Axolotl SMP Season 3

Axolotl SMP Season 3 was the quiet one. It began on a deliberately random seed with a promise of a fresh group adventure, spent most of its life as a one-man kingdom run by prop, and then, just when it looked finished, shook itself awake in November 2024. It was plain vanilla with Fabric client mods (Xaero’s map, Litematica, Distant Horizons, shaders), reached over the The Axolotl VPN, and it never got a flashy modpack. What it had instead was a castle, a wall, a small mountain of farms and a villager trading hall that was always about to be built.

How it began

The season launched on 2024-05-31 on vanilla 1.20.6 with Java 21 ^{1 2}, managed through the The Pterodactyl Panel ³, with the seed 8273052579893931433 and a 3k by 3k world border ^{4 5}. Random seed won out despite a poll ⁶, and prop reset the world several times to dodge a bad spawn, so the “10 pm” start slipped to about 16:38 ^{7 8 4}. The final seed handed everyone a huge nether portal beside a fortress and a blaze spawner (Season 3 Border and Seed), and prop, Levi (as DeathHack127) and k1R4 dived in on S3 Launch Night. Land was claimed by posting “dibs” and marking regions on a shared map, red for claims and green for community areas ^{9 10}.

The first week was prop’s. He turned a generated cherry-grove village into his base (The Cherry Village), rented houses there to abishek (IRIS) in exchange for a shared food farm (The Cherry Village Contract), rerolled librarians until one offered Protection 4 (Prot 4 Librarian Hunt), raided a bastion with Levi (Bastion Raid) and finished an iron farm on 06-05 (Iron Farm and the Iron Loan). That same day a power cut and a dead UPS knocked the home-hosted server over for the first of many times (Power Cut Takes Down the Server (June)).

The farm list and the castle

On 2024-06-09 prop declared the season’s real goal: the MegaZero villager trading hall, copied from a Hermitcraft design, after a checklist of farms (prop's Farm Checklist, MegaZero Villager Trading Hall). He later put it plainly to a lost Levi: “surviving forever was never the goal” ¹¹. Out came the mega cobblestone farm, which he warned “might kill the server” (Mega Cobble Farm), a 64-furnace super smelter, a wool farm run by a bot account named Sheep, and the odd The Surprise Thingy for which he collected everyone’s skins and never explained why.

Behind all of it the Pterodactyl Panel Down saga dragged on from about 06-09 until a voice call on 06-30, while prop pinged kira with “pls fix”. The voice chat mod was dropped to save bandwidth Voice Chat Mod Removed, 1.20.6 Restart. Kart finally joined on 06-28 as Kartwastaken (Kart Joins the Server), and on 07-01 nYx came back and claimed the cat-ear mountains over a double ancient city, soon nicknamed Car Mountain (nYx Claims Cat Ear Mountain, Car Mountain).

prop’s castle was the season’s showpiece. He marked the site on 06-07 and built a Norman keep out of tuff and spruce in a burst of work, with a throne room and an elytra launch roof (prop's Castle, prop's Castle) ¹². When Levi petitioned to ban him “so that he can get a life and touch grass”, prop answered by posting the finished castle ^{13 14} (The Touch-Grass Petition).

On 2024-07-01 prop upgraded the server to 1.21 ^{15 16} (Upgrade to 1.21), and the first trial chamber fell to kira, nYx and prop on 07-05 (First Trial Chamber Cleared). Meanwhile prop wrapped his land in a giant tuff wall, declared done on 07-15 (The Great Wall Is Finished), and adopted a cyan-blue flag with a banner colour code in which a yellow border means war (Flag Law Declared, Season 3 Flags).

The long sleep

After a mid-July power cut, the server went into two-week phases and was switched off after 08-21 ¹⁷ (Two-Week Server Phases). In effect prop played alone for months.

The revival

On 2024-10-02 prop revived the world, passed on the 1.21.1 hotfix, and k1R4 argued for keeping prop’s progress instead of starting over ^{18 19} (The Server Revival). That night the group went end busting, found the First End City and came back with elytra (First End Raid).

The October stretch was farm season again: a creeper gunpowder farm built to be visible rather than a black box (Gunpowder Farm Completed), a community Enderman XP farm built by prop and kira (The Enderman Farm Build), lantern-lit streets for the Cherry Village, and a RAM upgrade that gave the panel node 16 GB (RAM Upgrade). prop also spun up a creative copy of the world with Axiom on port 25567 ²⁰ (Creative Server Created).

On 2024-11-04 newcomer Rk asked for a reset to play from the start. nYx said no, GrimWatch said “2 no”, and Levi wanted no part of resetting “for one dude” ^{21 22 23} (Should We Reset the World?). The world stayed.

Then people came back. After Levi’s base pep talk produced an impressive starter base (Levi's Base Pep Talk), prop beat a runaway Wither in the End on 11-11 ^{24 25} (prop Beats the Wither in the End). On 11-16, “after half a year”, prop and kira were cheering “axolotl is back” ^{26 27} (Axolotl Is Back). nYx’s Car Mountain Castle had its exterior declared complete on 11-17 (Car Mountain Castle Exterior Complete, Car Mountain Castle), fuelled by prop’s kelp farm (Kelp Fuel Farm). Seeing it, prop admitted that “nyx castle puts my castle to the trash” ²⁸.

The end of the road

Infrastructure kept falling over. Back on 11-15 kira’s ISP had blocked ports 80 and 443 and sunk the panel for days ²⁹ (The Airtel Outage), and later the server stayed down from about 12-22 until New Year’s Eve, the same night prop released his eight-month video edit ^{30 31} (New Year's Eve Return and the 8-Month Video). In March 2025 the panel was swapped for Moonlight, with Pelican promised, and prop’s nostalgia drifted back to the lockdown peak of Season 1 (The Peak of Season 1).

The season’s last dated moment is not in the game at all. On 2025-04-11 prop, IRIS and kira went to see the Minecraft movie together, and prop reported, “We watched movie bro” ³² (The Minecraft Movie Outing). The next season followed the day after (Axolotl SMP Season 4).

Legacy

Season 3 is remembered for prop’s tuff castle and wall, for the farms he built and the trading hall he never did, and for the two-sided life of the server: months of one man alone, then the November comeback. The pyramid mega base (prop's Pyramid Mega Base) stayed a secret project, and the villager hall was still on the to-do list in 2026.