Minecraft Dungeons Breaks Down Ancient Hunts and Apocalypse Plus Changes in ‘Flames of the Nether’ DLC

What do you want to know

• The next Minecraft Dungeons expansion is “Flames of the Nether”, a massive DLC coming next week.
• Alongside the paid expansion “Flames of the Nether”, Minecraft Dungeons is releasing a major free update with tons of changes.
• These changes focus on endgame content, with new Ancient Hunt procedural missions, changes to the Apocalypse Plus difficulty mode, and more.
• In a new dev blog, Mojang Studios breaks down these new features, including balancing changes and new enchantments coming with the update.

Minecraft Dungeons isn’t the same game it was when it first released and has added a ton of new content, quality of life improvements, and feature changes since launch. Next up for Mojang Studios’ co-op ARPG-focused Minecraft spin-off is the massively massive Minecraft Dungeons Flames of the Nether DLC. Coming February 24, Flames of the Nether includes six new missions, with tons of new monsters to fight, loot to unlock, and content to play. Along with the paid part of Flames of the Nether, there is an equally massive free update available to all Minecraft Dungeons players.

In a new developer blog post, Mojang Studios has provided additional details on all the great features coming in this free update. Specifically: Ancient Hunts and Apocalypse Plus mode. If you want to know more about the Flames of the Nether DLC for Minecraft Dungeons, you can also check out the recently released dev diary.

There’s a lot of information to discover here, so let’s get started:

Ancient hunts

Ancient Hunts are procedurally generated, player influenced, high risk, high reward missions. These missions will provide a ton of nearly endless endgame content for players while rewarding them with some of the most powerful gear in the game.

With ancient hunts:

• Players are constantly sacrificing gear and enchantment points to unlock ancient hunts
• What is sacrificed to open the Ancient Hunt directly influences how the mission is generated and what rewards players can earn
• Ancient Hunts are also procedurally generated, so no two will be the same
• Ancient Hunts will feature a mix of old and new content, including the base game, expansions, and Flames of the Nether
• By playing Ancient Hunts, players can find lucrative secrets and rare rewards
• Ancient Hunts expands the in-game economy by giving players new ways to use their unused items and enchantment points
• Players have a chance to find super powerful Ancient mobs in Ancient Hunts, which have a chance to drop extremely rare and powerful loot
• Ancient Hunts can be played in a single session or over multiple sessions, once opened

golden gear

While ancient hunts can offer a wide variety of potential rewards to players in the late game, golden gear is the most lucrative and desirable. This powerful gear can only be found in Ancient Hunts and will be the rarest and most valuable loot in the game.

With golden gear:

• Golden gear comes in common, rare, and unique varieties of all kinds of weapons, bows, and armor
• Unlike standard gear, which is no more than three enchantment slots, golden gear can have a random fourth enchantment slot.
• The trade-off for such powerful gear is that all enchantments on gold gear will cost more
• Golden gear will be very hard to get but will be the most powerful gear in the whole game
• To obtain golden gear, players will need to find and defeat ancient monsters inside Ancient Hunts
• Each Ancient Mob has its own loot table, so specific mobs will drop specific golden gear
• To find certain golden gear, players will need to enter the correct combination of items to get the correct ancient hunt and defeat the correct ancient mob.

Apocalypse More

In a previous update, Minecraft Dungeons added the Apocalypse Plus difficulty. This mode added twenty additional levels of challenge for players and greatly increased the maximum power level for heroes and gear. However, players found that the difficulty increased abnormally quickly towards the end of Apocalypse Plus, while a select few players found exploits to reach the end relatively easily. With Flames of the Nether, Mojang Studios is bringing a ton of changes and further heightening the endgame to Minecraft Dungeons.

With Apocalypse Plus:

• The existing 20 difficulty levels are reduced to 10
• 15 additional difficulty levels are added to these 10, bringing the total to 25
• The gap between difficulty levels is increased, so players spend more time on each level
• Max power level for gear will be increased to around 250 at Apocalypse Plus 25
• Apocalypse Plus challenge is being rebalanced to be more consistent and increase less abruptly at the end
• New “Milestones” are added to unlock additional levels of Apocalypse Plus:
  • Every three missions, players will be tasked with completing “boss missions” to progress
  • Each additional stage thereafter will require defeating more boss missions to unlock new levels
  • This prevents players from abusing shorter missions to progress faster in Apocalypse Plus mode

Balancing and Other Changes

Along with all of these changes, Minecraft Dungeons is introducing all-new enchantments to the game, with a bunch of new enchantments specifically targeting pet and companion builds. There will also be new “damage” enchantments for thunder, poison, fire, souls, and more.

There will also be balances and adjustments to existing enchantments, to make the game more fair and consistent overall.

Endgame Changes

The idea behind all of these changes is to provide a ton of additional content for Minecraft Dungeons endgame players. By mixing Ancient Hunts with Apocalypse Plus, players will be able to reach new heights of power, find more ways to play, and spend even more time reaching the top of Minecraft Dungeons. It was the missing piece that prevented a long-term investment in Minecraft Dungeons, and now Mojang Studios has finally added it.

With these changes, it will also be easy for Mojang Studios to make additional changes to Ancient Hunts and Apocalypse Plus, and add more levels to them, if needed.

If you haven’t played Minecraft Dungeons yet, it’s available as part of Xbox Game Pass and is even one of the best games for Xbox Cloud Gaming on Android. To get the most out of Minecraft Dungeons, consider investing in one of the best headsets for Xbox Series X|S, this way you can always stay in touch with your teammates..

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