Chapter Text
What is an Admin?
This is a really core distinction in-universe: what is an Admin, and what separates them from Players?
It isn’t as simple as a physiological distinction. All Players and Hybrids have the potential to be Admin, and all Admin are either a Player or a Hybrid. A Player may become an Admin, resign, and go back to being a normal player many times over the course of their life.
An Admin is, instead, essentially defined as a Player who has used admin magic to create a server world into which at least one other Player can enter.
Tommy, wandering between worlds under his own power: Player. Philza, alone on his singleplayer hardcore world: Player. Techno, Dream, Xisuma, even if they’re not on their home servers: Admin.
Admin magic is different than player magic. Player magic is used by Players and Admins to interact with the world in set, specific ways: crafting, mining, using inventory, creating redstone machinery, breeding animals - it’s all a combination of physical action with innate magic to get the sort of results you see in Minecraft. The power is self-contained; players need no outside source to draw on to use it.
Admin magic, on the other hand, is tied to the Universe itself. It is generative - it creates the very world the server exists on, designing mountains and rivers and oceans within its swirls and eddies. By push or pull, an Admin can change the world around them - night into day, mobs on or off, summoning storms or dispelling them. Channeled properly, it can even warp the very fabric of a server, creating Modworlds where physics themselves become weird.
Admin are not the only ones with admin magic. Every Player has a spark of it, the same spark that lets them create a single-player world. Some players are so gutteringly weak that they can only create skyblocks, but they still have a spark. Some are so strong that they can influence other Admin’s worlds - these are hackers. Some Players are given permission to use their own magic to channel an Admin’s - these are mods.
When a Player becomes an Admin by creating a world, they anchor this spark and fan it into a flame. It grows rapidly, and channeling their new power is almost instinctive as the magic of the universe feeds it like a thin stream of oil flowing through the world.
This has several effects - the main one being the mask all Admin wear. This is both a symbol of their position and a shield for their players: when an Admin is channeling their powers, their eyes blaze with the energies of the Universe herself, and meeting their gaze can be anywhere from disconcerting to physically harmful for Players.
When an Admin decides to stop being an Admin, they close off their worlds and their connection to the Universe diminishes. Much of the knowledge gained about using admin magic also starts to fade - not lost, but hazy, without the power flowing through them anymore, almost as if it had been needed to make the information comprehensible. It returns quickly if they create a new server, however.
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Exceptions:
All Concepts can, at least in theory, create a server, since their power is an aspect of the Universe’s. Some - those most alien to Playerkind, like Kristen and Triumph - choose not to. Others, like Phil, might occasionally allow Players onto their worlds. Still others, like Techno, might specifically create worlds to Admin.
Meanwhile, non-Players usually can’t create servers at all - not even single-player worlds. This comes up more than you’d think! For example, while Hybrids are part-Player, and can create worlds just as easily as Players, the Nether races from which they originated are incapable of creating even single-player servers. Their original Game didn’t have servers - it was one contiguous world, and the Devs generated it.
You can imagine the issues this caused post-Netherfall War. Most surviving Netherfolk wound up scattered between hubs, or living in hiding on Hybrid-run servers. It was a whole cultural Thing that didn’t come up in this fic much…
This also applies to characters like Honeydew, who in this universe was an ascended Dwarf Fortress character. He lives with the Yogs on their servers without issue, but can’t go and make his own world, and also can’t be a mod for them - that sort of magic just didn’t exist amongst his native peoples.
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What Cultural Role Do Admin Have?
Admin exist as the very heart of Minecraft society.
Every Player in the Universe has the potential to live happily in a little self-contained world forever. However, this would deprive them of what the Devs intended to be a core feature of the Game - the ability to interact with each other, to learn and grow and build knowledge together, and to improve on the Game in their own way.
Admin provide that connection. With an Admin, many players can explore and develop a world together. They can create conflicts or alliances, build or destroy, fight or factionalize. They can share knowledge, develop technology, and break out of the core gameplay of Minecraft to tell their own stories.
They can perform that role in many ways, however. Some, like Xisuma and Dream, create worlds with tight-knit, dedicated communities, living almost self-contained within their server. Others, like Techno and Haus, have open servers, where players can leave and join of their own volition, and the strongest survive. Still others create hubs - huge, multi-Admin servers where hundreds or thousands of players can meet and interact.
Within their own server, an Admin is god. They may run it as a democracy, but at the end of the day, that’s their choice, and if they would rather be a tyrant, well - it’s their world. Players have freedom of association - under normal circumstances, if a Player doesn’t like how an Admin runs their world, they, well - leave.
However, Admin in this universe have their own subculture that we don’t get to explore as much. Admin are generally territorial over their Players - and this is partially because Players represent status to an Admin. An Admin with many high-quality, loyal players, especially ones who are well-respected in their communities, is a high-status Admin. An Admin who runs a large, successful Hub server, with lots of players travelling through and interacting, is a high-status Admin.
