Axolotl SMP Season 2

Axolotl SMP Season 2 was the world that was promised as “the Wild Update” half a year before it existed ¹. It ran on a fresh vanilla-plus-Fabric Minecraft 1.19 map, hosted by kira on a machine at home, and it was declared an anarchy from day one. It lasted roughly six months, produced two of the group’s best-remembered fiascos (the dragon that died too early and the statue that started a war), and then faded into a very quiet autumn before being replaced by the modded Season 2.5.

How it began

Season 1 had spent early 2022 in a long twilight, with kira moving the server to a new PC and Docker, and the plan for a successor was to start fresh on 1.19 because updating the old world “would be chaos” ². In mid-June 2022 the rules took shape. prop wrote a “possible rules” document and the group settled on a loose “roleplay anarchy” (explicitly not 2b2t) ^{3 4}; prop later announced there would be no shopping district, economy or council, and that stealing, killing and even wars between player-made countries were legal (Season 2 Declared Full Anarchy). In the end the whole rulebook shrank to two lines: no abusing glitches, and (DONT DO SHADY SHIT) “DONT DO SHADY SHIT”.

kira put a few settings to a vote in #s2-voting: quality-of-life mods such as voice chat and BlueMap, a better-horses mod to make horses the main transport, and a random seed ⁵ (Season 2 Settings Vote). Horses won, and the world border was set to a radius of 3000 blocks because nobody was expected to use elytra ⁶. The required client mods were Fabric API, HorseBuff and Plasmo Voice, with extras like Zoomify and Sodium on the optional list ⁷ (Season 2 Mods). prop proposed a flat island spawn; kira tested seeds in a 1.19 world and then pre-generated the overworld on 2022-06-19 ^{8 9} (Season 2 World Pregen). The server sat unexposed until the opening.

The opening and the first weeks

After a round of “when is everyone free?” the Season 2 Opening Ceremony happened on 2022-06-20, with prop telling kira to flip the switch ¹⁰. nYx was first in, prop promptly died to mobs a dozen times, and Saitama (in game: Akshay7432) was soon grinding diamonds. The founding trio of prop, nYx and Saitama sealed a pact of friendship that later mutated into a cult-like joke (prop-nYx-Saitama Alliance); prop and nYx also made a two-man cult around a goat horn, until the horn was lost to lava on 06-24 (The Goat Horn Cult).

The whitelist, an in-game password and an offline-mode server meant every newcomer needed the “whitelist dance” (Offline Mode and the Whitelist Dance). Hayan, Emperor Sian, Rk, ntize (in game: _eb), and Suresh all arrived in the first weeks (with Fili following in August), and bases spread out around the spawn circle. On 06-27 prop used the BlueMap console to mark everyone’s claims ¹¹ (Land Claims and BlueMap Markers), and Kart, who built right next to other people’s bases, became the subject of the season’s first land dispute (Kart's Base Crowding Dispute).

On 06-30, when ntize asked about the End, prop said there were no rules, but it would be better to save the first dragon for everyone to fight together ¹². The same week the group learned of Technoblade’s death, and kira proposed a memorial on the server (Technoblade Mourned, Memorial Proposed).

July: the Wild Update, tried at full speed

The first official event was prop’s raid on an ancient city on 2022-07-09, scheduled for “today evening 7 o clock ish” ¹³. The group laid white wool lines to muffle the sculk sensors, camped in a tent outpost, and sealed an alliance by eating a cookie (Conquest of the Ancient City, The Cookie Alliance, The White Wool Line of Life). The warden nearly one-shotted them, but the city was looted of about 98 percent of its goods, and that same evening Sian shot a warden dead from range, the first and only warden kill of the season (Sian Kills the Warden).

Then came the dragon. In the early hours of 2022-07-11, Akshay7432 killed the Ender Dragon entirely by himself ¹⁴. prop was furious (“why would u go and do dragon alone”) and logged it in his photo recap as the thing that “ruined the second event of the server” ¹⁵. The kill gave Saitama an elytra and a dragon head, and he went on to loot end cities and sell elytra at a markup (Saitama Solos the Dragon, Elytra Monopoly). Sian and _eb later brought the dragon back with end crystals, which proved the egg was renewable (Sian and eb Respawn the Ender Dragon, Dragon egg renewable).

