ASMP Earth

ASMP Earth was the side server that nobody planned to be a season. prop floated it in June 2023 as a “chumma” (just-for-fun) server to tide everyone over until Minecraft 1.20 arrived, and it ended up as four months of flag-planting, plane-flying, newspaper-printing role-play on a scale model of the real planet. The world was a downloaded 1:1500 recreation of Earth, with real geography and almost nothing else. prop even billed it as “Season 3” in his cinematic, though the later Axolotl SMP Season 3 would take that number for itself. ¹

How it began

The idea dates to 2023-06-06, when prop proposed a goalless stop-gap server with no mods, to fill the gap until 1.20 and its Fabric performance mods. ² By 2023-06-11 the server was “almost ready” except for the world itself, and on 06-19 he announced it was up. ^{3 4} This came right after Axolotl SMP Season 2.5, the Create season, had faded out. The world file was being downloaded around 2023-06-17. ⁵

The server went live on 2023-06-20 on Minecraft 1.19.3 with a live map at map.axolotl.pink. prop’s first screenshot was captioned “And it begins”. ^{6 7} Spawn was in Rajasthan, India, and India was off-limits for claims. ^{8 9} The server ran on a home machine of kira, behind the The Axolotl VPN and a Pterodactyl panel, with a five-slot player cap. Joining needed a VPN key from kira. ^{10 11} The game chat was relayed to Discord through MCDiscordChat, which is why a lot of Earth’s story survives in the old #the-original-mc-chat channel. ^{12 13}

Launch day was the usual mess of inventory mix-ups and an online-mode fix, and ASMP Earth Launches came with “pure anarchy” ground rules (no hacking, no duping). ⁴ In practice the claims were posted in a channel and respected as no-trespassing, and by mid-August prop was telling newcomers “this is the chill season”. ¹⁴

The scramble for Earth

The first thing everyone did was claim a country. nYx took almost all of Japan, and kira immediately claimed the ocean around it as a “no trespassing” buffer. kira then took the Bermuda Triangle and, on 07-23, the whole USA, handing Mexico back so he would not squat on too much land. prop claimed all of Antarctica plus a corner of Australia, and also staked out Greenland and Iceland for Kart before Kart had even joined. ¹⁵ Others followed: Mero took New Zealand and a share of Korea, nYx added Taiwan, Rk took Indonesia, and IRIS (through prop) got South Africa and Madagascar. See The Scramble for Earth.

The map was gloriously odd. It had no villages, almost no passive mobs and far too much gold and diamond, so the group did the only sensible thing and role-played as nation states. ¹⁶ prop’s Antarctica was a flat, treeless snowfield that he colonised with saplings from unclaimed lands. kira’s Cuba had a blinking lighthouse tree and a lot of potatoes. nYx rebuilt Japanese architecture and struck an ore vein holding coal, emerald, gold and diamond, which prop declared rigged (Striking the Japanese KGF).

Travel between nations was slow, so on 2023-06-27 prop polled the group and added the Immersive Aircraft mod. Players flew coal-fuelled biplanes, built runways and plane shelters, and prop took on the role of air traffic control at the A.R.A. (Antarctican Research Airport). ^{16 17} On 2023-07-05 he flew from Antarctica to Japan with full radio role-play, and billed it as the first manned flight to another continent (First Manned Flight from Antarctica to Japan). ¹⁸ Two weeks later kira flew in as the Cuban delegate for a state visit and left with a research pact (kira's State Visit to Antarctica).

The newspaper and the news wire

Role-play needs a press. On 2023-06-27 nYx and prop settled on short items in #asmp-earth-international-news and a Sunday newspaper to sum up the week, branded the Axolotl News, with prop’s MS Paint logo and nYx’s convincing graphics (The Axolotl News Is Founded). The paper itself was named The Marincess Herald after a joke suggestion from GrimWatch. Four editions came out on 07-09, 07-16, 07-23 and 07-30, the paper was cancelled on 08-06 for lack of content, and prop posted a tombstone emoji on 08-23. ^{19 20 21}

The wire ran stories on the Great Coal Shortage of 2023, Antarctica’s biggest coal deposit and a lone chicken sighted in Antarctica. In the trade channel prop put two librarian villagers up “for adoption” with the warning that “The Villagers will be euthanized” (Morbius I and Samuel I Up for Adoption).

