2021 - News Update: New and Upcoming Valhelsia Features

Greetings from the Valhelsia Team!

Now that a brand new year is upon us we felt it was due time for a news update to share with you our plans for the upcoming year.

We would like to begin by wishing everybody here a very happy new year! (yeah we are a little late) Thank you for the huge support that you have given us during 2020. It was a huge year for us with the release of three modpacks along with big updates to Valhelsia Structures and the initial development of several new mods.

This is a particularly special time for us, as we have just passed two million downloads of Valhelsia 2 and one million downloads of Valhelsia 3! Thank you all for helping us reach these amazing milestones!

Over the past few months the Valhelsia Team has grown and we have been hard at work on some new projects as well as updates to existing projects that we would like to share with you now.

Valhelsia 3

We have come a long way since the first edition of our modpack. Thanks to the experience gained from the development of Valhelsia 1 & 2 and Valhelsia: Origins, we have managed to offer you a 3rd Edition that is more optimized, enriched and enjoyable to play.

Our next goal is to balance all the mods, so that mods fit as well as possible alongside each other, vanilla Minecraft, and our own modding vision. Version 3.1.8 has introduced the first changes in this direction, where we have completely balanced all of the armor, weapons and tools from Mekanism. The upcoming releases will be focused on continued balancing.

Valhelsia 3: New Dimensions

Our next plans for new additions will be to introduce the first new dimensions to Valhelsia 3! “The Twilight Forest”, “The Aether” and “Atum 2: Return to the Sands” are the first candidates, but this is subject to change based on how long it takes the developers to port their mod to 1.16 and whether the ports are stable enough to include.

Valhelsia Tweaks

While Valhelsia Tweaks is currently a small mod that adds only minor changes to the pack, we have big plans to expand it in the near future to add new features to Valhelsia! Some examples are a blood moon, a chunk loading and claim system, and various texture improvements. Valhelsia Tweaks is a mod that we will use for many small additions to the pack in the future too, so stay tuned for an announcement!

Valhelsia Structures

In September we announced that the next big content update for Valhelsia Structures is the Jungle Update! We brought on board MCVinnyq as a artist for this update, and Cynthal as a builder to design new structures, joining the existing Valhelsia Structures team members - Khytwel, Stal, and Vaelzan. The team has been hard at work and we are proud to share some sneak peeks of the new update.

It won't be long now before it will be in your hands ready for you to explore the new additions to the jungle! After the Jungle Update we will dive straight into work on the next content update. We can’t reveal the theme just yet, but stay tuned for an announcement!

Valhelsia Quests

Next up is Valhelsia Quests. We have been wanting to bring quests to Valhelsia for quite a while now, but instead of adding quests via a book like many other packs we wanted them to be something rather special. We have been developing a custom mod that allows players to obtain quests by exploring the world and talking with characters you can find. Some of these characters will be found in villages, others will be found in structures from Valhelsia Structures, and some will occasionally seek you out similarly to a Wandering Trader. We really wanted to add a huge exploration and adventure factor to our quests, and thanks to the hard work of Stal and the team we are well on the way to achieving this goal.

Valhelsia Quests will be available later in 2021, but for now we want to share some screenshots of the work in progress.

Other Packs

Now that the majority of mod developers have moved on to working on Minecraft 1.16.5, updates on Valhelsia 2 and Valhelsia Origins have slowed down. These packs will still receive support on Discord and will receive small updates occasionally, but it is unlikely that major updates will come to these packs in the future now that the majority of our efforts are for Minecraft 1.16.5 and beyond.

Recruitment: Join the Valhelsia Team!

We are still searching for new members for the Valhelsia Team. In particular, if you are experienced with the pack or with technical support, we are in need of support and helper team members.

Helpers are a new role on Discord that we are introducing in order to distinguish community members who have proven themselves by assisting others when needed, whether that is in-game help with mods or assistance with troubleshooting. This is a role that people are welcome to volunteer for, but we will also be reaching out to members of the community who we feel are a good fit for it from time to time. It should be noted that Helpers are not obligated to help out at any particular time - we recognise that people often lead busy lives and can only help during certain times and days, so this is more recognition of past assistance and intention to help out in the future when available.

If you are interested, you can apply here.

We would like to thank the entire Valhelsia Team for their hard work over the past year, as well as the various contributors that have allowed us to use their work in our packs.

Finally, we would like to thank each and every one of you that has played any of our packs or mods. We’re extremely grateful for the active community on Discord, with many people helping each other out, posting in our gallery, or even creating video series or live streaming Valhelsia! It’s all of you guys that have helped us to expand Valhelsia from a small hobby project into something that has become more successful than any of us originally could have dreamed of. Thank you.

We hope you have a great 2021, and that you enjoy the new content coming soon. We’d like to leave you now with one final sneak preview.

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