So there’s definitely a sort of bowerbird vibe to them that I didn’t get super into in this fic. Admin want their servers to be perceived as “safe” (on an existential level, survival difficulty notwithstanding) and “comfortable” for potential players. An Admin running a closed-off world, needs to be able to give their players a reason to join them and no reason to leave.
For a very high-status Admin like Xisuma, this means courting potential players. He didn’t just stumble into the Docs, Ethos, and Scars of this server - he very carefully cultivated a reputation as a talented, brilliant Admin, then selected players he thought would do well with his existing group and approached them carefully. Some of them were found while looking for a specific skill set - Stress as a doctor, for example. Others were connected to existing server-members - Team ZITS all followed each other onto the server, Ethos recommended Doc as a colleague, Mumbo brought on Grian who brought Gem.
Meanwhile, for someone like Techno, filling a server is more a process of attrition. Having a large, successful server tells Players that that server is a good place to be - which brings more players, which raises the profile of the server even more. Techno doesn’t pick people - he lets those not suited for his particular style of server flounder until they leave, while those with either the skill to succeed or the boneheadedness to endure eventually find their footing. This is common across lots of worlds - players travel between open servers until one suits them and they stay, retiring to Hubs or single-player worlds between them.
Because Players are so important to an Admin, they get… territorial, sometimes. An Admin like Xisuma or Dream jealously guards his players from the advances of other Admin, since they could very well just up and leave if they got a better offer. There’s often friction here at even the perception of poaching another’s Player. This is why Xisuma wasn’t surprised at Dream acting prickly when he asked to talk to Techno - he perceived it as culturally-normal territoriality by a younger, less confident Admin, especially since he had already offered Techno a place on his server in the past.
Meanwhile, someone like Techno would probably only get territorial about their Mods, if even then. Mods are the most trusted inner circle on a server, the Players an Admin trusts enough to give power over the very reality of the world itself, so they tend to be very, very close with their Admins.
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Would Xisuma actually be able to hurt his players? There's a couple lines that make me think he's sort of driven by an instinct to protect, beyond his conscious mind. So if he were in a situation where he had to kill one person to save the rest, could he do it?
First off - "kill" in Minecraft is a loaded term. Xisuma kills his own players all the time! Demise, Bedwars, Hunt The Hermits… but that’s not what you meant, obviously. “Destroy” might be a better analogue to what we think of as killing - ending them the way we think of it, a final, real death.
The first obligation of an Admin - the thing that sits at the very core of their being - is to separate Game and Players from Void. This is a primordial bond, as old as the Universe itself. It’s instinct, and it’s overwhelming - even after the Dreamon had fully corrupted Dream, it was incapable of forcing him to do something like casting Tommy off the server. To do so would be to forcibly reject the very magic that comprised him.
So Xisuma is for sure not kicking anyone into the void!
Even if it was to save everyone - even if someone was fully capable of destroying the server and everyone on it, it’s not something he could conceive of. Even the thought of it would be completely alien - it’s the exact opposite of everything that an Admin *is*.
Now, that’s for *his* Players, mind you. Admin owe a duty of care to exactly two classes of Player: their own, and any neophyte Players arriving on their server after abandoning their first worlds. Players who enter the server with permission - no matter how broad - are their Players. Players who enter without their permission are interlopers, trespassers who the Admin has no duty to protect.
That’s why Tommy the hacker was in danger, but once Xisuma invited him to stay on the server, he was safe. It reclassified him from a random player, possibly a threat, to one of the people Xisuma inherently protects.
Destroying a Player other than casting them into the void *should* be all but unthinkable to an Admin, too. It’s not as innate a rejection as throwing them into the void would earn, but - socially, culturally, and magically, Admin are incentivized to keep players safe.
However - they’re not unthinking animals. Could an Admin destroy a Player to protect their own? Absolutely. Could an Admin destroy one of their own Players to protect the rest? Probably, but it would be a very alien thought to them - the sort of conflict that would put them in that situation doesn’t really exist in this Universe, not on any sort of scale.
Many Admin would burn themselves out fighting rather than make such a decision - even if, academically, they understood that doing so would place their other players in more danger than just sacrificing one.
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In terms of other harms… there is very, very little that can really “harm” a Player. They’re immortal, and they’re designed to be - they die and respawn healed of any injury except, sometimes, their mostly-superficial scars. Traumas fade with time, and more perfectly than they do on humans, since even the most sadistic tortures are within the context of the game for them. That’s a really key difference - Players know that they’re playing a game.
So something like Dream did with Exile - it was weird and sadistic, sure, but everyone else on the server just saw it as a game being played between Dream and Tommy. Ordinarily, Tommy staying on the server would be his consent to this - he could talk to Dream about it, and if Dream wasn’t willing to change, he could leave. That’s part of why the server lock was such a big deal - with Tommy and the others trapped, they necessarily weren’t consenting to whatever Dream was doing to them.
But there’s nothing really *stopping* an Admin from acting sadistic and harming their Players, if they find a group of Players masochistic enough to stay on their server and put up with it. Xisuma would never, but hey - that’s basically Techno’s whole shtick.