Direction
We released our answers to MassiveCraft Survival January Q&A in the Factions Discord!

Game
This week Game announced the retirement of Essalonia slated for 2023. Check out more details in the Factions Discord! Elytras can now be repaired with McMMO repair skill, using phantom membranes! They take 4 phantom membranes for a full repair, available at repair level 200 and above. New 1.17 custom recipes are available: Dripstone and 4 pointed dripstone are crafteable into each other, and deepslate ores can be crafted using an ore + a deepslate block. These are temporary until a full 1.17 world is launched. The PvP ELO for 2021 has seen its champion NPC’s updated. Everybody’s ELO has been reset to 500, so good luck fighting your way back up! Work is still on-going for the Essa spawn and this week we’ve completed over 70 tickets! Stay tuned for some upcoming projects in the near future.

Quest
1.17 Block Quest Mining section is in final review before launch – launch is expected this coming week if no changes are needed. We’re ramping up towards the Ezekiel Finale coming soon!

World
World’s hands are still full with the new Noble Estate clusters. Event assistance and shop decorations are also being worked on as per usual, along with some Staff build projects for various departments. WaterDruppel: worked on noble estate decoration, communal noble space decorations and did in-game tickets. Created World ticket guidelines.

PR
This week PR has continued on with both internal and external work. We worked on spotlights, some cool 3D models and also did some creating/editing for Kingdoms, Guntlet and Minigames pages. Some spotlights are being worked on, while we also did some research on player loss. Player spotlights are up on the forums, more are to be posted in the future, and the new decoheads were announced. We are also working on updating the website where it is needed.

Tech
Worked on Siege review as well as bug fixes.

Lore
Lore Updates:
Changes Submitted by Birdsfoot_violet & MonMarty

We have just released a set of Proficiency Starter kits for our enhanced New Player Experience.
These Starter Kits are lore-staff approved simple kits to allow one to quickly build a character based on recognizable archetypes!
https://forums.massivecraft.com/threads/character-application-starter-kits.97875/

Made a small change to kill a linguistic annoyance for a while: Picard and Norman (romance languages) and Welsh (Brittonic Celtic) have very little in common, and contradict one another. To solve this problem, the Breizh language is consolidated to just be Breton (which is also a form of Celtic, and related to Welsh distantly). The point sort of is, Welsh is not a language that borrows itself well to lore writing due to its length, and romance languages sound too french for the Breizh people. Breton is a very pretty language, and though there are less resources for translating to Breton, it’s syllables lend to better lore writing.

The difference is the Fae Knights being called Korrigan Order instead of Ysbryd Order or god forbid, Gwarcheidwad-Enaid Order. Try pronouncing that.

The following pages have been updated to more modern standards. The intent, especially for the Magic Page, was to make it more digestible for new players, with the most relevant information begin categorized with links out that they can follow based on their interest.
https://wiki.massivecraft.com/Magic
https://wiki.massivecraft.com/Abilities

World System Updates:
Change submitted by MonMarty

Period 3 is now over (with a few days delay), Period 4 is now up. Because I had a chain of “things” happening over the last period, and the title evaluation took so long, I am choosing to let December pass over. To compensate in between however, I will let the events of December count on top of Events for January. Prog 4 deadline https://forums.massivecraft.com/threads/world-progression-period-4.97908/ is set for 30th of January.

Event Updates:
No new changes!

Roleplay Updates:
Changes submitted by MonMarty

We are doing segmented work on the district, updating it with the new ArtDeco textures of the latest texturepack, and introducing Regalia’s new appartment/semi high-rise buildings as Regalia slowly industrializes. We are also doing this to simplify New Town, because it is sprawling and large, and barely roleplayed in.