Chapter Text
Locations and bases
"I don't think you're ready..."
Eight-year-old noob's room
A large room in a castle built by one of his parents or siblings. The room itself is made primarily of stone bricks, matching the rest of the build, but the room's decorations make it stand out. An armor stand with cyan-dyed leather armor is placed near the balcony; its owner must have hoped it would look like diamond armor. Wool is arranged against one wall in the oversized shape of what's either supposed to be a throne or an armchair. Painting spam covers one of the walls, with a rather obvious secret doorway into another room. In a chest in the secret room, there is an iron sword and a book.
A sign on the wall says something like "[player]'s Dungeon of New World Enderworld Nether Part 1". It feels like he was starting to make an adventure map of some kind in his room, and didn't get very far.
---
"I see fire, but there's no smoke"
Lotus village
As Odysseus observed, players have clearly messed with this village. In a word, it's... mossy. Patches of moss have overtaken the usual paths, puddles of water filled with dripleaf and lily pads litter the landscape, and glowberries hang from every roof and ledge.
(Not a very good food source, glowberries. Of course you would check the chests for something better.)
Despite the lush cave makeover, nobody seems to live here aside from the villagers. No signs say who owns it or even give it a name. No supersmelters or even farms, aside from the naturally generating ones, seem to have been left here. No walls keep it closed in.
Something about it feels out of place in this violent, competitive server. Some people may think it's a nice place to set down a crafting table and take a break from the drama. Others may think it's a trap.
...those "others" would be right.
It's not the most dangerous trick on the server; the modded food is survivable, after all. Poison just reduces you to half a heart; it doesn't kill you. But it does make you very vulnerable, and poison isn't the only status effect the food in the chests can inflict: some of the objects also add slowness, weakness, or nausea, just to name a few.
There's a good chance that if you eat the food from the chests, you won't get much farther.
---
"How mAny FloAtInG IsLanDS HAve yOU SeEn BefORe?"
Aeolus's base
Although building a floating island base is not a new concept by any means, Aeolus's was made from one of the largest naturally generated floating islands on the server. (One of. It's not the biggest sky base, of course!! You wouldn't want to offend Zeus, right?)
Its architecture is pretty distinguishable as well; there are lots of 1x1 pillars around, as though the place was an aerial basalt delta, or one of those dirt structures from those enderman time-lapse videos (for reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLss-7SPQ-o). A few of these pillars are free-floating in the air around the island, like blaze rods around a Blaze. Or, breeze rods around a Breeze, more likely.
A spiral of glass parkour curls upwards into the clouds, reaching all the way to the build limit. It must have been a pain to build, and the use of primarily blue, white and clear glass blocks makes it even more of a pain to try climbing it, since they're hard to see against the sky. Aeolus has memorized the parkour by now and can complete it easily, but has much more fun challenging others to complete it and watching them fail.
Foxes frequently sprint around the floating island; Aeolus likes their energy and mischievous nature.
Wandering traders can be seen up there pretty often, too. It's unclear if Aeolus is using cheats to summon them in, or somehow moved them up there manually, or if they really do just spawn in more frequently there for some reason.
(It's because villagers are Winions lol...)
---
"Welcome to the best part of your life"
Circe's base... and its history
Circe's base was not always the enormous quartz palace that it is now, though it had the same thought and design put into it. It used stone and tuff bricks, vines and waterfalls, stairs and slabs. It used simple blocks in complicated gradients and patterns to add detail and realism.
It was a collaboration with her friends, back when many of the mods being added were relatively new. As the mastermind of the project, she did the planning and building of the large-scale things, while her friends worked on the exterior and interior details, really making it come together. They even decorated the forest, adding leaves, grasses and even custom trees, and made a well-lit, detailed dirt-and-spruce path all the way up to the palace.
And that was their mistake. She made it too obvious that somebody lived there. She made it too easy to get to her and her friends. Her base was griefed beyond repair, and one of her friends even rage-quit because of it.
She decided that instead of rebuilding, they would start from scratch. First, she haphazardly scattered birch trees around to make the area look like a naturally generated forest. Why birch? Because nobody would want to chop down birch trees for wood; most players hate birch.
Second, she went into a creative world and sketched a blueprint for a grander base than before, one that even the most heartless players would be hesitant to destroy. She would make it out of quartz, because quartz would be plentiful where she was going for part 3 of her plan...
Third, after doing a little research on the world's mods, she prepared for an extended trip into the Nether. Aside from the quartz, she'd need blaze rods, nether wart, and a number of ingredients that most people on the server hadn't even heard of yet.
After all... nobody could grief her base if they couldn't control their avatars.
Her current base is split into two main parts. The first, the courtyard, has a very open feel, with vines made of leaf blocks winding around the pillars, gardens framed by quartz pillars instead of oak logs, and shallow pools made from waterlogged slabs and stairs. Most blocks are waterlogged, actually, whether it's visible or not. A precaution against TNT.
Animals- mostly pigs- roam around, loosely corralled by the leaf block hedges that subtly fence in the area. Circe planned this build well; she knows they can't get out.
The second, the interior, is more enclosed and less outdoorsy, though it still has high ceilings- so high that you can't estimate how many blocks tall it is by looking. So high that between the ceiling and the roof there may be any number of secret rooms, and the causal viewer would have no way of knowing.
Inside, it's less sweeping elegance and more welcoming cuteness. A lot of the modded stuff she has in there are modern appliances, furniture, and paintings. She has a huge dining hall, a cozy kitchen, and some cute but rather basic bedrooms- because those aren't actually the bedrooms where she and her friends set their spawnpoints. Instead, they sleep in that hidden attic I mentioned, the same place where she brews her potions and crafts her modded items.
