PetalMC wiki

PetalMC: Museums Update (Version 1.8)

V1.8 is the collecting update. It adds a whole new expedition - Ancient Relics, a desert of dig sites, buried strongholds and careful shovel-work - and the reason to run it: collectible fossils that a curator will rebuild into museum mounts you can stand in your base. Around that: your own photos as hangable maps, fifty-odd pieces of found-only decor with twelve collectible plushies among them, spawn eggs for the animals of your pocket, and a balance pass with a longer guild ledger.

Ancient Relics

A new expedition kind, rolling from launch. Peaceful and Calm links only - the challenge out here is the ground itself, and a party knocking carefully around a live charge does not also want a creeper behind them.

You land at an excavation camp: a tent, a supply chest and flat sand in every direction. The chest holds everything the work needs - two Knockers, two Detectors, copper picks and shovels, bread, and the Archaeology Guide, which is the rules of the dig written down in the Curator’s own hand. Read it.

The dig sites

Four per expedition, each a 7x7 patch of gravel and stone roped off with survey lines, sunk five deep into the sand. Somewhere in the bottom layers, one or two finds - fossils of one of six ancient creatures. Also in the volume: volatile earth, which takes a block in every direction when disturbed, armour notwithstanding, and whatever was buried with it.

The two tools are the whole craft:

  • The Detector reads finds and only finds. Right-click the ground: a slow pulse is far, a quick one close, and inside four blocks the pitch climbs a step per block - the top note is the block itself. Silent off-site, and silent over a spent site, because those mean the same thing.
  • The Knocker reads danger and only danger. Tap a block and it answers honestly - settled, or something touching this is volatile. Twice per block. The third tap sets it off. It will not tell you which block: that is not a fault in the tool.

Digging itself talks back: clean ground sounds different from ground near a charge, and rock sounds like nothing at all. A find only comes up whole under a pickaxe - a shovel through a fossil is a shovel through a fossil, and the whole party hears about it either way.

The desert works

The sand is not empty. Ziggurats stand out past the dig ring - banded, pilastered, roped with copper light, their tiers hiding tombs, treasuries, archives, shrines, cisterns, ossuaries and armories, no two builds alike. The stairs go somewhere; so do the rooms. Somewhere near the top, sealed away with no stair and no door, every ziggurat keeps one room the builders meant to stay shut. It holds the best thing in the building.

Rarer: a Descent Stronghold - a copper-crowned tower over a thirty-block spiral into the earth, and at the bottom, behind a copper door, a maze. Sandstone and copper corridors, cased in obsidian on every face, winding for a couple of hundred blocks past gift rooms to a great chamber with a guaranteed epic. You can mine through obsidian if you insist. It is slower than walking, which is the point.

Nearer in, the desert holds the lives of whoever dug here first: mudhif hamlets - reed guest-houses, storehouses and open work shelters stood around a common fire, the larders still stocked - and the farmbeds that fed them, terraced beds stepping up the dunes behind mud brick walls, the irrigation still running and the wheat still standing.

Sealed against everyone: the pyramid tomb, a genuine pyramid with no entrance at all. Somewhere under the mass is a terracotta-lined burial chamber - gold and iron stacked in the corners, cobwebs, the residents still on the floor, and a chest holding one fossil and one epic, guaranteed. The only way in is the archaeologist’s way: through the wall.

And under a small mudbrick hut with a lantern by the door, a ladder that goes down further than any hut needs: the labyrinth, a buried city. Corridors connect dwellings, a market, a shrine, an archive, storerooms and a dry garden, lantern-lit and sprawling, down to a plaza at its deepest point holding a guaranteed epic. The city grows around water as it is built, and its walls are sealed against whatever it could not avoid.

Collectible fossils

Fossils come in two families, and the difference is the whole design:

Set fragments - twenty-four of them, four per creature: Tyrannosaurus, Spinosaurus, Velociraptor, Sabre-toothed Tiger, Dodo, Coelacanth. Each set is tinted to the rock it comes out of - tar black for the sabre-tooth, marine shale blue for the coelacanth - so the colour names the animal before the label does. No counter will buy a fragment at any price. Four of one creature are worth a mount; three are worth nothing at all, and that gap is what makes the fourth one an event.

Loose finds - ammonites, ferns, amber with something ordinary trapped in it, trackway slabs, pottery. Sold to the Curator’s Assistant for honest small money, or framed on a wall, since a flat find sits in an item frame like it was made for one.

The Curator

A new character in the village, and not a vendor: he does exactly one thing. Bring him four fragments of one creature and he takes them, pays 1,000 gold, and hands back the museum mount - a placeable skeleton for wherever you have the floor for it. The spinosaurus wants a hall. He confirms before he takes anything, names what he keeps, and is clear that it does not come back. Completing a set is worth hearing; make sure your sound is on.

