Potato SMP: Season 2 "Mekanism!"

Season 2 of the friends’ first servers swapped Origins for machines. It launched as Necro SMP Season 2 “Mekanism!” on 2021-05-22, running Forge 1.16.5 on nYx’s laptop, and within a week it was renamed Potato SMP, the name that would outlive it by months. It lasted barely over two weeks, but it produced a Digital Miner, the group’s first real tech race, a server host who, by prop’s account, all but quit after falling down a hole, and the vote that pointed the friends towards vanilla 1.17.

How it began

The previous season, Necro Origin SMP, had been Origins. On 2021-05-13 prop announced that the Origins server would stay online until the mods for the next season were decided ¹. The vote went to Mekanism, and on launch day prop announced Season 2 to @everyone ². The season marked a switch from Fabric to Forge: prop posted the Forge installer (1.16.5-36.1.0) with step-by-step instructions ³, and players copied the jars from #s2-required-mods, Mekanism among them, into their mods folders ^{4 5}. Optifine and a few performance mods were listed separately ⁶. The onboarding channel pointed newcomers to the Mekanism wiki and prop’s own “Bit-by-Bit” video series (see Season 2 Recommended Mods and Packs for the optional extras).

The server came up on the same IP as before ⁷. prop’s first report was that it worked, and soon after came “bruh already got diamonds” ⁸. Suresh and prop then threw up the Mekanism Spawn Base with a farm, a portal and chests of iron and food ⁹. Almost immediately prop was begging Necro to turn off spawn protection “for the love of god” ¹⁰, which the host insisted was already set to zero, as his settings screenshot proved (see Spawn Protection Saga).

The reset

The first world did not last a day. prop realised that “we generated the current world before we put in the mekanism mod” ¹¹, so spawn had no Mekanism ores. The fix was brutal and simple: delete the folder called world and open the server ¹². Necro did exactly that on 2021-05-23 with a random seed (see The Mekanism Reset). IRIS was left mourning “80 iron ingots” ¹³ and only then worked out that “that was vanila server we were playing” ¹⁴. He would lose everything again that same afternoon, minutes after showing off his new inventory and swearing he didn’t want to die (IRIS loses everything (again)) ¹⁵.

The Mekanism race

With a fresh world the season became a race between prop and Fili. Fili came back on a new PC with his friend V3nnkat (Fili returns and cyber arrives), and V3nnkat built a V3nnkat's Iron Farm within hours and dug a huge V3nnkat's Mineshaft. On 2021-05-25 prop finished the server’s first Digital Miner after grinding for steel and obsidian ¹⁶, and crowed that “i can get any ores on demand anytime anywhere now” ¹⁷. Fili built an Atomic Disassembler the same night ¹⁸; the two are told in The Digital Miner Comes Online. The same trip to mine obsidian left prop trapped under it in lava (prop trapped under obsidian).

By 2021-05-27 Fili had built an ore tripler while prop had upgraded all his machines to advanced and was hunting a new energy source ¹⁹; Fili would go on to quadrupling and reactors, and boasted he was the only one with a quadrupler (see The Mekanism race, Fili's Mekanism base and Spawn Teleporter). The wider system of steel, jetpacks and the Digital Miner is covered in Mekanism Progression.

Potato SMP

On 2021-05-28, at the host’s request, the server was renamed from N3cro SMP to Potato SMP with a new logo and VoxelMap on the recommended list ²⁰ (N3cro SMP becomes Potato SMP). The difficulty went to hard that day ²¹, and flying was enabled and JEI added on 2021-05-29, because jetpacks were setting off the anti-fly kick ^{22 23}.

Hosting from a laptop shaped the whole season. Power cuts changed the IP, so prop wrote a Python program and Discord bot to start the server and post the new address automatically ²⁴ (The auto-IP bot). The server was normally switched off around midnight ²⁵ (Server Hours and Difficulty).

The host’s own luck was the worst. On IRIS’s first day, Suresh died saving him ²⁶, and nYx, coming to help with prop, fell through a hidden one-block hole into a ravine and lost everything too (Necro's fall). nYx’s defence was that the hole “was hidden completely unless i went in sneak” ²⁷. prop’s verdict was that Necro “basically quit on the server” ²⁸.

The vote and the end

Meanwhile the talk was already about what came next. On 2021-05-27 prop reported that lore had been confirmed for Season 3, pitching a 1.17 “story mode rpg server” ^{29 30}, to which nYx replied that the name “necro smp” “sounds too weird” since it literally translates to death SMP ³¹ (Lore promised for Season 3). On 2021-06-02 prop put out an “Important Vote”: stay in Mekanism, or move to 1.17 ³². In the thread that followed (The Vote to Leave Mekanism, Season Vote Pitched: Vanilla Roleplay), Fili announced “you guys won” ³³, and Kart called dibs on playing Technoblade ³⁴ (The season vote). The final announcement on 2021-06-06 said the group would go to 1.17 once a stable server was available, with Mekanism running until then ³⁵.

On 2021-06-07 a newcomer arrived: kira (k1R4) toured the Potato SMP, finished prop’s turbine and asked how things stood in “hyphae” ^{36 37} (k1R4 arrives). The Mekanism world was still online that day. The announcements list the season as officially over on 2021-06-09, the day the Caves and Cliffs world opened.

Legacy

Potato SMP gave the group its first shared machine culture, its first tech rivalry and the habit of voting on seasons in public. It also left a name behind: when kira took over hosting on 2021-06-18 ³⁸, the next world (Create Together) was still called Potato SMP, and the label stayed on the server’s IP bot long after, through the first Axolotl season (Axolotl SMP Season 1). Much of the group that played the Mekanism season followed it there.