Axolotl SMP Season 2.5

Season 2.5 was the Axolotl SMP’s in-between season: a modded, Create-powered world on Fabric 1.19.2 with Terralith terrain, wedged between the vanilla anarchy of Axolotl SMP Season 2 and a Season 3 that was supposed to wait for Create Aeronautics. It began with a teaser and a VPN, produced the most elaborate train network the friends had ever built, and faded out by June with one player doing nearly all the work. By the end prop was close to the only player, and nYx joked that it should be called “propolotl smp”. ¹

How it began

On 2023-02-06 kira posted a “coming soon” teaser, and on 2023-02-09 he announced modded Season 2.5. It was meant to get everyone familiar with Create ahead of Season 3, which was then planned around Create Aeronautics. ^{2 3} See Season 2.5 Begins Behind the Axolotl VPN. The big change was access: joining now required kira’s WireGuard tunnel, the The Axolotl VPN, so the server was never directly exposed. ^{4 5}

prop’s own season chronicle ended with a lore bridge: the Season 2 war destroyed the world, and everyone woke up with amnesia in a new, modded one. ⁶ On 2023-02-10 he reset the channels (leaving “so many archived channels”) and rattled off the server’s lineage: Nyx S1 Origins, S2 Mekanism, S3 Create, then vanilla ASMP S1 (“most chad season”), the anarchy-ish ASMP S2, and now S2.5. ^{7 8} See Channels reset for Season 2.5.

The pack was Fabric 1.19.2 built around Create, with Terralith worldgen, Traveler’s Backpack, a shared ender chest, JEI, WTHIT, Simple Voice Chat and the usual performance mods. ^{9 10} kira hosted the jars too big for Discord on his “AxolotlShare” Nextcloud, and prop posted a ready-made game folder that imported straight into MultiMC, UltimMC or Prism. ^{11 12} The whole list lives at Season 2.5 Mod List.

The Glorious Contraption Cave

On the very first day prop found what he took for a giant cave and then realised the whole mountain was hollow. ¹³ See The Hollow Mountain. He turned it into The Glorious Contraption Cave, his Create factory and, in theory, a community area.

Over the following weeks the cave filled up: a 10k-stress-unit generator, a giga windmill, a remote-controlled auto-miner that “deleted half a chunk in 10 minutes”, an Iron Nugget Farm and Ore Doubler, a Lava Collection System drawing on the Nether lava ocean, the Flattest Tree Farm, and an Automatic Cobble, Sand and Gravel Generator he explained in eleven steps. ^{14 15 16} The same toys caused trouble: in early March a drill contraption crashed the server every time its chunk loaded, locking prop out of his own accounts until kira read the logs. ^{17 18} See The Server Killer Machine.

Trains, steam and a station

The first Create train ran on 2023-02-28, and prop followed it with more carriages, automatic doors and signals. ¹⁹ See The First Train on the Server. It grew into the Axolotl Train Network with a second route through the cave so trains could avoid each other, and in the chat it became the Pop Express, with prop as a joking tour-guide driver. Beyond the cave, he began Axolotl Central, a four-platform grand central station, and after a remark from nYx about Hogwarts Legacy he decided to hang floating candles in it like the Great Hall. ^{20 21} See Train Station Begins, with Hogwarts Candles.

Power came from kira’s Kelp Farm and Steam Engine: a kelp-fed steam engine on blaze burners. ²² The two of them pushed it into “giga mode” (see Giga mode), reaching 147k stress units. ^{23 24} See Steam Engine Completed and Giga Steam Engine Mode. prop’s pride in all this was loud, and so was the in-joke that he was building an entire network to be its only rider.

Who was actually there

The active core was prop and kira (the Create-mod builders), with Fili building separately and, from late February, Hayan and, by mid-March, Mero (who played as captainbolt) joining in. ^{25 26 27 28} Fili’s arrival made everyone briefly paranoid, and kira reportedly threatened to kill the server if he caught him stealing. ²⁹ See Fili joins and everyone panics. Emperor Sian and Rk turned up in the second half. The newcomers settled around the map, in places like captainbolt's Base, Hayan's Base and EmperorSian's Castle, and prop ran train lines out to them. ^{30 31 32}

On 2023-03-27 prop gave Sian a long Create crash course ³³, and the same day a huge ruined-portal castle village turned up after kira had flown 10k blocks without finding a village. ^{34 35} See Castle Village Discovered. Later rk's cave house and the village rush by nYx and rk in late April and early May were the last real burst of exploring. ^{36 37}

Thinning out

The server’s mood shifted on 2023-04-09, when prop logged in to try a shaderpack and walked into a box of lava near spawn that kira had built to taunt him and then forgotten. It cost him his diamond armour, a mining machine and a pile of chests of resources. ^{38 39} See The Lava Spawn Trap and Lava trap by spawn. prop declined to start a war over it, and over the next days he admitted that nobody else had time to play and that he was playing Create to escape other stress, while kira admitted he had no idea what to do on the server. ^{40 41} See Motivation Collapse.

The server still had its touches, such as a chat bot relaying deaths and advancements, Create advancements like Expert Driver and Road Kill, and a request for a web-map mod. ^{42 43 44} On 2023-05-02 kira noticed that rk could still connect to the VPN-hosted server even though kira’s domain had been banned. ^{45 46 47} See The VPN Ban Mystery.

The end

In late May kira discovered he had lost the latest Axolotl backups, and the newest one he could find was from after the 2021 Season 1 restore. ^{48 49} See The Lost Backups. prop got hold of a leaked early Create Aeronautics build and asked for a temporary server to test it. ⁵⁰ See The Leaked Aeronautics. On 2023-05-31 kira, who was busy wiping and rebuilding his server, gave prop full access and made him the manager, which prop later said was so that people would stop pinging kira about Minecraft. ^{51 52 53} See prop Becomes Server Manager.

By early June nobody was playing, and prop told IRIS that all the previous worlds were gone, until kira added that he still had a backup of the Create world. ^{54 55 56} prop then proposed a goalless stop-gap server to hold everyone over until 1.20, and that idea became ASMP Earth.

Legacy

Season 2.5 is remembered as prop’s world: more than 90 percent of everything on it was his own work, by his own count, and it left the friends with the running joke prop the Lone Grinder. ²¹ It was also the season that introduced the The Axolotl VPN and the The 'axolotl' Machine and AxolotlShare, taught the group enough Create to build the later trains (see Create in Season 2.5), and handed prop the server keys. The Aeronautics-powered Season 3 that it was meant to prepare for was later dropped, and the next world was the Earth map. ^{3 56}