Breaking through

Midsummer was an exploration phase. With no structures on the map, half of 1.20’s content and the Warden were out of reach (The Missing Structures Crisis). prop lit the first Nether portal in Antarctica on 07-13, landing beside a fortress and a bastion, and cured his first zombie villager on 07-15 (First Nether Portal Opens in Antarctica, Zombie Villager Cure). On 2023-07-22 he added a custom nether portals datapack and punched through the bedrock to the Nether roof. This was the start of the Nether Roof Portal Network, a portal for every nation that doubled as a flight path. ^{22 23} (The Nether Roof Is Breached)

The server had its bad days too. A crash on 07-18 rolled kira’s inventory back and cost him his biplane. The The Power Cut Saga meant the home machine kept going down, and kira promised a Raspberry Pi to switch it back on automatically. ^{24 25 26} A creative test server ran from 2023-07-31 so that prop could design farms. ²⁷

Fabric, 1.20.1 and the border

On 2023-08-13 prop took the server down after a backup and moved it to Fabric 1.20.1. The mods channel got a client mod list, with JEI and the updated Immersive Aircraft required. ^{28 29 30} The same day he released his cinematic and wrote the The Beyond-the-Border Rules. Normal terrain was generating beyond the edge of the Earth map, so building out there was forbidden and the land stayed public. ^{31 32}

1.20 brought armor trims and archaeology, and with normal terrain generating past the border, ancient cities and their Wardens came within reach. DeathHack127 joined with a starter kit and a claim in France, Suresh (BotFragx) finally got his VPN file and spawned stranded in Rajasthan, and RJ arrived in early September to claim South America. ³³

The farm years

By late summer the server had a regular crew: prop, IRIS (the same person as the player Abishekishere, “abishek”), BotFragx and RJ. They hunted every armor trim, and on 2023-09-01 Abishek became the first player on the server to kill a Warden. ³⁴ (First Warden Killed on the Server) The next day Abishek found the rare Silence trim template (prop had noted it had a 1.2% chance in any ancient-city chest), and the two of them spent 148 diamonds trying trim colours. ^{35 36 37} (Silence Trim Obtained) The End was deliberately held back for a group fight, and on 2023-09-10 four players entered together and killed the Ender Dragon. prop remarked it was the first time he had seen so many people online at once. ³⁸ (Four Players Beat the Dragon Together)

The group then built farms for their own sake. prop’s prop's Trading Hall, bonemeal farm and a giant tree farm in Antarctica were joined by IRIS’s IRIS's Raid Farm, a huge Creeper Farm (Antarctica) whose spawn pads needed 24 to 48 cats, and a guardian XP farm at an ocean monument. prop began a research-centre mega build with floating fragments of Antarctica, and from 09-23 he dug the Item Sorter / Storage Hall. ^{39 40} Carpet fake players (the Carpet Fake Players page has the bot names) kept farms running while everyone was away.

The end

Activity fell off in October. On 2023-10-11 prop admitted that nobody was coming to play and that it was “not even a real minecraft world”, and IRIS agreed the server was dead the next day. ^{41 42} (Server Declared Dead) On 2023-10-14 prop announced the end of the season, with a final forced backup, and on 2023-10-18 he declared “SMP earth is done”. The 13 GB world download was shared on 10-22. ^{43 44 45 46} (SMP Earth Is Done) A modded Create server, ASMP Limbo, opened on 2023-10-23.

Legacy

Earth is remembered as the chill season, the one with the news desk, the planes and the countries. prop’s own verdict was that a downloaded map with diamonds and an end portal at Kanyakumari baked in could never feel like a true first server (Downloaded Map Isn't a Real SMP, Pre-placed End Portals). But it gave the group a shared joke vocabulary, from Antarctic Fried Chicken to the Marincess Herald, along with the roof portals, the trading hall and four players killing a dragon together.