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// INITIALIZING UNSTABLE SMP — SEASON 3 // LOADING CHUNK 0,0 //
♥ HP: 20/20
🍖 Hunger: 20/20
🎒 Inventory: —
— Spawn —
There was nothing.
No light.
No sound.
No body.
Just a vast, yawning absence that presses in from all sides like deep ocean pressure.
You exist as a single point of awareness adrift in the dark, with no memory of how you arrived or what came before.
The void hums at a frequency you feel in your being.
Then the codes begin.
Lines of neon-green text tear across your vision, flying so fast you can barely register them — coordinate strings, chunk seed values, [PLAYER_DATA] headers, authentications.
They pour like digital rain, a waterfall of protocol and initialization scripts, each line burning itself into the black before dissolving.
You try to move.
You cannot.
You try to speak.
There is no mouth.
The codes slow.
One line hangs in front of you, glowing:
> SPAWNING PLAYER...
> LOADING DIMENSION: overworld
> You have joined the world
Light floods your vision.
It was a violent, bloom of brightness that rips through the void like a breach, and you feel yourself thrown — hurled upward through layers of compressed data, through code strings and fragmenting sound files, until—
WHOOSH — CRACKLE — THUD
You hit the ground hard.
Real ground. Something solid.
Brick stone and cobbles under your palms.
The smell of ashes and burnt wood floods your senses. Your ears ring. Something hot and wet trickles down your forehead—sweat, and you realize—you have a body again.
You are here. You push yourself up, coughing, and the full weight of the scene crashes into you.
Spawn is griefed.
You're standing on a raised platform, a once-grand welcome point now reduced to rubble.
The ground is cratered — deep, smoking wounds in the earth where explosions have torn through. Pillars that must have held banners lie snapped, their remnants scattered across the platform like picked-clean bones. The surrounding walls—what's left of it, anyway—are choked with blackened debris, chunks of rubble scattered along the sides.
Above it all, the sky churns a sickly grey. And the withers—there are three of them that you can see.
Massive, skeletal, jet-black forms drift against the corrupted sky, their skulls swiveling lazily as they survey the devastation below. No one is spared from its attacks.
One of them shrieks and fires a volley of black skulls into a cluster of ruined buildings to your left. The explosion sends debris spiraling. A player tries to sprint away, but a wither follows, its charge relentless. The player's armor shatters. The player falls. The wither lingers for a moment, then drifts on.
All around you, there are so many movements.
New players scatter in every direction. Some make it ten blocks before going down. Some make it fifty. You see one girl, clutching a stone sword she must have crafted in the first thirty seconds, sprinting away. A wither skull clips her from behind. She doesn't get back up.
The platform beneath you shudders as another explosion rocks the spawn chunk. A section of the walkway to your right crumbles and falls into the void below. Your heart pounds. Your hands are empty. You have nothing — no armor, no weapon, no food.
You have to decide—fast.
▼ ▼ ▼
Hide — Find cover and wait for the chaos to pass
♥ HP: 20/20
🍖 Hunger: 20/20
🎒 Inventory: —
— Hide —
You drop low, pressing yourself into a crater gouged out of the platform's surface.
The stone is warm. You press your back against the wall of the crater, knees to your chest, and try to breathe as quietly as you can.
The air tastes like gunpowder and ash.
Above you, the withers continue their search. You hear the hiss-thump of another skull launching, the crack of impact, the blocky rumble of collapsing stone. Someone screams, somewhere to your left. The scream cuts off abruptly.
You press your hand over your mouth.
Time stretches.
You count your heartbeats.
Twenty-three.
Forty-seven.
Sixty-one.
The chaos seems to be moving away, drifting toward a different area.
Maybe you've made the right call.
Maybe patience is survival.
You allow yourself a shaky breath.
Then you hear footsteps.
They're close.
Too close.
Someone—or something—is walking along the rim of the crater above you.
Slow.
Deliberate.
You freeze, every muscle locked, and look up.
A figure stands at the edge, silhouetted against the dark sky. They're wearing enchanted netherite armor and they're holding a sword that glows with the telltale shimmer of enchantments. Their face is obscured by a helmet, but you can feel them looking at you, head tilted, considering.