His Assistant keeps the counter beside him: buys the loose finds, the mounts, the dig props and the outfit, and sells spare Knockers and Detectors for anyone who left theirs in a hole.

Your photos, on your walls

Run /web in game for a link into the player portal. Sign in, send a picture, and collect it from Astra as a filled map for an item frame. 500 gold on collection, not on sending; one commission at a time.

The preview is the product: 128x128 in the map’s fixed 244-colour palette, quantized in your browser, pixel for pixel what you will hold. Drag to reframe; sliders for zoom, brightness, contrast and colour; dither on by default for photographs and off for logos and text. New this update: a wooden frame option that borders the picture in planks before it ever reaches the palette - like it came back from the framer’s.

Every commissioned map carries its own id (Picture #7), and /mapreport <id> reports one without needing to hold it.

The menagerie

The Broker now sells Menagerie Charms - spawn eggs for the friendly company of your pocket: chicken, cow, pig, sheep, rabbit, cat, parrot, horse, and a copper golem. One use each, good only inside a pocket you own, with a cap per pocket so nobody’s sheep become everybody’s lag.

Forty pieces of decor

All found, none sold: a new expedition-only cosmetic drop tier carries potted plants, crates, two working fountains, a twenty-five-piece excavation camp’s worth of props, and the archaeologist’s outfit - a costume, deliberately not a tier of gear, but one that pays for itself: fossils and relics sell for 50% more per worn piece, and a full set triples the Curator’s mount fee from 1,000 to 3,000 gold. Forty entries share one roll: trophies to come across, not a checklist to clear.

The plushies

The cosmetic pool grew by twelve collectible plushies (Nog’s, licensed): ten creatures - allay, axolotl, bee, chicken, cow, fox, parrot, pig, sheep, turtle - and two hearts, the Pride Plushie and the Trans Pride Plushie. Cosmetic tier only, like the rest of the family: no vendor sells one, and the only way to a plushie is to find it. Each is worth 600 gold (vendors pay 150), places as a one-block prop, and - try it - two different plushies within five blocks of each other sparkle. A shelf of duplicates stays quiet. Collections get noticed.

Where it all turns up

Kills are rare in the peaceful worlds, so the cosmetic tier lives in their chests now. On Paradise, a new trellis walk threads the forest at canopy height - a raised timber path in the island’s own wood (cherry under the blossom, jungle wood under the vines, oak under the oaks), climbing and twisting on posts and arches, with little rooms hanging beside the bigger trees. Every hanging room keeps a piece of the decor line, guaranteed. Beyond that: paradise supply caches, ruins settlement chests and relic caches, and the desert’s own larders and buried rooms all roll the tier. Decor never drops from a kill: the whole family is found by exploring, and the six museum mounts aren’t in the pool at all - a mount exists only by handing the Curator four fossil fragments.

Balance

  • Ancient Relics joined the rotation. A peaceful link is now an equal-thirds draw - Paradise, Ruins or Ancient Relics - at every level, and calm links roll Ancient Relics at fair odds beside the dungeon.
  • The Alchemist now sells ghast tears. Regeneration potions no longer gate on owning a nether trip; the 4x spread still makes farming her shelf a losing trade.
  • The guild ledger grew a tier. Lifetime profiteering past 75,000 gold now earns a 2% tax rate - the maximum discount has gone up, so the couriers who never stopped keep a little more of every chest. There is no lower rate. We did look.
  • The wiki has been reorganised and expanded alongside the update.

Small fixes

  • /clan protection <on|off> (owner): open your territory so a friend outside the clan can help build, and close it again after. The clan shop stays members-only either way, and /clan info warns in red while the door stands open.
  • Clan borders stop mechanical grief. Liquids poured outside a claim no longer flow into it, outside fire cannot spread in or burn anything inside, and pistons stall at the border in both directions - no pushing blocks in, no dragging blocks out, no flying machines crawling through. Machinery wholly inside a claim is untouched, and none of it switches off with /clan protection off.
  • The Archaeology Guide has been rewritten - shorter, softer, and plainer about what the Detector’s climbing pitch and the Knocker’s two answers actually mean.
  • Mudhif larders now hold a little of what the diggers were paid: iron in about one house in four, an emerald or two in one in six.
  • Desert siting is stubborner. On a small desert the monument search walks inward instead of giving up, so a cramped link no longer opens with its ziggurat or stronghold missing.
  • Placed fountains murmur: a soft water loop, audible within about eight blocks of the basin.
  • The wiki gained a temperament x terrain matrix - which links open which worlds, and at what odds per pool.

Collectors with an ear for music may find the System X has an opinion about standing near old bones.

Welcome to V1.8. Read the guide, trust the knocker, and stand something ancient in your front room.