all changed when a famous youtuber decided to do a video on Wynncraft. I don’t remember their name, but their video cascaded and more youtubers started making Wynncraft videos. Soon enough, Wynn had thousands of players online at once. The number of available servers went all the way up to 36 to accommodate the new players.
Click to expand...

It was Inthelittlewood, also known as Martyn from yogscast. This is their first video on it:

qraq · May 31, 2020

WithTheFish said: ↑

It all started when Grian posted a teaser showing a rebuilt Troms entrance.⁵ In that thread he said that 1.17 would be coming in at least two months, and a lot of the community ignored the "at least" part. This led to plenty of disappointment when October came and there was still nothing.
Click to expand...

Am I stupid, or if this thread was posted 2 months before October, doesn't that mean it should have come in or before 2 months?

________________________________

Soul of Storms said: ↑

It was Inthelittlewood, also known as Martyn from yogscast. This is their first video on it:

Click to expand...

he also has a dedicated area for popularizing it! the little wood near time valley! @WithTheFish you should include that

________________________________

WithTheFish said: ↑

The only other player to complete HIC so far is a player named linnyflower, meaning that beating this challenge is still a very rare thing to see someone accomplish.
Click to expand...

@Linnyflower wtf I didn't realize you were famous

Linnyflower · May 31, 2020

qraq said: ↑

@Linnyflower wtf I didn't realize you were famous
Click to expand...

wtf im famous

NITEHAWKX · May 31, 2020

man, clicking 2013 on that poll made me feel really old lmao

I definitely haven't had time to read every bit (dw I will), but I'm going to assume this is just an updated and revamped version of the previous history of Wynn post you had, so thank you for updating it! it looks really nice :D

thepicferret · May 31, 2020

I could have joined wynn at 2015 and for some reason I only did at around 2017
I missed so much because of that

btdmaster · Jun 1, 2020

If I remember correctly, didn't servers used to have 60 players or something before the economy update? Might be wrong idk
Also maybe something about featured wynncraftian could be included somewhere?

Log in or Sign up

Guide The Wynnic Archives - A Comprehensive History Of Wynncraft

When did you join Wynncraft?

2013

2014

2015

2016

2017

2018

2019

2020

WithTheFish Internet Macrocelebrity CHAMPION

WithTheFish Internet Macrocelebrity CHAMPION

WithTheFish Internet Macrocelebrity CHAMPION

Skylaar erm VIP+

Cloud__ wynncraft is cool duh VIP+

Salted Game Design & Wynncraft Founder Staff Member Admin GM CHAMPION

Windfall_ Proud Owner of the Worst Sage HERO

WithTheFish Internet Macrocelebrity CHAMPION

Novalescent Retired Wynncraft Systematic Recreation Developer HERO

SmileyAlec Olympic Gaming CHAMPION

qraq Well-Known Adventurer

Druser ele defs don't matter HERO Featured Wynncraftian

Mistrise Mystic Surfing winds and chasing windfalls HERO

Linnyflower ironman btw Item Team HICH Master CHAMPION

Mistrise Mystic Surfing winds and chasing windfalls HERO

qraq Well-Known Adventurer

Linnyflower ironman btw Item Team HICH Master CHAMPION

NITEHAWKX Wanderer of Nemract & The Lands Beyond HERO

thepicferret Chief of Avicia, Send help wynncraft addicted HERO

btdmaster Famous Adventurer VIP Item Team