ASMP Limbo

ASMP Limbo was the modded stop-gap between the Earth map and the next real season. It was a Create-centred 1.20.1 server that prop built as a no-stress place where nobody had to care, a world “to REMAIN FOREVER” until a serious SMP came back. In practice it became prop’s personal engineering playground: a handful of friends passed through, but one player logged most of the hours. It lasted six months, ended in a lavacast, and left behind a surprisingly good argument about why modded servers do not hold the gang together.

How it began

ASMP Earth was already dying. In mid-October 2023 prop and IRIS admitted the server was dead ^{1 2}, and prop announced its end of life and took a forced backup of the 13 GB world ^{3 4}. On 2023-10-23 a new modded Create server went up, after several restarts on its first morning ⁵. Kart posted “FIRST” in the new channels, GrimWatch scolded prop for uploading the mods as ten separate files instead of one archive ⁶, and prop and Kart raced through the early Create advancements (ASMP Limbo Opens) ⁷.

That first version ran on Forge, with FTB Quests and FTB Teams imported from another modpack and the instance handed out as a zip from Drive ⁸. It lasted four days. On 2023-10-27 prop explained that a Forge world cannot be converted to Fabric, so switching meant wiping it, and put it to a vote. IRIS gave up on the Forge world, Kart said to start fresh, and the majority sent Limbo to a brand new Fabric 1.20.1 world (Forge or Fabric: the rebuild vote) ^{9 10}. The rebuild came with Tempad and Nature's Compass, and prop admitted he added Tempad mostly because he loved Loki ¹¹. The reset was announced the same evening ¹².

The Create years of plenty

November 2023 was Limbo’s busiest stretch, and it never got very busy. The regulars were prop, Kart and IRIS, with Suresh dropping in once. Mods came and went (Decorative Blocks, Carpet, Jade, Xaero’s maps, a Create web map), and the whole stack is recorded in The Limbo Mod Stack. The server ran in offline mode, which let prop spawn Carpet fake players under any name (Carpet Fake Players) ¹³.

prop settled on a perfectly flat patch of land and began prop's Base, with IRIS’s house visible in the distance ^{14 15}. It started as a water-wheel-powered cliff island and grew a quarry elevator to the bottom of the world, granite walls and a mega windmill that IRIS decorated and roofed, and on 2023-11-09 prop unveiled his “giga cobble farm”, which made 700 cobble in under ten seconds and which he declared had made his base the hub yet again. A mining machine with 41 deployers, a giant drill that crashed the server and then somehow duplicated itself (The duplicating server-crashing mining machine), and an iron-for-leather deal that left both sides sure they were scammed all belong to this stretch too.

IRIS built a Nether lava pump and planned to send lava home by train. On 2023-11-15 he and Kart dug into an ancient city and looted it (Ancient City Expedition). One marathon build session came on 2023-11-29, when prop and IRIS finished an automated Iron Factory in one go, with four giant windmills and item vaults. It reached hundreds of iron blocks within hours, which made Kart’s old iron farm look a bit sad (Windmills and the Iron Factory) ^{16 17}.

The server’s plumbing was a running saga. The Discord bridge broke repeatedly until prop reset the bot setup on 2023-12-04 and the new “ASMP Chat” relay finally worked both ways (Discord bridge fixed) ¹⁸. A few days later he set a scheduled restart every two days at 3 am on the Pterodactyl panel, proudly, by himself (Auto-restart and RAM troubles) ¹⁹. The schedule then misfired into one-minute boot loops on 2023-12-08 and again on 2023-12-14, when kira said the server “had a stroke” (The Restart Loop) ^{20 21}.

On 2023-12-09 prop travelled almost 3,000 blocks with Nature’s Compass to find spruce and cherry biomes, and unveiled what he called “the most over engineered over complicated honey farm built in asmp limbo” (The honey farm unveiled, Over-Engineered Honey Farm).

