The basics

Your first week on a skyblock server

Skyblock punishes a bad first week more than any other gamemode, because income compounds and a slow start compounds too. Here is a plan that works on essentially any server.

Day one: establish the rules

1. Create the island. Build a cobblestone generator even if you will never need it, to confirm vanilla mechanics are intact.
2. Find the shop. Note the cheapest spawner's price and the sell price of one common crop.
3. Work out spawner payback time. That number decides everything else you do this week.
4. Ask in chat how old the season is. If it is nearly over, change server now rather than in five days.
5. Vote on every vote site the server lists, and claim any daily reward.

Days two and three: one farm, no distractions

Build a single sugar cane or melon farm, sized to what you can afford, and run it. Resist building anything decorative, resist island levelling, and resist buying gear. The only goal is your first spawner.

Days four and five: the first spawners

Buy the cheapest spawner and a killing mechanism. Confirm the drops are actually reaching a chest before buying a second. Then reinvest everything into more spawners until the payback time stops improving, which it will once you hit a stacking cap or a mob cap.

Day six: the multipliers

Now spend on the things that raise the rate rather than the volume: a harvest or looting enchant, auto-sell, whatever the server's skill tree rewards. These are worthless on a small operation and transformative on a large one, which is why they come sixth and not first.

Day seven: decide what game you are playing

By now you know whether the server's endgame is island level, a leaderboard, PvP or trading, and you can aim at it. This is also the point to recruit one or two island members, because from here parallel effort helps and before here it mostly does not. See coop islands.

The whole week in one line

Farm to afford a spawner, spawners until they cap, then multipliers. Vote every day throughout. Everything else can wait.

Next in the skyblock wiki

• Skyblock glossary Every skyblock term you will meet in chat, defined in one line.
• How Minecraft skyblock works One island, no ground, and a cobblestone generator. What the original puzzle was and what servers turned it into.
• Island levels: what the number actually measures Island level is a weighted count of valuable blocks placed, which is why top islands converge on solid cubes.
• Spawners and minions: where skyblock money comes from On almost every modern skyblock server the real economy is spawners, and the number that matters is payback time.