They don't say anything.
They raise their sword.
The blade comes down. You don't even have time to scream.
The last thing you see is the sky, spinning, as your vision goes dark. A wither shrieks overhead, but you can barely hear it anymore. The world fades to static. Somewhere in the distance, new codes begin to scroll.
Run — Sprint for the edge of the platform, find a way down
♥ HP: 18/20 -2
🍖 Hunger: 16/20 -4
🎒 Inventory: —
— Run —
Your legs move before your brain catches up.
Adrenaline seizes your muscles and you're sprinting across the ruined paths, leaping over craters and skirting around debris, your breath ragged in your own ears.
A wither skull screams past your shoulder and impacts the ground five blocks to your left, sending a shockwave that throws you off balance.
You stumble, catch yourself on a half-destroyed pillar, and kept going.
You do not look back.
The platform stretches ahead, a broken causeway of darkstone and obsidian. To your right, a section has completely collapsed, revealing the long drop to the forest floor below — easily a hundred blocks, maybe more.
A straight fall would kill you.
But as you run, you spot something: tucked against the far edge of the platform, nearly obscured by rubble, oak stairs leading somewhere down—somewhere out of here.
It descends along the side of the platform, cut into the stone itself, winding down toward the ground.
You don't stop to question it.
You throw yourself onto the stairs, taking them three at a time, your steps thudding against the wood as you descend.
The sounds of spawn fade above you — the wither shrieks, the explosions, the dying — replaced by the sound of your own breathing and the rhythmic slap-slap-slap of your feet on stair after stair after stair.
The stairs end.
You are on solid ground. Grass and dirt.
Overhead, the canopy of a dense forest blocks out most of the sky.
For a moment, you just stand there, doubled over, hands on your knees, gasping for air. Your side aches. You scraped your arm on something during the sprint — a shallow wound, nothing serious, but it stings.
You made it.
You're out of spawn.
You're alive.
And that's when you see it: a path, leading away from the base of the platform, cutting through the forest and plains in a straight, deliberate line.
It's a highway made of obsidian.
▼ ▼ ▼
Continue — Follow the obsidian highway into the forest
♥ HP: 18/20
🍖 Hunger: 14/20
🎒 Inventory: —
— Obsidian Highway —
Up close, the highway is exactly as it appeared from a distance: an obsidian road, roughly four blocks wide, cutting through the terrain.
It's not built on the ground—it's set into it, the roadbed dug down so that the highway sits in a shallow trench.
You step onto the obsidian.
It's smooth and cool under your feet, polished by use. This road has seen traffic—regular traffic, the kind that comes from a route between major bases or farms.
The thought is strangely comforting. It means civilization exists out there. People. Structures.
Maybe safety.
You start walking.
The highway stretches ahead in a dead straight line, barely deviating from the terrain. Where a hill rises, the road cuts through it. Where a ravine interrupts, a simple bridge spans the gap—more obsidian, supported by pillars driven into the walls.
The construction is crude but effective, the work of players who valued function over form.
Your footsteps echo in the trench. Clack. Clack. Clack.
The forest rustles on either side, alive with the ambient sounds of the overworld.
Your stomach growls. Loudly.
You realize you haven't eaten—you don't even know how long it's been since you existed, let alone ate.
The hunger bar at the edge of your vision is already down to a little over half.
You push the thought aside and keep walking.
The highway branches ahead. The main road continues straight, disappearing into a dark tunnel cut through the face of a steep hill.
But to your right, you can see a dense forest, you can climb over the obsidian highway walls.
Two paths. Both are unfamiliar to you.
▼ ▼ ▼
Follow the highway — Enter the tunnel and see where the road leads
♥ HP: 18/20
🍖 Hunger: 12/20 -2
🎒 Inventory: —
— The Tunnel —
You commit to the highway. The tunnel swallows you whole.
The transition from open air to enclosed space is abrupt—one moment the sky is above you, the next you're walking through darkness, lit only by the occasional wall torch placed at irregular intervals.
The obsidian road continues underfoot.
The tunnel is wide enough for two people to walk side-by-side, its ceiling arched roughly ten blocks above.
