New Player Guide

## **What is UHCC?**

UHCC is an iteration on the UHC (Ultra Hardcore) gamemode that adds 11 classes.

In UHC, natural regeneration is turned off, meaning **you will not regenerate health with hunger**. Instead, health can generally only be healed using Golden Apples, Suspicious Stews, or (more rarely) Potions.

The goal of the game is to be the last team alive, with most games ending in a final fight as a World Border pushes players towards the middle of the map, 0, 0.

All of this applies to UHCC as well, but each class has its own unique abilities and playstyle. For more detail on each of the classes, consider checking out their individual class pages.

## **Important Information**

* **Health is not restored with hunger. So don’t take unnecessary damage.**
* **Make a shield. Blocking with a shield prevents 100% of damage from most damage types if you are facing the right way.**
* **Do not face *any* hostile mobs before obtaining a shield. Shields are easy to craft and it’s not worth the risk of losing health.**
* **Know what your class does to know your strengths and weaknesses.**
* **Don’t ghost (impact the game after you die). Don’t cheat. Just be a cool person and we’ll all have fun. :)**

## **Before Starting**

Before the game begins, you’ll wait in a lobby (affectionately referred to as “the box”). To select a class, you open your inventory and place the item corresponding to the class you want in the green ring.

While knowing what all the classes can do certainly helps, it is recommended to at least read up on the class you are going to play so you know what to expect. Keep in mind that there can only be one of a class on a team, so you’ll need to check with your teammates to make sure you’re not picking the same one.

Knight is often recommended for newer players as it is durable and fairly simple compared to the other classes. Pirate may be appealing to newer players that aren’t used to post-1.9 combat as it can attack without a cooldown.

## **Start of the Game**

As soon as the game starts, you’ll be spread randomly into the world with your team. The first thing you will want to do is get 3 pieces of wood from the nearest tree. Then craft the wood into planks, and make a wooden pickaxe. Dig a small staircase down, (usually about 3-4 blocks) until you hit stone. Mine just 3 cobblestone with your wooden pickaxe and then immediately make a stone pickaxe with them. You can then get your remaining cobblestone for tools with your stone pickaxe.

By making a stone pickaxe as quickly as possible and minimizing the amount of blocks you mine with your wooden pickaxe you can get your other tools a lot faster. While this may not be incredibly long, making sure you have adequate time to gather materials before the first night is fairly important.

Gather enough stone to make an axe, a shovel, and potentially a sword. Shovels, while often overlooked, can save you a lot of time over the course of the game and are very cheap. Also consider grabbing another 8 or so cobblestone to make a furnace.

If you are playing a class that is able to melee with an axe, it is almost always recommended to use an axe over a sword. Axes, while having a slower swing speed and less damage output over time than swords, can deal higher burst damage, which, when playing defensively, is often preferable. More importantly than this though, **axes disable enemy’s shields**, making them incredibly useful in combat. By hitting a blocking enemy with an axe while sprinting, you can disable their shield for a period of time, leaving them vulnerable.

Remember to be careful not to take careless damage, as **health does not regenerate naturally in UHCC, meaning every ½ heart counts**. A common mistake is forgetting about fall damage. If you fall from a height of 4 blocks or higher, you will lose health. Some other forms of damage that are easy to prevent are getting hit by a llama’s spit, drowning damage, and attacking an iron golem.

## **Before the First Night**

Quite often, your success at the end of a game of UHCC is determined by how successfully you were able to prepare in the early game. Before the first night there should be a mental checklist of all the essential materials you should prioritize getting. In approximate order of importance, they are:

