Hypixel Skyblock

Type: Game

Score: 9.5/10

Date modified: Dec 31, 2025

Yes, it's technically not its own standalone product, but I think considering I've spent more time on it than anything else, it deserves its own placement. Hypixel Skyblock is something I hold very near and dear; I've spent ~1500 hours playing it, and in that time I've both been mind-numbingly bored and had some of the best experiences I've ever had playing a game. This whole thing is probably going to be super incoherent, so just try to stick with me, please (not that I'm super coherent often).

The gameplay of Skyblock is uniquely addicting to me; the majority of it will be doing the same thing over and over, so it's not exactly super interesting, but sometimes being able to watch something while absent-mindedly clicking things and hearing that ringing sound of gaining EXP or the sound of many glass panes breaking at once when I was armadillo mining are things that have been seared into my memory permanently, for better or for worse. The more "active" parts of this game (dungeons, Kuudra, slayers, etc.) are slightly more engaged but just as grindy; however, I don't really see that as a bad thing. I've always seen these videos of people grinding for some super rare item drop in Runescape, and while I think Runescape is a great game (even after some of their recent rather shitty decisions), I've never been so invested that I've ended up grinding to get some of these extremely rare items as drops. In Skyblock, however, I was pretty all in, and that let me have three ultra-rare drops: firstly, the overflux capacitor and an epic dragon pet, neither of which I was grinding for, but both were pretty exciting moments regardless, but most importantly, my lovely giant sword. It's not even that good a sword (though I was grinding in a time before the claymore), and even with the rather mediocre mining setup I had at the time, I could've bought it in like five hours, but I grinded that motherfucker well over the drop rate, doing, I think, almost 1k F6s (I know that's pretty small compared to some Hyperion grinds, but F6 party finder parties are something else) before I got it, and when I finally dropped it, I was euphoric. I don't regret wasting my time like this for a second, and that's probably the best result for a game like Skyblock. I'm going to say here that the moment of excitement and joy I had there was probably the best moment of my entire life thus far. This isn't to say I've had some awful life or haven't had some experiences that almost everyone would consider more important and all around "better", yet that moment has stuck with me and is still enough to get a grin when I think of it. The Skyblock admins have also recently (like within the past two years) added some pretty exciting content too that really feels more gameplay focused, such as the rift and the slayer updates post-enderman slayer.

There are some issues I hold with some of the newer content, though. Skyblock, until a while ago, didn't really have any story and only had a few quests; however, now they've started adding a lot more quests and general story-based content. This isn't a bad thing in and of itself; I just don't think the approach they've taken to writing quests is all that good. Obviously I didn't expect a masterpiece story from this game, and I appreciate that they aren't taking themselves too seriously considering they're a gamemode in a server in Minecraft, but all the sarcasm and jokes seem way too on the nose to actually be funny. It seems like they've taken a sort of Runescape style in writing their quests, with lots of puns in the names of characters and them acting all silly and very video-gamey, but I find that Skyblock gets too heavy-handed with this, that they do it so often it loses some of the sincerity I found in the characters of Runescape. I was fine with it during most of the rift, but once I finally got around to trying out the foraging update and found out the CENTRAL NPC is named "David Hunterborough" it started to grate on me. It didn't help that much of the new foraging content has so many systems that are all taught to you back to back, not really giving much time to digest any of them. Mr Hunterborough didn't even have any witty dialogue; he just talked like any other NPC, so it's not like his dialogue-filled tutorial was even that engaging. I kind of liked the way previous content drops like the dungeons gave you a short rundown and then kind of just let you go to town and figure out the rest as you go, and most of the stuff, like essence and stars, was so intuitive that no tutorial was even needed. The mining update was a bit less so, but eventually I got the hang of it, the same with the new nether stuff, but I felt like the foraging update went a little too far, especially when instead of developing on previous systems (apart from adding one billion essences), which would've made the pretty disconnected feeling game feel like one homogeneous thing, yet the admins keep adding new, shallow systems. One way they expanded on a system was the pretty big revamp of the attributes system, and while I'd love to complain even more, I thought it was pretty cool.

One last titbit before I end this: I'm well aware Skyblock is full of P2W, but at the same time, I just don't care. It's not like I'm fighting these guys; if anything, more people with better gear is a good thing if I'm doing something like dungeons with them and opens more money options if I want to enderman carry them or something.