Create Together

Create Together was a short, busy, slightly absurd chapter of the friends’ Minecraft history: three weeks in June and July 2021 on a Forge 1.16.5 modpack built around the Create mod’s gears, belts and contraptions. It was the first world kira ever hosted for the group, and in a way the rehearsal for everything that came after. It also kept the old name. The Discord bot still labelled it “Potato SMP” the whole time (see Potato SMP (It's Lore Now)).

How it began

The Caves and Cliffs world that followed the Mekanism season had died within days, and by 2021-06-14 prop had already called it dead and tried the Create Together pack on his own laptop. On 2021-06-18 he said what he wanted: “i just wanna play create together modpack as a long standing thing with yall” ¹. The catch was a host, so kira asked whether Ubuntu 20.04 was acceptable ² and a few hours later reported “ok box has been setup” ³. That was the kira Hosts Create Together. The server ran as a systemd service on kira’s home Linux machine, started through tmux with Aikar’s flags and a 5 GB heap ⁴.

Getting in took some doing. Players were told to move their existing mods out of the way and extract a mods.rar from #s3-mod-folder ⁵, and prop shared a YouTube playlist of Create tutorials, starting with the water wheel and mechanical press, for newcomers ⁶. Addresses were handed out by kira’s Python bot, which he had hurriedly made from a staging copy of another bot (“too lazy to create new bot”) ⁷. That bot is the StonerBob / the Axolotl Bot of the later chat. On 2021-06-20 the Simple Voice Chat mod arrived and prop walked IRIS through joining ⁸. Kart was kicked for not having the mod and was promptly accused of hacking, so he posted a screenshot of his mod list to prove he had no Wurst client ⁹. All of this is the Create Together takes over episode.

The rules were looser than in earlier seasons. Separate bases were allowed, though prop asked that nobody wander 2,000 blocks away ¹⁰. One of the earliest screenshots shows a pattern in the fresh world that prop explained as the layout for his house, started in survival with stone tools and no op.

The cursed IP

Hosting from a home connection gave the world its running joke. kira’s address normally changed whenever the router did, but this time it simply would not. “cursed af, ip hasn’t changed at all,” kira wrote on 2021-06-27 ¹¹, and everyone begged him not to restart the server and break the streak ¹² (The Cursed IP). It lasted until 2021-07-08, when prop reported “it changed” ¹³. The rest of the home-hosting experience is in The Server on Kira's Home Connection: an outage after somebody yanked the ethernet cable ¹⁴, followed by a scheduled power shutdown the next day ¹⁵ (Somebody Yanked the Ethernet Cable), a one-player-sleep datapack added on 2021-06-26 (One-Player Sleep Added), and a week of nonstop uptime that left the server laggy until kira restarted it on 2021-07-05 ¹⁶.

Machines, merchants and thieves

The Create mod was prop’s playground. His base near spawn grew into a gear-driven fortress with an elevator, Create workstations and what he called the biggest storage system on the server (prop's Create base). The mod gave the world an automatic Automatic Tree Farm with an ultra-fast sorter, an Auto Miner and a Blaze spawner farm with a glass enclosure.

Not everything worked. IRIS’s quarry burned in lava and prop’s netherite miner tunnel defeated him after two days (Failed Machines). prop’s advice to IRIS on Create’s shadow steel was blunt: do not bother. Even the pack had its quirks: caps lock made you walk forward on its own, which prop defended with “its not a bug, its a feature” (Caps lock auto-walk).

Meanwhile an economy sprang up. IRIS sold potions, wool, enchanted books and, famously, potatoes. nYx declared “Communism prevails” when prop caught somebody stealing his things and Suresh living in his house ¹⁷, and IRIS replied that he shared iron but sold potatoes: “i sell them” ¹⁸ ('Communism prevails', IRIS the merchant). The cooperative spirit was supposed to be kira’s The Resource-Sharing Pact. IRIS and prop built a Create Together Villager Trading Hall and “grinded villagers to the core”, and in early July the pair were handing out max-level enchantments for a diamond each ¹⁹ (Enchantment trading boom). kira, for his part, suspected a scam when he found IRIS’s villager selling Mending for only 18 emeralds (The mending 'scam').

Small dramas

The chat of those weeks reads like a village gossip column.

• Snake followed a treasure map for twenty minutes (“bruh after twenty minutes i found it”) and came back with a chest and a heart of the sea ²⁰ (Snake's Buried Treasure).
• kira announced that he had reached the Create endgame, “but died and lost all my stuff in between :/” ²¹ (k1R4 Reaches Create Endgame and Loses Everything).
• Kart declared a tripwire dupe and “INFINTE EMERLADs” (Kart's Tripwire Dupe). A few hours later IRIS discovered coloured saplings in Kart’s possession and his own two blue ones gone, and demanded to know how this happened ²². Kart said he had punched a pink tree, but IRIS countered that blue trees only grow from the saplings Kart had taken. This is The Great Sapling Heist, with Kart's pink tree at its centre.
• IRIS spent hours finding a distant village and hours more trying to breed its villagers: 30 beds, stacks of bread, and for half an hour the villagers just looked at the bread ²³ (IRIS's Villager Breeding Ordeal).

On 2021-07-07 prop learned from JEI that ancient debris can spawn from a basalt generator, and the same night “designed a passsive netherite farm” ²⁴, later a Create schematic to build on the main server (Passive netherite farm).

The last dragon and the vote

The second week had a sour note. On 2021-07-05 kira said he was thinking of taking the server down soon, and that “create is good but its not my jam” ²⁵. prop wanted a “hermitcraft style” vanilla server “with ppl actually not quitting for once” ²⁶. That wish is a fair description of the Axolotl SMP that followed.

On 2021-07-08 prop gathered ender pearls from piglin barter and announced “Pearls and blaze powder ready for dragon boisss lets do it today” ²⁷.

kira, busy, was missing from the expedition, and Kart too, so Suresh was drafted as the substitute ²⁸. They dug 2,000 blocks out to a stronghold, killed the dragon, and prop called dibs on the egg ²⁹. The same night kira wrote that he wanted to play vanilla “so badly now” and asked for an end date ³⁰. prop agreed that the only reason there had been any activity that day was the dragon ³¹. IRIS objected that people who had not played a real part in the Create world should not get a say ³², but the vote to end went ahead (The vote to end Create Together). On 2021-07-10 prop settled it with a single word: “end” ³³. That afternoon kira began posting setup votes for the new server ³⁴.

Legacy

Create Together only lasted three weeks, but a lot of what the museum later covers began here. It was kira’s first time as host, and it started his habit of running the machines, the bot and the IP. The Potato SMP name stayed on the bot’s embed for months after the modpack was gone. IRIS the merchant, Kart the duper and prop the engineer appeared here in nearly the form they would keep. prop called the vanilla 1.17 world “the next season of this smp” ³⁵. That world became Axolotl SMP Season 1, launched on kira’s Fabric 1.17.1 server on 2021-07-11, and Create came back years later as a season of its own (Axolotl Create Season 3).