1. **Apples**- These are essential for crafting golden apples, the primary source of healing in UHCC. Apples only drop from Oak and Dark Oak leaves. To collect them efficiently, rather than punching out the leaves, chop the wood touching the leaves, causing the leaves to start decaying. If you are in a forest and do this to many trees, you will have a fair chance at getting a sufficient amount of apples. Usually around 5 apples tends to be a good amount to aim for.
2. **Leather/Sugar Cane**- These materials are needed to make books. Your team will need a minimum of 1 book to craft an enchantment table, meaning you’ll want to aim for at least 3 sugar cane and 1 leather. However, additional books can be used for enchanting later, so don’t pass up extra leather or sugar cane.
3. **Feathers/Arrows-** 5 of the classes in UHCC are able to make use of arrows in some way, these being Marksman, Pirate, Scout, Trickster, and Warlock. Making sure that these classes are able to make full use of their range is often critical to their success. Typically around 1 ½ stacks of arrows is a respectable amount, but it can never hurt to have more. Crafting arrows using feathers from chickens and flint from gravel is the primary way to obtain them, but villages are an excellent source as well. By changing a villager's profession to a fletcher using a fletching table, you can trade sticks for emeralds and potentially amass a large supply of arrows.
4. **Oxeye Daisies/Mushrooms**- Regeneration suspicious stew can be crafted from 1 red mushroom, 1 brown mushroom, and 1 Oxeye daisy. 4 can be made per player, per game, with each healing ½ heart of damage. This means gathering these materials can net your team 2 hearts of healing per player if adequate amounts are found.
5. **Food**- Food will often be gotten as a byproduct of other materials. Don’t be too concerned about gathering a lot of food, as most hunger is lost from healing back health. Since you do not regenerate from hunger in UHCC, hunger tends to drain more slowly. It is a good idea to make a smoker early on as it is cheap, costing only a furnace and 4 logs, and can be used throughout the game to cook up any food you collect.
6. **Wool/Bed**- A bed is needed to prevent insomnia. If you have not slept for at least 3 nights, phantoms will spawn above you at night. To prevent this, simply lie in a bed at night for about 5 seconds, waiting until the screen finishes turning purplish. Your team can share one bed, which may be advisable to conserve inventory space.
7. **Wood**- Often chopping wood for apples will provide you with enough to last you the game, just make sure you’re picking it up as you go. Generally around a stack of 64 logs is a good amount to allow you to use your wood freely without worrying about running out.

If you find a cave while looking for materials, approach with extreme caution. **Do not fight any hostile mobs before getting a shield.** It simply isn’t worth the risk of losing health you will have to make up later.

## **The First Night**

As the sun begins to set, you’ll want to meet back up with your team to prepare to start digging down. As mobs spawn on the surface at night, it tends to be much safer underground. If you can, remind your team to lie in a bed once it becomes night to avoid potential phantoms from spawning later on.

If you’re with your team, you will likely want to dig a staircase down to allow your team to easily follow you underground. Someone on your team can cook up the food you’ve collected on the surface while someone else continues digging.

**The first thing that should be crafted once iron is obtained is a shield. Shields only cost 1 iron and 6 planks to make, and are incredibly important for survival.** While blocking, you can deflect arrows, prevent damage from zombies, and even survive a creeper’s explosion all while taking no damage.

After crafting a shield, an iron pickaxe is often a good choice to speed up your mining, followed by armor for your team. Ideally your team is fully armored as soon as possible. Damage taken with armor on means less health lost.

Once you reach level 11, you can start strip mining. Consider mining in a different direction than your teammate to uncover more blocks for more chances at ores. Be sure to keep an eye on your X and Z coordinates. The World Border is centered on 0 X, 0 Z, meaning that you should try to move in the direction that will make your coordinates closer to 0,0.

Caves can be useful for finding ores quickly, but take care to traverse them slowly, blocking off passages as you go to prevent mobs from sneaking up behind you.

## **Abandoned Mineshafts**

Abandoned Mineshafts are very dangerous, but can be quite worth entering if you’re careful. The cobwebs can be broken with a sword, providing ample string for bows, and the rarer minecart chests can contain enchanted books or even golden apples.

However, Abandoned Mineshafts also have Cave Spider spawners, and along with Witches, Cave Spiders are perhaps the most deadly mobs in UHCC. Being poisoned will take you down to ½ a heart, which can be detrimental to you and your team, with you often needing more health than you will be able to heal back.

Move slowly, blocking off side passages, and making sure there is only one path open to you at a time. If you see a spawner, move as far away as possible, blocking off the way to it if you can. If available, milk can be potentially life-saving, and eating a golden apple while poisoned will cause part of the Poison damage to be absorbed by the Absorption hearts the golden apple provides.

