Axolotl SMP Season 1 Goes Live

Every museum has a first exhibit, and for the Axolotl worlds it is a terminal window. On the evening of 11 July 2021 kira shut down the Create Together server and started a Fabric 1.17.1 one in its place; the service reported itself running at 17:22 UTC. ¹ File permissions turned out to be broken, and had to be fixed before anything would behave. ²

Getting it to stay up

kira and prop spent the afternoon crashing and restarting the server while they wired in the Discord chat bridge, whitelisted everyone by name and ran into offline-mode UUID problems along the way. Eventually kira declared it done:

aight server is functional time to deploy this mf

^{3 4} prop’s reply, in the announcements channel, was a nudge to “do the deed”. ⁵

Earlier that day prop had still been posting the ETA as “Tomorrow”. ⁶ That evening kira posted the @everyone announcement anyway: the much-awaited 1.17.1 server was officially online, and players would need Java 16. ⁷

The world and the “rules”

The map had been pregenerated beforehand: 393,129 overworld chunks, 5.1 GB once the Nether and End were counted, inside a 5,000-block border. ^{8 9} The starting mod list was light: Lithium, Phosphor, fabric-tailor, Ledger (a CoreProtect equivalent) and the disfabric bridge, with BlueMap held back. ¹⁰

kira also set the tone for the season:

Btw this season, no rules ie; we ain’t imposing rules. If the rest of the people feel it’s wrong person is punished. Also we can overrule

¹¹ The chat suggests power fluctuations pushed the proper opening of the whitelist to the next day, 12 July, when prop was already confirming the version as 1.17.1. ¹²

Day one

prop posted the first screenshot of the new world with the caption “where this server started”, then a join shot of axolotl-prop. ^{13 14} He had already dug a base into a ravine at 40 ~ -140, the beginnings of prop's ravine house, and kira’s reaction to the idea of theft was “if you steal you fucked boi”. ^{15 16}