Last week, we made an announcement about a necessary transition and rebranding away from the drugs theme. Since then, we've had a ton of love and support from the players and community, and we're very thankful for everyone who has decided to stick around, we promise it will be worth it. While that post had a quite dreary tone, today we are looking forward to the future and a new era of the server: MCLabs.
The Labs Theme
Originally, we were planning on keeping the server called "MCD", a homage to what it has been called for the past ten years. However, we soon realized that trying to cling to the past, just to honour what the server once was, would be to back the server into a corner in terms of creativity and marketability. Instead, we've decided to commit to a full rebrand and an entirely new theme.A simple farming/agriculture theme seemed a natural choice ("MC-Crops", as many joked), but such a theme isn't very interesting, and more importantly, it lacks the edge that the drugs theme had.
So instead, the theme we chose is that instead of growing and selling drugs, players are growing these plants in order to synthesize base chemical elements, which can then be sold in mass amounts to shady corporations, or refined further into chemical compounds before selling. Due to the mass quantity and suspicious motivations involved in selling these chemicals, selling them is strictly illegal, so the role of police on the server is unchanged.
"Drugs" are now "Chems"
Since we can no longer refer to drugs or selling drugs, we have chosen "Chems" as the new name for the illicit items being sold. We feel that this keeps a lot of the black-market-y vibes that "drugs" had, while still being permissible with Minecraft's terms and requirements.Raw drugs are now base chemical elements - for example, Pumpkins are now Pumpkonium (Pk), and Beetroot is now Betronium (Br). Combos are now chemical compounds of these base elements, with the names representing what the compound is made of - for example, Fentanyl is now Betrompkinide (BrPk₂).
While it might take some time for current players to adjust to these new names, we feel that they flow a lot more naturally with the actual item names and ingredients of the compounds, and knowing what each base element and compound consists of will quickly become second nature.
Naturally, "Druglab" has been renamed to just "The Lab". The command to see prices has changed from /drugs to /chems, but the old command will continue to work.
The items in /chems and the items you get from crafting compounds have been changed to the new items, but don't worry, your old drug-themed items can still be sold.
If you have old drugs, you can convert them with the /convertdrugs command, which will transform all drug items in your inventory to the new items.
New Rank Names and Other Terminology
It wouldn't make much sense to keep the drug-themed rank titles with the new theme, and while it was sad to see the rank titles change after nearly 10 years of them being the same, the new ones fit much better. We went with chemistry lab-themed rank titles, such as "Intern", "Technician", "Bioengineer", and "Biochemist". We chose to keep Junky and Chemist, as these ranks are still appropriate. This was only a surface-level cosmetic change, so nobody has lost their rank, it will just look different in chat.While "Muling" could have stayed the same, we feel that renaming it to "Running" feels more fitting. Anything related to Muling, Mules, Mule Jobs, etc. has been renamed to "Running", "Runners", "Runner Jobs", etc. The base command has changed to /runner, but you can still use the original mule commands for now.
Other than that, there will be a general transition to "chems" anywhere that "drugs" is mentioned.
As of this announcement, the major changes (new item names, new rank titles, rebranding of "MCDrugs" or "MCLabs" in notable places) have already been made. However, there's still a lot of work to do as we transition our ten years of developed content to an entirely new name and theme. We appreciate your continued patience and understanding as we complete the transition throughout the next couple weeks, and as always, we are dedicated to keeping gameplay and player experience as unaffected as possible while we make these changes.
As mentioned, all of the changes so far are merely surface-level and cosmetic. However, we have a lot of concepts for future mechanics that we're excited to develop from this theme, as it will create a lot of possibility for interesting new gameplay.
As always, we're open to and appreciate suggestions from the community to help build upon this new theme and continuously improve gameplay. Feel free to drop a suggestion in the #suggestions channel on our Discord at any time.
Finally, thanks again to everyone who continues to support and play on the server, we're looking forward to continuing to make something that you enjoy
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