## **Mid-Game**

The mid-game primarily consists of fully gearing up to prepare for the inevitable final fight. Prioritize getting complete iron armor and weapons for your team to ensure your survival.

While you cannot increase the speed of a furnace without making a blast furnace, you *can* make additional furnaces. By spreading your ores between multiple furnaces, you can smelt ingots much faster than a single furnace could alone.

The magic minimum number of diamonds you need tends to be 5. This is enough to make an enchantment table, as you need 3 diamonds to make a pickaxe to mine obsidian, and 2 to craft the enchantment table. Additional diamonds are always nice, and it should be a discussion with your team to decide how they are used, whether it be better armor, or weapons.

Enchanting should always be a main goal in a game. Giving your armor Protection will give you additional protection from most damage sources, keeping you alive longer. Sharpness and Power will deal potentially significant additional damage. If you do not see the desired enchantments listed, you can reroll them by enchanting something else. It is often worth crafting a grindstone to easily reroll without wasting materials on tools, and to get a partial refund of experience.

If possible, a secondary goal should be to obtain 31 iron to craft an anvil. An anvil will allow you to increase the level of your gear past I using books or other enchanted tools. Be aware though, that some enchantments are disabled in UHCC.

It is a good idea to grab an amount of gravel if you find it, as if you have a teammate that can use arrows on your team, you will need it for flint later. Shoveling gravel for flint is something useful you can do whenever you have a spare moment, like when waiting for ore to smelt.

All gold obtained while mining should be promptly smelted into ingots. 8 gold ingots can be used to craft a golden apple, which heals 2 full hearts of health. To maximize your healing, wait until you are damaged for at least 2 hearts before eating a golden apple.

It is highly recommended to grab a bucket of water and lava when you can. Water is incredibly useful, not only for putting yourself out if you get lit on fire, but also for negating fall damage and as a makeshift means of climbing up.

Lava on the other hand is a powerful, if dangerous, tool in combat that can be placed on enemies unexpectedly to potentially deal a lot of damage.

## **Final Fight**

Once your team feels sufficiently prepared, the World Border will likely have become fairly small, meaning that teams will soon be forced to fight. Start heading to the surface to gather any materials you might still need and look for players.

If digging directly up **place a torch below you before mining the blocks above you**. If any gravel happens to be above you, this will prevent it from landing and dealing suffocation damage, as instead it will pop off of the torch. This may seem overly-cautious, but you would be surprised how often this can prevent potentially careless damage.

Once on the surface, it’s possible that you may need more apples, or feathers for arrows. Gather what you need, chopping down trees and searching for chickens as necessary.

If a member of your team can use a bow or crossbow and has not obtained one yet, you will likely need to kill spiders for string. Spiders can often hit you unexpectedly if fighting them directly, as they jump while attacking and have a fairly large hitbox. For this reason, it is recommended to fight them using a “spider hole”.

This is done by digging 3 blocks down before aggroing the spider and then retreating into the hole. As the spider is wider than 1 block, it will be unable to reach you, but you will still be able to reach it. It is advisable to dig a few additional blocks for a staircase up to escape if another mob, like a zombie, threatens to jump in after you.

Upon finding an enemy team, what you should do and how you should act will be highly dependent on the state of your team, the state of their team, as well as what class you're playing.

Remember to make use of your golden apples, finding opportunities to heal in fights. You might even consider healing preemptively if you have enough golden apples in order to get your 2 absorption hearts early.

Use your shield when approaching players wielding ranged weapons, and remember that axes can disable shields. Perhaps most important of all when meleeing, **remember not to spam-attack**. When spamming, your damage gets cut down to 20% of its normal potential. This means that a diamond sword that normally deals 4 ½ hearts of damage will only deal a measly 0.7 hearts.

Remember to communicate with your team, and, of course, have fun. UHCC is super fun if you have some idea of what you’re doing, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. :)

Consider looking at the specific classes’ pages if you want more information on how to play and fight with a particular class.