Axolotl Create Season 3

Axolotl Create Season 3 (officially “Axolotl SMP Create Edition Season 3”) was the Create-modded side server of 2025: NeoForge 1.21.1, Create 6, a Terralith world, and a player list that was, for most of its life, a list of one. It is the world where prop talked to himself in a cozy cabin, fought three different networks to get online, turned flowing lava into a power plant, and filled the media channel with machines. It also never quite ended, which is why the dates on this page are fuzzier than we would like.

How it began

The season was born out of boredom and a video. After Axolotl SMP Season 4 ran out of players, prop watched a Phoenix SC video and pitched opening the new season with a UHC last-man-standing match, pinging the Active and Alive-but-not-Active roles to turn up for the first session (The UHC Opener Pitch). The mods were shipped as a GitHub release, which prop proudly called “the most wrong way to use github” (¹). A day later kira asked him to move the repository into the Axolotl Guild organisation, and prop did it on the spot (^{2 3}). The modpack itself is covered in The Create Season Mod Pack.

Launch day was 12 September 2025. prop announced to @everyone that Create Edition Season 3 was live, with the mods on a GitHub release (⁴), but he had already met the first boss a few hours earlier: the Velocity proxy, which rejected modded clients in a reconnect loop. The fix was blunt. Players connected straight to the host machine at sculk.local:25566 (^{5 6 7}). See Axolotl SMP Create Edition Season 3 Launches.

The first weeks

On launch day prop explored the Terralith terrain and claimed a “central spawn looking” spot by a gigantic ravine (The Ravine Spot at 140 ~ 91, ⁸). The next evening he had diamonds within about half an hour of logging in, warning kira that he was going to hate him for racing ahead (Diamonds on Day One, ^{9 10}). The server was live and bridged into #mc-chat from launch day. kira (in game as GlitchSabre) bounced off the proxy several times that morning before getting in directly, and had his first proper session on the 14th (^{11 12}). The new “Axolotl Chat” bridge relayed every join, leave and sentence, which is how most of this season’s story survives.

prop settled at prop's Create Base, starting with The Cozy Cabin, a small starter cabin he said “captures all the vibe of minecraft”, complete with a spare bed for kira and an enchanting table in the attic.

Getting there was the hard part. The server lived on kira’s home machine behind Tailscale and a self-hosted headscale, and the network kept fighting back: bad Wi-Fi blocked Tailscale, mobile data swung between 60 and 640 ms ping, and prop ended up balancing his phone at one precise angle (The Airtel Wars and the Port Forward, The Connection Curse). The cure came on 22 September, when kira set up port forwarding through vpn.axolotl.pink (^{13 14 15}). The same day prop worked out that the average player count since launch was about 1.1 (¹⁶), a fair summary of the whole season (prop the Lone Grinder).

Lava, windmills and 442,368

Late September was prop’s Create education. On 27 September he printed his first schematic with a schematicannon, a max-size windmill that makes only 8k stress units but “looks cool” (¹⁷, First Schematicannon Print: The Windmill, The Schematicannon Windmill).

Minutes later he realised that a tall enough flow of lava counts as a bottomless supply for Create pumps, and announced “so the next step is infinite lava” (¹⁸). The result was the Infinite Lava Pit, a very large hole with lava pouring down about 200 blocks, no Nether trips required (Infinite Lava from Flowing Lava). Three days later three level-9 steam engines were running off it, and prop typed the number straight into chat: “442,368 stress units” (¹⁹, 442,368 Stress Units, The Half-Million Stress Unit Steam Engine). Other builds of the period include the Andesite Caves, a huge cave of nearly pure andesite that suits Create’s andesite alloy.

The same night kira kept trying to join and kept crashing the server with “invalid player data” and a recipe loading error. prop crowned him “the walking crash dummy” (²⁰), and kira only got in after prop sent him his own modpack export, the Modrinth file ASMP_Create_6_0.1.2.mrpack (^{21 22}, Kira, the Walking Crash Dummy).

The logistics winter

In early November prop discovered Create 6’s logistics toys: chain conveyors, frogports, packagers and a stock ticker staffed by a mob. On 6 November he built a storage building he admitted he had “no idea how to operate”, and within a day it was sorting his entire stash, with the Passive Iron Farm plugged in (The Create 6 Logistics Network, The Storage Network, Create 6 Logistics).

On 7 November he dumped about 30 screenshots into #asmp-create-s3-media and called them “everything that happened on this server in chronological order” (²³, The Create Season 3 Photo Chronicle). That is why an earlier version of this page assumed the season ended that day. It had not. Two days later prop was showing off the Ultimate Create Mod Workshop, which he declared done (^{24 25}).

Outages

The server’s hardware was its own antagonist. kira rebooted the host on 9 November after 48 days of uptime, taking the game-server panel down with it (Server Crash After 48 Days of Uptime). On 16 November the machine died outright, and then a power shutdown kept it offline until 20 November (^{26 27 28}, Axolotl Just Died). All the while the bridge kept announcing “Server has started. Enjoy!”, which prop took personally (The "Server Has Started. Enjoy!" Bait). December saw almost no play.

Second wind

On 3 January 2026 kira and prop logged in together. kira got trapped in prop’s underground base until prop pointed out the camouflaged wooden button, and prop deployed a bigger furnace-minecart “giga drill” (²⁹, ³⁰, Kira Returns: Giga Drill and the Nut Tree). prop went on to raid a trial chamber (Trial Chamber Raided), automate his Farmer’s Delight meals (First Automated Farmer's Delight Meals, Automated Farmer's Delight Food Farm) and go back for the bones of the Desert Dragon Skeleton. When the server went down again, prop formally requested “the restoration of the server’s playable status” (The Mystical Force). On 16 January Levi joined after a comedy of a fake launcher site and two missing mods (Levi Joins Create Season 3), and on 19 March Kart logged in as Kartwastaken (³¹, Kartwastaken Logs In).

The last sign of life in the sources is 21 March 2026, when prop found the server down during a holiday and pinged kira seven times in a row: “when free time is there nothing working” (³², Down for Ramzan).

Legacy

Create S3 never got a closing ceremony, so its end date here is simply the last time the chat shows anyone playing. What it left behind is a record: a windmill that barely turns, a steam engine that does, a fully sorted stash, and a media channel that tells the story in pictures. It also gave the group the vocabulary of a lone builder’s season, including the walking crash dummy, the bait message and the Connection Curse, and a modpack repository in the Guild’s GitHub organisation.