---
"Down in the Underworld"
Hades's palace
Hades's base is made mostly from blackstone, and uses basalt pillars to break up the monotony a little. It looks oddly like a mix of a bastion and the Disney castle, menacing in color scheme but with a paradoxical fairytale elegance to its shape. Soulsand fire lights the windows and the path to the palace in eerie blue light. But the exterior is not as interesting as the interior.
His palace grounds are split into five sections, separated by five rivers of lava flowing out from a lava waterfall in the center. I will list them clockwise, starting at the left side of the front of the palace.
First is his gold farm. It is efficient and mostly undecorated.
Second is his piglin trading hall. It looks polished, dignified, but also simple, and gives the impression of a bank.
Third, at the back of the palace, are his own quarters- an area that is a bit more ornate and shows off his artistic side.
Fourth is his garden. It is made mostly of modded Nether plants, though he also built custom trees out of stone, ores, and nether materials. He is rather protective of this garden.
(After he proposed to Persephone IRL, he proposed to her again in Minecraft by giving her a diamond block from his garden.)
Fifth is the guest rooms. The Nether is a dangerous place, and sometimes, players who have made it that far will choose to stay there rather than risk the journey back to their own bases in the Overworld. Hades is a kinder moderator than his brothers, so he allows it (though it often feels like too many people), but he has rules they must follow.
---
"This is the home of the sun god..."
Helios's farm
It's mostly a wide, flat area with a few large structures. Most noticeably, there's a couple huge barns and a giant player model, hollow inside with a secret entrance. This statue is where Helios actually lives when he is at the farm; the head of the statue has a bed, crafting table, furnaces etc inside it while the body has a few rows of plowed land growing wheat. A 5x5 fishing pond is enclosed by the crown on the player model's head.
No torches or lanterns can be seen; Helios used his moderator powers to place invisible light sources wherever they are needed. His farm is lit as bright as day, even during the night.
Different areas of the farm are decorated differently: the pen for ordinary cows is rather plain, but the pen for warm-biome cows is decorated with acacia trees and the pen for cold-biome cows is decorated with spruce trees. The red mooshroom pen uses mycelium in place of grass, and the newest addition- the brown mooshroom pen- uses podzol.
Inside one of the barns is an aquarium where Helios is attempting to get that rare blue and orange axolotl, and tied to a fence post he has a zombie horse. He eventually wants to get all the rarest mobs.
---
Character headcanons
- Athena's skin is a rather goofy-looking owl skin, but not much except the big ol' eyes can be seen while she's wearing her Netherite armor. Because of her skills and fame in the community, people take her seriously despite the skin she most often wears.
- Athena has redstone tutorial videos on her channel, but goes through the tutorials a little too fast for viewers to keep up.
- Sometimes, Athena will change her skin to something wildly different (like, say, one that looks like an old man), walk around, and see how long it takes people to realize that it's her.
- Eventually, Telemachus dares her to change her skin to the Duolingo Owl. She accepts the dare. She may think it's a little ridiculous, but... maybe it's alright to be a little ridiculous for a friend.
- There is a Discord server called the "Spectator Server," where people who died in the Minecraft server watch streams together, joking and reminiscing about their lore and drama. It was started years ago by some people who were killed in the server but didn't want to stop being able to enjoy/participate in it. It's kept a secret and it's invite-only, but Circe found out about it somehow. She made an alt account, did a couple of silly or dramatic things with it- just enough to get into a few videos- and then purposely died on-screen, winning her alt account an invite. Now she can listen in to what the "ghosts" of the server have to say. She just has to be careful that they don't catch on that she's still on the server; because of this, she generally lurks rather than talking.
- Hermes is also in the spectator server. I think people just haven't banned him yet because he's so silly and they love to see it.
- Polyphemus's favorite sheep was a rare naturally-spawning pink sheep. He found it fairly early on, asked Poseidon to use cheats to give him a nametag, and rushed back to nametag it before it despawned. Its name was "a" because he was in a hurry and didn't want to type out a longer name.
- Hermes makes Knarfy-style videos about "adding YOUR bad ideas to Minecraft," "adding these CURSED items to Minecraft," etc. The videos only ever discuss about half of the items he made, though. If you want to see the rest, you have to download it yourself and be surprised!
- Tiresias has a habit of not looking at other players when he's talking to them. Honestly, he has a habit of standing there as though he's AFK, even when he is on his computer. It's hard to focus on Minecraft when he's looking at 3 streams, 1 tutorial, and 2 or more wiki pages at once. One of these streams is always Apollo's, because he has such a good instinct for what will happen next. The other two change regularly, depending on what's most relevant.
- Despite the dangers of the server, Tiresias feels secure going semi-AFK like this; he's been on the server for a long, long time and has plenty of gear and armor protecting him, and not as many players are in the Nether as in the Overworld. Not doing much also means he's less noticeable to the moderators, which is a very good thing since he's helped people sneak around their rules before.
- He used to have a recap channel, but got kind of burnt-out, and handed over the recapping responsibilities to a player he trusted named Cassandra. People are angry about this change and complain that her recaps aren't as good, her commentary isn't as snappy, and her summaries aren't as accurate. In reality, she's doing a great job recapping the events of the server- it's just that she isn't much like Tiresias, and people want their once-favorite channel to go back to how it used to be.
- The Siren has multiple different bases across the server, which she uses to keep from being caught. She doesn't really have a main base, but when Apollo asks, she always pretends that the base closest to his is her main base.