Your footsteps echo differently now. The sound bounces off the stone walls and comes back at you from strange angles, multiplied, distorted. You find yourself walking slower, your senses straining against the dark.
The tunnel curves gently, then bends again. You've been walking for what feels like fifteen minutes, though you can't be sure. The torches are beginning to space out, the pools of light growing farther apart.
Your hunger bar gnaws at the edge of your vision.
It's getting low. Dangerously low.
You stop walking.
That's when you hear it.
Voices.
Up ahead.
Echoing through the tunnel, distorted by the stone.
Laughter.
Conversation.
You can make out at least two, maybe three distinct speakers.
There's a hole on the ceiling, stretching all the way to the sky. Rubbles were scattered on the obsidian road. The brightness of the outside light almost looked harsh with the contrast in the tunnel. There's water pouring down. The voices were somewhere near that spot.
Your heart rate spikes.
Friend or foe?
You have no weapons, no armor, and your hunger bar is blinking dangerously.
If they're hostile, you're dead.
If they're friendly—you might survive the night.
You make a decision before you can talk yourself out of it.
You step forward, around the bend, and into their torchlight.
— and we're really running low on some supplies and armor. Egg, do you have some spare netherite armor or something?—
The voice cuts off.
Three heads turn toward you.
You're standing in a wider section of the tunnel—the small area looked carved out just for the purpose of making a hidden space within the tunnel for a temporary stop.
The one in the center demands your attention first.
Long, straight purple hair cascades past his waist. There's a small beauty mark right below each of his eyes. He's lean—slender in a way that suggests lightness over bulk, but there's a definite curve to his waist, and his thighs are thick where his legs are crossed beneath him. His nametag flashes above his head: Wemmbu.
A pair of black horns curve from his temples—he's a demon-hybrid, and it shows in every sharp line of his silhouette—and a golden tiara sits nestled between them, glinting dimly in the faint glow of his enchanted netherite, dark and polished.
He looks you up and down with undisguised confusion, seemingly trying to convey something to his companions with his eyes alone.
"Oh wow, you actually escaped from the spawn. New player?"
To his left sits a figure in a dark pirate outfit—rich blues with silver accents, a dark blue bandana pulled up over the lower half of his face. A pirate hat sits atop his head, and from beneath it, a thick black braid trails past his shoulder. His netherite armor is visible beneath the open coat, dark and well-maintained. He's quiet, watchful, his eyes scanning you with calm assessment. The same tag appeared: Jaden_MAN. You'll call him 'Jaden' in your mind.
Next to him is the third player. Short white hair falls across his face, one eye obscured by bangs patterned in black and blue circles—the arrangement creates the strange illusion of a giant blue eyeball staring from the side of his head. Three small pairs of wings decorate the sides of his face, and larger angel wings—the mark of an angel-hybrid—are tucked tight against his back, folded neatly beneath his netherite armor. He squints at the purple-haired man, then at you, with the slightly unfocused look of someone whose eyesight isn't quite there yet, and offers a casual smile. Eggchan is his name.
You stand there, empty-handed, your hunger bar flickering red. You open your mouth.
"Do you have any food?"
There's no place for shame here. If you don't get food in your system, you're quite literally going to die.
Wemmbu's relaxed, hands coming up to cross over his chest.
"Oh, food? I only have golden apples and I really need them. So, I don't think I'll be able to give you some."
He glances at Jaden, shrugging.
"Don't look at me like that. The LAW is a pain to deal with. Not like they're gonna win against me, bro."
"Dang, bro. You were asking for spare netherites and we got someone here who only asks for, like, steak for survival."
You were faintly surprised at his deep voice.
Your hunger bar pulses. You're not sure how much longer you can stay on your feet.
"Well, sorry! I don't have any steak! They're useless in fights,"
huffs Wemmbu,
"Egg, you got any steak?"
The white-haired angel's wings flutter once as he chuckles.
"Yeah, I've got some. Hold on."
He reaches into his inventory and tosses something toward you. You catch it instinctively—a cooked steak, still warm, seared marks dark across its surface. Half a stack of them.
You almost cry.