The long solo winter

From December the friends drifted away and Limbo became, as prop put it in effect, a one-man show. He built an iron factory building, a giant spinning mining drill that briefly became a cobble generator after hitting lava and water (The giant spinning drill), and gave newcomer Mero a tour and a starter kit in February (Mero's Induction) ²². In February he said he wanted a Hermitcraft-style server with “da bois”, and nYx replied that nobody would come if the goal was grinding (Hermitcraft Envy). In March he beat the Nether, lost his local instance and map data (The Lost Instance), and accepted that he was playing alone (Solo carrying the server). Friends mostly watched from Discord, and the chat suggests the in-joke was that he was “solo carrying the server”.

A thaw came in late March. kira, who hosted the machine, finally got in on 2024-03-18 ²³, came back on 2024-03-20 and said he would play it as plain vanilla (k1R4 returns to the server) ²⁴. Asked what he wanted, he said “put exposure”, and the Exposure camera mod arrived on 2024-03-25 ²⁵. On 2024-03-28 prop and kira finally explored together, shooting black-and-white film and hunting flowers for dye (Exposure Camera Day) ²⁶. DeathHack127 (Levi) joined on 2024-04-02 and settled far to the east (DeathHack127 Joins the Create Server) ²⁷.

The trains

April belonged to the railway. prop, advised by nYx on how to lay out a yard, decided to build a perfectly straight track of around 2,000 blocks to kira's Peninsula Base, since their bases lined up almost exactly (The Long Track to Kira Island). The line flattened IRIS’s acacia house (abi's House and Portal), home of one of the server’s only two Nether portals, though prop moved the big build rather than losing it ²⁸. On 2024-04-05 he declared the network finished: two main stations, a train yard, and keep-right traffic because he had laid the right side first (The Train Network Is Complete) ²⁹. A live map at map.axolotl.pink showed the trains and even their carriages (Create Track Map and the Train Network) ³⁰.

Mid-April went to farms. prop spawned a crowd of fake players named after friends to AFK-boost his skeleton farm and called 18 April the most active day in Limbo history (The Bot Army of April 18). That same day kira cut the VM to 4 GB of RAM, a change that was reverted a few days later (k1R4 Downscales the Server) ³¹. prop found that his Create liquid experience was worth about 43 levels a bucket and that his farm held 88 of them (The Infinite XP Farm). On 2024-04-24 he beat the Wither and built a beacon (Prop defeats the Wither). By then he had logged about 126 hours on the world ³².

The post-mortem and the lavacast

On 2024-04-24, lonely after months of solo play, prop announced that Limbo would close once the dragon was defeated ³³. What followed was a long debate about why it had failed (The Great Limbo Post-Mortem, Limbo's Ethos and Demise). kira’s reasons were Create, prop’s intimidating progress, no lore and too little recruiting ³⁴. prop laid out two options: kill the dragon immediately and open a fresh vanilla server, or wait for the 1.21 trial chambers update first. “Option 2” won ³⁵. Nobody got around to the dragon fight.

Two days later prop could not bring himself to wait. On 2024-04-26 he logged in, announced “lava cast has begun” ³⁶ and poured lava over his own base and the land around it, then dropped Carpet bots named after friends and famous YouTubers into it one by one, GrimWatch’s bot included (The Lava Cast). The server was stopped at about 14:19 ³⁷. His own verdict on the wreckage was short:

unrepairable damage no backups too fuck this world

³⁸

The “no backups” turned out to be too gloomy. The same day prop shared a zip of every backup ever made, from just before and just after the lavacast, so the roughly 130 hours of gameplay were never entirely lost (ASMP Limbo Ends) ³⁹.

Legacy

Limbo never found a crowd, but it set up what came next. The same console channel went straight on to host the Wither Storm test server on 2024-04-28 (Axolotl Storm), and the successor plan from the post-mortem (a fresh vanilla server on a public seed, with players kept close together) probably fed into Axolotl SMP Season 3. The mods channel’s name, “prop-only edition”, is still the most honest summary of the world. The friends are also fond of the leftovers: the train map, the camera mod, Tempad, and a long line of bots that died heroically in lava.