Axolotl Storm

Axolotl Storm was not a survival world in the usual sense. It was an event server, a short, noisy mini-series built around a single boss: the Wither Storm from Minecraft: Story Mode, imported through Cracker’s Cracker's Wither Storm Mod. prop ran it, filmed it and edited it for YouTube, and for about a month a handful of friends tried to survive something that eats the world one chunk at a time. It never had a clean ending, and that is half of why it is remembered.

How it began

The Storm was born out of a funeral. In April 2024 ASMP Limbo, the modded Create server where prop was almost the only player, was winding down, and on 2024-04-26 prop gave up waiting for the dragon, announced he would “blow everything up” and lava-cast the whole base. ^{1 2} He spawned a parade of bots to die in the lava, typed “this is the end” and shut the server down. ³

Two days later he was already building the next thing. On 2024-04-28 prop proposed a Wither Storm event and, within hours, had a throwaway Forge 1.20.1 test server running with Cracker’s Wither Storm 4.0.1.1, Embeddium, FerriteCore and Oculus. ^{4 5} He opped everyone with unbreakable gear, elytras and keepInventory, then summoned a Storm together with kira and Levi (DeathHack127). They name-tagged it “Axolotl Storm” and force-evolved it for fun. ⁶ The result was good enough to become the server’s name.

The plan was to fill the time until Minecraft 1.21 arrived, after which the proper survival SMP would start, possibly reusing the Storm seed. ⁷ On 2024-04-30 prop published the client pack in #axolotl-storm-mods: Forge 1.20.1, a zip of optimisation and immersion mods, and the boss mod itself, which players had to fetch from Modrinth because the file was too big to attach. ^{8 9} On 2024-05-03 he added Simple Voice Chat, Konkrete and Just Zoom, promising that proximity chat, paired with Sound Physics Remastered, would make the server “immersive as fuck”. ^{10 11} Joining still needed the The Axolotl VPN, which Kart tried to do without on launch day.

On 2024-05-01 prop reset the world, deopped everyone, revoked every advancement and ran kill @a for a fair start. ^{12 13} nYx, Levi and prop played the opening session. He also wanted the server run in scheduled, Last Life Style Sessions, with a minimum of three players.

The Storm is summoned

The real thing was released on 2024-05-04, at about 17:02. prop and nYx, on voice chat, summoned the Wither Storm while the others were away, then went off for gravel to make a flint and steel. By the time they came back it had reached phase 3 and was at the door of their pink wool house. ¹⁴ The pair escaped through the Spawn Mineshaft Hole, built a portal, found a Nether fortress and set up a refugee camp in the Nether, the Storm Nether Base, with a bed outside the portal for overworld respawns.

That evening prop announced the The Journal Lore Rule: anyone playing while the Storm lived would get a writable book, to be filled in only at the end of each session so everyone had a similar number of entries, with the journals published for the lore. By 2024-05-11 kira and Kart were the only two players to have caught wither sickness, and prop wrote them into that lore as the people who had lived with the aliens in Independence Day. ¹⁵ See Wither Sickness Survivors.

Chomped

Everyone’s introduction to the boss was being eaten by it. On 2024-05-05 Levi recorded his own POV escape from under the Storm to the portal while Kart kept dying on purpose to pull its attention away, which was also when Kart cycled through borrowed identities with the The /skin Command, from All Might to Walter White. prop opped a second account, prop_cam, to fly around and film it. Kart’s screenshot of the Storm after he looked away for five minutes shows how fast it grew.

Hayan joined for the first time on 2024-05-08 and was chomped within minutes like the others, then coached by prop_cam towards a safe village, after a wrong sign on the coordinates at first. The next day kira logged in directly underneath the boss, got chomped several times and earned “Brushing Shoulders With Death”, which prop called a first, though Kart had already earned it on 2024-05-05 ^{16 17}; prop and nYx rescued him with a respawn anchor charge and a crashing server restart. Between sessions the two planners drew up the fight: smite swords, a bow, a great many ender pearls, and golden apples looted from a Treasure Bastion to cure wither sickness. The Safe Village, by prop’s account, never lost a villager.

Stalled

By mid-May the energy drained away. Players were busy, prop was spending more time editing the video than playing, and Levi complained that the “storm server” was dead. prop still refused to start the survival world until the Wither was finished. He also kept adding quality-of-life mods as the pack grew. ^{18 19}

The Formidibomb finale

On 2024-05-28 prop rallied kira, nYx and Levi for one last evening, handing out pearls, bows, Wither Storm amulets and a command block book. ²⁰ After a long chaos of deaths to Withered Symbionts and sickened mobs, they crafted Formidibombs and, at about 15:57, all four earned “The Strong Grow Weak…” by blowing the Storm up. ²¹ Within seconds all four were caught in the blast, and kira, nYx and Levi were blown up by the Storm’s own segments; then they earned a second advancement, “…The Weakened Arise Stronger”: the Storm had risen again, more powerful than before. ²²

When Levi declared the SMP over and called for survival, prop answered that it wasn’t. The event was “going on hold”, and they would return to finish the boss properly on a later day. ²³ The server was stopped that afternoon. ²⁴ The world’s end date is that finale, although it was started once more by accident and not finally stopped until 2024-05-31. ²⁵

Legacy

On 2024-05-30 prop said he needed to back up the world before setting up the next server, which became Axolotl SMP Season 3, and on 05-31 he found he had forgotten to remove the old files. ^{26 27} The Storm itself lives on in the footage: prop spent weeks editing the video, and the boss was officially left on hold rather than beaten. The Wither Storm Cast remain the group’s story of the month the Wither fought back, and the pink sheep that died unphotographed (The Pink Sheep) is still a sore point.