Axolotl SMP Season 1

Axolotl SMP Season 1 was the world the friends keep coming back to. It was a vanilla-feeling Fabric server with Hermitcraft-style datapacks, run from a spare computer at kira’s home, and it lived through a farm boom, a shopping district, a staged funeral, two griefings, one rollback and a slow fade. It opened on 11 July 2021 and was archived the following June. It came back, improbably, in 2026 as The Return: Season 1 Restored.

where this server started — prop, posting the first screenshot on launch day ¹

How it began

Season 1 grew out of the Create Together modpack season. After the dragon fight there on 8 July, kira asked for an end date so the group could go vanilla, and prop called time on it two days later. The friends then auditioned seeds (Picking the Axolotl seed). prop’s seed 25836763 won: plains spawn, jungle nearby and a decently distant village. ^{2 3} kira pregenerated a 5,000-block-radius world on Fabric 1.17.1 on 11 July; he and prop logged in that evening and everyone else joined from 12 July on a whitelist. ^{4 5}

The server first came up on 11 July at around 17:02 UTC on a Fabric launcher ⁶, and prop had told the group “no mods this time”, just vanilla with datapacks. ^{7 8} The only server-side extras at first were things like Ledger, the block logger kira called “coreprotect for fabric”. ⁹ (The Season 1 Server Stack has the full list.) The server ran in offline mode, which meant every newcomer required the whitelist dance. ¹⁰ Chat flowed to Discord through the AxolotlChat bridge, with !online and !console commands. ¹¹ kira laid down a “no rules” policy (Season 1's 'No Rules' Policy): the community would police itself, with the single firm ban on duping after Kart confessed to using the 1.17 anvil glitch (Kart's Anvil-Dupe Confession).

The first players were prop, kira and GrimWatch, who called themselves the The Veterans and walled a starter settlement about 300 blocks from spawn (The Veteran Club Is Founded). Kart, Suresh, nYx, 0uttadaworld and the rest followed over the next two days. ^{12 13} That settlement became Veteran Base, the hub of the whole season.

The first weeks packed in a lot. On 15 July Omen_49 wandered into the base carrying Bad Omen, and because the villager trading hall made the base count as a village, he set off a raid that killed prop and kira dozens of times (The Great Bad Omen Raid). Later that day he was caught x-raying (Omen Caught X-Raying). DeathHack127 and Omen founded the Monke Alliance, and the Veterans declared war on it (The Veterans Declare War on the Monkes). On the morning of 19 July kira, prop, Snake and Grimwatch found the stronghold and killed the Ender Dragon, eight days after launch (The First Ender Dragon Falls). ^{14 15}

Farms, shops and the first quiet

Late July was all business. prop and kira ran a shop out of the base, selling max-enchanted picks and books for diamonds (Max Pick Business Booms). ^{16 17} They built the creeper farm, the slime farm, a god-tier iron farm and the community Enderman XP farm. FiliTheLegend, back from a long Hypixel ban, joined on 26 July and promptly lost a pile of gear to the End void (Fili arrives). kira’s gold farm on the nether roof gave him 170 levels in half an hour and a lot of lag (kira's Gold Farm). kira also opened a gold tent as a shop in the The Diamond Economy.

Then the server ran out of steam. Players drifted to Hyphae, Hypixel Skyblock and other games, and the chat filled with “ded server” checks (The 'Ded Server' Summer). kira and DeathHack127 drained an ocean monument for a base and a guardian farm (Draining the Ocean Monument). From mid-August the server sat idle for weeks (16 August to 8 September was the quietest stretch), apart from kira’s poll on whether to keep it alive (Keep the server alive vote). ^{18 19} The pause was not only boredom: the machine at home suffered power cuts, a blown backup fuse and ISP trouble (The Server on Kira's Home Connection).

The rebirth

In September prop found his motivation again, helped by easy farm designs from ianxofour and company (Farm-Designer Canon). On 13 September kira and prop agreed to keep the pregenerated world and let 1.18 generate the terrain beyond the border. ²⁰ prop built a streamed raid farm on a pillager-outpost island, and then the server found a project nobody had planned: every active player started building their own piece of one prismarine-and-sandstone Nether tunnel and central hub, which prop called the server’s “first unintentional community project” (Nether Hub and Tunnels). ²¹ Players kept joining in waves. ²² Suresh rejoined on 22 September after a long absence (Kart quipped it had been “2 years”), and IRIS (abishekishere in game, whitelisted back in July) returned to the Discord on 23 September and became the dedicated builder, with prop “adopting” him (IRIS, Prop Adopted Abi). ^{23 24 25}