July also gave the season much of its texture:

• The accidental raid at Sian’s base, where two villagers and a bed produced dozens of deaths and a Hero of the Village (The Accidental Raid at Sian's Base).
• The first PvP feud between Sian and _eb over a stolen warden head (The First War: Warden Head Feud).
• A one-day creative Create-mod event on 2022-07-17, hosted by kira on a separate Forge event server, which partly fizzled on “unknown host” errors ^{16 17} (Create Mod Creative Event, Event Server).
• A Hermitcraft-style diamond economy, with elytra, netherite and enchanted gear all priced in diamonds (The Netherite Trade).
• Saitama’s NASA-style observatory, Sian’s raid farm, _eb’s industrial district and a Nether roof full of connecting portals (Akshay's Observatory, Sian's Raid Farm, _eb's Industrial District, Nether Roof Portal Network).
• kira logging in as a self-declared peasant, killing Saitama and taking his shulker box (Kira Kills Saitama and Takes His Loot).

On 07-29 Sian finished his own Technoblade memorial, a giant creeper head topped with a statue (Sian's Technoblade Memorial), and on 07-30 prop survived a drop of over 150 blocks off the Nether roof and posted it as the greatest clutch he had ever done ¹⁸ (The Greatest Clutch).

August: advancements, borders and the statue

By August the server was in a grinding routine of advancement hunts. Because the border held no warm ocean, kira temporarily widened it from 6000 to 8000 blocks on 08-04 so Sian and _eb could fetch coral, then reset it about twenty minutes later ^{19 20} (The Border Opens for Coral). Sian chased 100 percent advancements and the long, dolphin-plagued How Did We Get Here? (Advancement Hunting), while kira ruled that there were no rules, lag machines included, as long as others could remove them in-game.

The day everyone remembers is 2022-08-09. prop had hidden his Technoblade statue under sand for a planned unveiling, with fireworks and nYx’s noteblock songs. The reveal dissolved when DeathHack127 began sacrificing nYx with a goat horn, chanting “sacrifice for the blood god” ²¹ (Blood for the Blood God). nYx retaliated against DeathHack’s beach villa; DeathHack killed prop (whose gear ended up scattered, though DeathHack swore he never stole any of it ²²), later explaining “i just wanted to declare war” ²³. The group argued for hours over whether DeathHack could compare himself to Technoblade. prop remembered it a month later as a tribute “botched so hard” that it caused a war on the server ²⁴. He turned it into the video “Kid starts a war in the name of Technoblade” (The Technoblade Statue War).

Two days earlier, when nYx cancelled on yet another event, prop had already vented that nothing had gone properly “after iris funeral”: the castle reveal blown up, hide-and-seek wrecked, a thinly attended ancient city, and the dragon ²⁵ (prop's Cursed Events Rant). He swore off announcing events and promised to log on when many people were online instead.

The long quiet

After August the world slid into what the chat itself called a dead server. People drifted off and the host lost power or internet several times (Power Cut Takes Down the Server). Sian and _eb kept their warden cage and their advancement hunts going, Rk was often the only regular, and prop kept starting trading halls and raid-farm ideas. On 2022-11-17 kira introduced Hisoka as “here to revive the server” ²⁶, and prop’s reply was to tell him to read the history channels “to see how fucked up our server is” ²⁷. prop wrote those chronicle chapters himself in November, opening with the new 1.19 world, an alliance of peace that “later evolved into a cult”, and Kart’s early land quarrels ²⁸.

The end

kira announced on 2022-12-30 that Season 3 would be modded around Create: Aeronautics ²⁹, and the server went offline on 2023-01-01 for an architecture upgrade ³⁰. On 2023-02-09 kira asked prop to archive the Season 2 channels ³¹. prop’s final chronicle entry ended the season with a “random bullshit plot”: the war destroys the world, and everyone wakes up with amnesia in a new, modded one ³². That new world was Season 2.5, the Create server where prop built trains and a cave of contraptions.

Legacy

Season 2 is where the group’s anarchy experiment was put to the test, and where Technoblade’s death, the Dream SMP-flavoured rivalries and the Hermitcraft-style economy all collided. It left behind some of the most-repeated phrases in the chat (“blood for the blood god”, “hit the ground too hard” (Hit the Ground Too Hard) and “the monopoly, the capitalism”), the BlueMap markers that recorded who claimed which hill, and a pile of bits about who stole what from whom.