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All-new hats, and our newest pet, the Witch Cat are now available on The Hive Store!

Hats

Introducing hats, The Hive's newest category of hub cosmetics:

Hats come in several levels of rarity; rarer hats come with special features, such as animations, color variants, or state changes when you sneak.

The following hats can be purchased from The Hive Store right now:

• Octopus Plush (changes state when you sneak)
• Gamer Headset (comes with 2 colors)
• Cardboard Box
• Axe Head
• Shining Crown (comes with 3 colors)
• Flower Crown (animated)

Additionally, anyone that purchases the Broomstick mount will get the Witch Hat for free! If you have purchased the Broomstick already, the hat will be added to your locker within the next few days.

We will be implementing the option to gift hats in the very near future, be sure to look out for future announcements for more information.

You can view and purchase hats by selecting the Hub Cosmetics (egg) item in the hub.

Witch Cat Pet

Just in time for Halloween, the brand new Witch Cat pet is the perfect spooky companion for any young witch or wizard!

The new pet comes with 3 color variants, its own unique animations, and an exclusive avatar and 'cat person.' hub title.

The Witch Cat pet is a permanent addition to The Hive Store and can be purchased for 830 Minecoins.

To help players find full lobbies better at off-peak hours, we automatically enable and disable the availability of specific game queues.

Learn more on our support website.

Developers note:

As we're in a post-lockdown world where Minecraft isn't currently the hottest game on the market, we are intervening to keep our games active where possible. One of longer-term goals is region agnostic matchmaking - allowing you to play against other regions from your "home" region. Dynamic game queues is a stopgap we're testing until then, both to accommodate players that just want to get into a functional queue, and to have Platform-Based Matchmaking active more often.

Whilst we understand that choice is good (and fun!), it can also cause issues when long queue times lead to players giving up. As always, feedback is much appreciated - the more detail the better. You can leave it below, on our forums as a suggestion, or on our socials.

After extensively reviewing the feedback received, as well as the discussion that was prompted by our recent version support update, we have decided to change course on this decision. We want to thank those that worded their arguments and feedback in a constructive and reasonable way.

We will not be removing support for non-RenderDragon versions of the game until January 1st, 2023. At that time, we will re-evaluate this decision.

We understand that the majority of those that remain on older versions do so because of issues with input delay, as well as performance issues. Both these issues are fully out of our control. As a Minecraft Partner, we voice the concerns our community has to Microsoft. However, this is in no way a replacement for using the bug tracker and other avenues of informing Minecraft's developers that you're affected by these issues.

To prioritize these issues, consider upvoting them in the official bug tracker:

Significant input delay on devices with Render Dragon
Render Dragon decreases performance by a lot

As mentioned, we will re-evaluate this decision at the start of next year. There may be multiple factors that lead us, or force us, to drop support at that point:

• A newer version of the game contains functionality required by updates to our games or other experiences
• The issues are not resolved before the next major version of the game (1.20)
• Microsoft disables functionality in older versions of the game, such as the Marketplace or other services required to authenticate with our server

As we continue to evolve our content, and stay compliant with the newest Minecraft updates and technologies, it is unfeasible to retain version support indefinitely.

For a better experience on games and regions with lower amounts of players, we have lowered the requirement for Platform-Based Matchmaking from 300 to 200 players. We will continue to monitor queue times to ensure this is a correct balance between gameplay experience and waiting times.

Additionally, we are investigating taking input type (touch, controller, KBM) into account for matchmaking in the near future. This is mainly aimed at making mobile queues fairer.

Our upcoming "region agnostic" update, which enables cross-region gameplay and matchmaking, will future improve the availability of Platform/Input-Based Matchmaking whilst lowering queue times.

Read our full support article on Platform-Based Matchmaking for the most up to date information.

Please read the update to this post here. The information below is outdated.

In the interest of providing the best experience for our players, The Hive has continued to support 1.18 versions of Minecraft, despite 1.18.0 being originally released almost 12 months ago.

On September 20th, Minecraft version 1.19.30 was released, and the 'pink glitch' - one of the main reasons that players have opted to play on older versions of Minecraft - was fixed.

Only a very small number of our players (less than 1.7%) still play on non-Renderdragon versions of Minecraft, and this number continues to fall.

Whilst we understand that a few players have continued to use older versions for other reasons, continuing to support these versions indefinitely would leave us unable to use features introduced in newer versions of the game.

The Hive will be dropping support for all versions of Minecraft below 1.19.30 on or after the 25th of October.

From this point onwards, you will need to update to Minecraft version 1.19.30 or above to be able to join The Hive.

Spooky time is almost upon us... the Pumpkin Farmer costume can now be purchased from the Quest Store!

A new update to Murder Mystery has been deployed to all regions. This patch is to help further balance changes introduced in the recent Murder Mystery update.

Changes

• Increased XP coin cap to 50 (based on survey results)
• Increased murderer kill XP from 10 to 15
• Introduced murderer-specific XP coin cap (currently set to 20)

Developer note: It seems people like being able to collect more coins for more XP, but it has resulted in games being longer than we'd like. To help combat this, we have introduced a murderer-specific XP coin cap. However, to ensure murderers still have an opportunity to gain a good amount of XP, we have increased the XP per kill. Our hope is this will motivate murderers not to hold the game up. We will re-evaluate and tweak as necessary.

Map Changes

• Pigment: Cubes will no longer grant a bow on collection
• Pigment: The murderer can now see the cubes, but cannot interact with them

Developer note: We've heard from many players that the cubes granting a bow was too overpowered, making the games much harder for the murderer. Now, the cubes will only grant you an extra arrow.

Thank you for all your feedback so far! Your feedback helps us make changes like this, so keep it coming. If you have feedback, please let us know on our Discord or Forums.

After successfully locating their treasure, the pirates will be setting sail and heading back to sea on Monday.

If you haven't completed the pirate event yet, be sure to do so this weekend!

Check out our blog post for all of the information about the event.