The autumn peak

October 2021 was the high point. prop posted an official register of every farm in #asmp-s1-farms-list, from the Veterans’ slime, iron and wool farms to kira’s gold and guardian farms and the perimeter crew’s Omega Guardian XP farm. kira’s wither skeleton farm on the nether roof pushed the world border from 5k to 10k. ²⁶ Ideas got bigger: a Gladiator Arena that needed over 34,000 smooth stone slabs, a TNT-powered cobble factory, and the The Perimeter project, a chunk-clearing machine meant to host an omega base. There were feuds, too: prop banned Kart from the base region for blowing up farms and shops, and Kart fell into the void and lost his netherite. Because each backup kept breaking the redstone farms, kira switched to a backup every 12 hours of play. ^{27 28}

The Fall

On the night of 27 October 2021, outsiders logged in under the accounts of prop and abi, used op to delete the recent saves, and wiped out the base. In the early hours, the chat reported inventories wiped, about 50 withers over the Veteran Base and everything covered in lava. ²⁹ prop had been spawning joke Carpet bots named Technoblade and jeb_ that same day, and he blamed those fake celebrities for drawing the attention of 2b2t-style exploiters (The Copenheimer Grief, The 2b2t Griefers, Famous-Name Bots). kira published the server log and took the server offline; a Ledger rollback on 4 November failed because lava kept destroying the restored builds. ³⁰

On the evening of 7 November the group agreed to restore a 20-day-old backup, most likely the one from 7 October. ^{31 32 33} The friends treated it as time travel and called the result The Alternate Timeline. prop wrote it all up as the chapter “The Fall” in his own chronicle, #asmp-s1-history (prop's S1 Chronicle). ³⁴

Alternate timeline, shopping district and funerals

The restored world came back to life quickly. prop and the others started the Perimeter Project, the mall design contest was won by prop’s heart-shaped design, and on 22 November the server held its first meeting about a Shopping District with 15x15 plots and diamond-block rent. ^{35 36} The Council of Axolotl, made up of every active member, took on the governing role, and IRIS finished a 64-module honey farm in the End. ³⁷ Meanwhile kira patched the server against Log4Shell, and on 13 December he updated it to 1.18, making it public that night. ³⁸ He also announced that 1.19 would be Axolotl S2. ³⁹

As the winter chill set in, so did the lore. prop introduced custom Blockbench models (Custom Models and Patents), starting with the Stormbreaker axe and ending with the Glitchpop axe (The Glitchpop Axe). IRIS announced he was done, “ascended” to The Watchers, and was given a staged funeral at the Veteran Base on 18 December, a Dream SMP-style ceremony that prop filmed and that dissolved into F spam (Abishek's Will, Abi's Funeral Site). ⁴⁰ A “revival event” followed in January (The Revival Event).

The twilight

New Year’s Eve brought a second grief: intruders joined on Kart’s account and killed nYx before they were shut out within minutes, and kira introduced a password login system. ^{41 42 43} On 1 January prop said the server had “died” three times, once from inactivity and twice from being hacked, and was still going strong. ⁴⁴ The aftermath is catalogued in Post-Grief Security.

The rest of the season was endurance. The server was very laggy after 1.18 because kira’s five-year-old Pentium could not cope. ⁴⁵ After a switch to a new ISP the pings reached hundreds or thousands of milliseconds. The server was barely playable until late February. ⁴⁶ On 12 March 2022 kira moved the world onto a new machine, which he named “axolotl” (The 'axolotl' Machine and AxolotlShare), and it later ran under Docker and a Pterodactyl panel. ^{47 48} prop built his piston-themed megabase (prop's Megabase) and planned a hide-and-seek event that was postponed again and again until he deleted the event and called it cursed. ^{49 50} kira announced a shutdown for inactivity on 19 March and made it official on 25 March, saying the server would be back only for events or on request. ^{51 52} It was switched on only now and then through the spring. The channels were archived and kira declared “rip s1” on 19 June 2022. ⁵³ By then the new server was already pregenerating, and Axolotl SMP Season 2 held its opening ceremony on 20 June. ^{54 55}

Legacy

The friends remember Season 1 as the peak (The Peak of Season 1): a Nether hub, nearly every farm design, wars, hackers and a funeral, all in one world. Every server since, in its own way, has tried to recapture it. prop closed the S1 lore on 29 September 2022 in “The End of a Universe”, noting the server had been attacked twice. ⁵⁶ The world itself never quite went away. In June 2024 prop was still talking about staging a wallpaper-style scene of everyone’s skins in the old S1 world. ⁵⁷

On 30 and 31 October 2026 an old backup was found and relaunched on Minecraft 26.3 at axolotl.pink. kira and prop began “Operation Clean Up” of the Veteran Base, and old players drifted back. The backup had caught the players preparing for the Deep Dark, stockpiling snowballs and wool. ^{58 59} It is older than some of the farms that came later, so those were gone, and the funeral had not even happened yet. The friends agreed that “old is still gold”. See The Return: Season 1 Restored.