▲ ▲ ▲ ▲ ▲
🍖 Hunger: +12.8 Saturation 🎒 +32 Steak
▲ ▲ ▲ ▲ ▲
You eat. It's the most satisfying thing you've ever experienced. The hunger bar fills, and strength returns to your limbs. You let out a breath you didn't realize you were holding.
Wemmbu watches you eat with an expression that's hard to read—part amusement, part awkwardness, like he's trying to figure out whether you're worth his time.
"Feel better? Good. Now—you got a name, or should we just call you, uhhh, 'Stray'?"
Before you can answer, Jaden stands, rising with ease. He adjusts his bandana with one gloved hand, then seems to rummage through his inventory, and turns back to face you. His expression is unreadable behind the fabric, but his eyes are steady—not warm, not cold, just present. He walks over and drops something at your feet.
"It's dangerous out there. You'll need it."
Iron armor. A full set. And an iron sword, plain but sharp. You look up at Jaden, then at Wemmbu, then at Eggchan, who just shrugs one shoulder.
"Don't get used to it, mate. Server doesn't hand out freebies twice. Just this once, yeah? Those iron items are no use for us, anyway."
▲ ▲ ▲ ▲ ▲
🎒 +31 Steak 🎒 +Full Iron Armor 🎒 +Iron Sword
▲ ▲ ▲ ▲ ▲
Wemmbu stands, rolling his shoulders with practiced ease. He gathers his hair to tie them in a high ponytail, and the movement reveals an elytra strapped across his back—sleek, dark wings folded tight against the back of his netherite chestplate.
"Right. Well, as fun as this has been, we've got places to be. Do us a favor and don't fall for the LAW's propaganda."
You wanted to ask about this "LAW." But the three were already moving.
Wemmbu pulls out a firework rocket.
Eggchan stands, producing a riptide trident from his inventory and spinning it once in his hand—a little clumsily, almost dropping it before catching it with a sheepish grin.
Jaden rises last, his hand resting on the hilt of his own trident.
"The highway keeps going for another thousand blocks or so. If you continue following it, you'll eventually reach the Northern Council. If you decide to go further, you'll get to Capital City."
His eyes crinkle into a warm smile, and there's something sharp in it.
"Try not to die before you find it. That'd be embarrassing. You only live once on this server, after all."
— FWOOOOSH —
Wemmbu launches upward, a rocket propelling him down the tunnel and out of sight in a burst of gunpowder trail. Eggchan exchanges a glance with Jaden, then—shwick—his trident glows, and he's gone too, launched forward in a spray of water particles. Jaden lingers a moment longer, meets your eyes once, and then he's moving too in a similar fashion as Eggchan.
The tunnel is quiet again.
You stand there, alone, in iron armor, holding an iron sword.
Your eyes squint at the sky through the hole in the mountain.
The highway stretches ahead, but you can already see the light at the end of the tunnel.
► TO BE CONTINUED... ◄
You have survived the spawn. You have found... "allies." You are armed, armored, and fed.
The road stretches before you.
Go off-road — Leave the highway, head into the wild forest
♥ HP: 18/20
🍖 Hunger: 14/20
🎒 Inventory: —
— The Wild —
You leave the highway behind.
The decision feels reckless the moment you make it. The obsidian road offered safety—a known path to somewhere. But something in you balks at the idea of walking through a dark tunnel.
You've had enough uncertainty for one life.
You scramble up the wall of the trench and pull yourself onto the forest floor. The trees are dense here—oak and birch, their canopies interlocking to create a dim twilight. The ground is uneven, a patchwork of grass, coarse dirt, and mossy cobblestones. Fallen leaves and logs lie everywhere.
You walk.
There are no mobs. You notice that after the first ten minutes. No zombies groaning in the dark, no skeletons rattling, no creepers hissing. This is the Unstable SMP—the danger here comes from players. From people. The mobs have been cleared, suppressed, or never existed in the first place.
The silence is almost worse. Every rustle of leaves could be someone. Every snap of a twig could be an ambush.
You walk for what feels like an hour. Your hunger bar drops. Your legs ache. The forest seems endless, a labyrinth of identical trees and shadowed clearings. You begin to wonder if you're walking in circles.
