The Return: Season 1 Restored

The Return is what happens when a friend group’s oldest world refuses to stay dead. In the last days of October 2026, kira and prop reopened the original Season 1 world (Axolotl SMP Season 1) from a backup that was almost five years old, upgraded it to Minecraft 26.3, and put it online at axolotl.pink. The old players trickled back, the old farms were still standing, and nearly everyone agreed that this was the Minecraft they had been missing.

How it began

The seed of the Return was planted in #mc-chat. On 2026-10-27 prop pushed kira to make an “Axolotl ForeverWorld”, a mostly vanilla, Hermitcraft-style world, calling it the only true Minecraft experience they would end up enjoying, “like how we still fondly look back at our og axolotl days”. kira agreed. ¹ The same day kira announced that the self-hosted “axolotl” machine was being decommissioned after its SSD failed, and that Minecraft would move to an online host. ^{2 3 4} (The pitch is told in The Axolotl ForeverWorld Pitch.)

Four days later the forever world turned out to be the old one. On 2026-10-30 kira teased the OG members with “Remember the good old days of season 1?”, and on 2026-10-31 the announcement landed: the server was reopened at axolotl.pink on Minecraft 26.3, running Fabric with optimisation mods, cloud-hosted and paid for by kira, with old player data restored by username. ^{5 6} prop’s own chronicle added a final entry, “The Branch Timeline”, welcoming everyone back to a Season 1 that continued from the point after the 2b2t hack. ⁷ Kart summed it up in chat with “We are back. Again”. The whole story is on its own page as The Return: Season 1 Restored, and prop’s rallying cry lives on as We Are So Back.

The relaunch itself went live on 2026-10-31. ^{8 9 10}

Getting the machine running

Part of the return was plumbing. prop brought back the original Axolotl chat bridge, pre-rendered Xaero map data for the whole old world except the End, and he and kira finalised a mod list while kira set up the axolotl.pink domain. ^{11 12 13} (See Getting the Old World Ready Again and Shared Xaero Map Data.) The Discord bridge itself is kira’s discordlinkplus-fabric, a Paper plugin fork ported to Fabric by GPT with custom features, and later prop forked it again for A Fork of a Fork. ^{14 15}

Players installed a client modpack called “Axolotl SMP Revived”, first handed out as an .mrpack file in a temporary #asmp-s1-modpack channel while Modrinth reviewed it. ^{16 17} It brought voice chat (Simple Voice Chat, bridged to a Discord voice channel), Freecam and Distant Horizons, but no minimap. ^{18 19} The server runs in offline mode, so when an account changed, prop simply copied player files onto the new UUIDs. ^{20 21} There was no permissions mod this time: Going on Trust.

The first night

TPS sank to around 15 with only two players online, thanks to the block entities and villagers crammed into the Veteran Base. ^{22 23} That night prop and kira began Operation Clean Up: ripping out lag-causing junk, Jeswin’s builds and old paths, and fighting the War on Podzol, which prop hated and kira defended as “a nice block”. The mountain around the slime farm was flattened (The Mountain (by the Slime Farm)).

Meanwhile the backup showed its age. It predated several late-2021 farms, and the S1 funeral had not even happened yet in this version of the world, so prop listed the farms lost in the revival (Farms Lost to the Revival). ^{24 25} Old chunks kept their pre-1.18 terrain, so diamonds could be mined at y 15 rather than y -55. ^{26 27} Placed player heads, on the other hand, lost their names and tags in the upgrade. ²⁸

The crew comes home

By 2026-11-03 Hayan, IRIS, Kart, prop, kira and SuperCewl had rejoined, with Levi (the old DeathHack127, on a new account) also playing from 11-04. Grim, RJ, BotFragx, Snake, Jeswin, Fili and Saitama had not yet shown up. ^{29 30} A Ledger log of the backup listed every named player in the old world, which is how Hayan learned that he had never played here and so started fresh, far from spawn. He then died so often that Kart asked prop whether he was building a “Hayan farm”. ³¹ (See Hayan's First Days, The Hayan Farm and Hayan's Home.)

The returns came with small archaeology. prop found FiliTheLegend’s head in an old portal (Fili's Head in the Old Portal), IRIS toured the server and died repeatedly to GlitchSabre’s k1Slicer (The k1Slicer Server Tour), and the Veterans’ iron farm turned out to have run at about 75% for five years because an iron golem had clogged it. ³² (The Five-Year Clog) IRIS’s end-busting trip found an End already stripped bare (End Busting in an Empty End). Because the server is offline-mode, prop moved Levi’s hacked DeathHack127 inventory onto his new account, L3vi18 (DeathHack127 Lives Again as L3vi18). ²⁰

New world, old world

The restored save is 26.3 content on 2021 land, so armor trims, crafters, pale oak, trial chambers, the mace, spears, happy ghasts and copper armor all appeared in an old world. ^{33 34} The world border sits at 20k by 20k, with the edge around x = -10000, and the pinned seed is 25836763, which prop noted barely matters because the world is so old. ^{35 36 37}

Kart and IRIS flew out to the border and raided a trial chamber (Trial Chamber at the World Border). ³⁸ On 2026-11-06 prop launched “operation ancient city” and found the Silence trim in only his second chest, and began selling trim services (Operation Ancient City, prop the Shop). ³⁹ The same day Kart, long known as the player who lives in a hole, posted a picture of his new house. ⁴⁰ (Kart Gets a House, Kart Base)

On 2026-11-07 an “AxolotlWiki” bot joined the Discord, which Grim called an “ai wrapper for lore” (The AxolotlWiki Bot Arrives). Yes, that is us.

Legacy

The Return is, so far, a world about not letting go. It exists because an old backup survived, and it keeps its original quirks: the Veteran Base still groans with villagers, the End is still empty, and the funeral that defined December 2021 has not happened yet. For a few weeks it also gave a small friend group an excuse to log in at the same time again, and the chat suggests that was the real point.