Then you step into a clearing, and you realize you're not alone.
They come from the treeline.
Four of them.
They move with the coordination of people who have done this before, fanning out to block your escape routes before you've even registered their presence. Their armor is mismatched—leather here, gold there, one of them in a half-set of iron—but their weapons are real. Swords. An axe. One of them has a bow, already drawn, the arrow trained on you.
The one in front steps forward. His voice was rough.
"You new players never learn. Highway's that way, but you just had to go wandering."
You look down at your hands.
Empty. No weapon. No armor. Nothing.
"This is gonna hurt. But hey—first death's a rite of passage on this server."
The bandit with the bow adjusts their aim. The one with the axe shifts their weight, ready to move. Your pulse hammers in your throat. Your mind races. You have no gear, no backup, no plan. You are a fish in a barrel.
But you're not dead yet.
▼ ▼ ▼
Fight — Go down swinging, even with empty hands
♥ HP: 0/20
🍖 Hunger: 14/20
🎒 Inventory: —
— No Chance —
You ball your fists and charge.
It's a stupid decision. You know it's a stupid decision. But something in you refuses to go quietly, refuses to let them take your life without a fight. You close the distance in three strides, swinging at the bandit leader with all the force you can muster.
Your fist connects with their chestplate. It does nothing. They barely staggered.
The bandit leader looks down at you, almost pitying, and runs you through.
The iron blade punches through your ribcage with a wet ease.
You feel it—the shock, the cold, the slow spread of numbness radiating from the wound. Your vision blurs. Your knees buckle. You hit the ground face-first, tasting dirt and blood.
Behind you, one of the bandits laughs. It's not cruel—like they've seen this a hundred times before.
"Told you,"
the leader says again,
"oh, right. The server's on hardcore mode. You only live once."
The world fades. The last thing you see is a pair of worn boots turning away, already dismissing you. The last thing you hear is the forest rustling overhead.
The sky darkened even more.
Then nothing.
Run — Bolt for the only gap in their formation
♥ HP: 12/20 -6
🍖 Hunger: 12/20 -2
🎒 Inventory: —
— The Ravine —
You run.
The bandits shout behind you but you don't look back. You dive through the only gap in their formation, a narrow space between the bow-user and the axe-wielder, and you're through before they can react. Branches whip at your face. Thorns tear at your clothes. You don't slow down.
The forest blurs past you. You don't know where you're going—you just know you have to put distance between yourself and them. Your lungs burn. Your legs scream. An arrow thunks into a tree trunk a few inches from your head, and you veer sharply left, crashing through a patch of berry bushes that leave thin red lines across your arms.
Then the ground disappears.
One moment you're running, the next you're falling, your stomach lurching as the forest floor drops away into a vast, open gash in the earth.
A ravine.
You twist in midair, catch a glimpse of stone walls rushing past, water glinting far below—
— SPLASH —
The impact knocks the breath out of you.
Cold, dark water envelops your body, and for a terrifying instant you're disoriented, unsure which way is up.
Your lungs burn. You thrash, kick, break the surface with a gasp.
You're in a pool of water at the bottom of a deep ravine.
The walls rise on either side, at least thirty blocks high. Above you, the sky is a narrow strip of grey between two walls of stone.
There's no sign of the bandits. No sound of pursuit. The waterfall you landed in cascades down from a ledge above, its constant roar filling the ravine with white noise.
You drag yourself onto a narrow ledge of stone, soaked and shivering. Your body aches. You took a significant amount of damage from the run, and the cold is already settling into your bones. Your hunger bar is ticking down. You have no gear, no supplies, and you are unsure of the safety on the surface.
But you're alive.
You sit there, back pressed against the cold stone wall, listening to the waterfall, catching your breath. The ravine extends in both directions, disappearing into shadow.
Somewhere far above, the forest rustles in the wind. The bandits are gone. For now, you are alone.
You look down at your empty hands, then up at the narrow strip of sky, and you wonder what comes next.
◆ TO BE CONTINUED... ◆
You escaped the bandits. You are alive, wounded, and trapped in a ravine.
What lurks in the shadows below? What waits above?