#(also posts that make me want to make a minecraft survival multiplayer server . bc i can only play minecraft survival in multiplayer)

[waveridden]

okay I'll bite. what's the deal with the life series. what's the lore. what's your favorite thing about it. I wanna understand the Posts

huge win for the me community let's go. okay. idk your minecraft knowledge level so i am going to explain as though it's zero bc mine was basically zero when i started watching.

so. the life series (also known as 3rd life, bc that's the first season) is a minecraft survival multiplayer series, which essentially means it's a server where you can die. in fact, it is a death game! everyone on the server has three lives; if you die three times, you're out of the series. your goal is to be the last one standing. additionally, when you're down to your last life, you are expected and honor-bound to engage in pvp and ruin your alliances. your goal is Murder.

there are five seasons out right now with different gimmicks, each one has the same core cast with some changes - essentially it's a bunch of friends who will take any excuse to kill each other, but with increasingly weird and complex political factions and interpersonal dynamics. people are out here swearing fealty. there are betrayals. there are team banners. there's a season where they build a complex net of paths in the sky and drop tnt on one another.

it's one of those things where there is some lore/plot and you can take it as seriously or not-seriously as you want! yay! i for one love to go the "let's take this to its logical horrifying conclusion" route but some people are here for the sillies and that's good too. the fanart game is insane, people are making renaissance paintings and stuff.

anyways, this explanation is a mess, so i will go on to reccing povs, because there are ~15 people in each season and they're all posting videos and that can get overwhelming! there's not really a "right" order but when i started, @charaznablescanontoyota gave me the excellent advice of "start with the winner of each season and then whenever you're curious about something watch that next" - if you like that route and don't mind knowing who wins,

er4df444444444444 sorry that's my cat. he's been watching along with me. he has a lot of opinions.

anyways here's the list of winners, the wiki is a pretty good reference to have on hand. HOWEVER. i will also add that everyone has a different style! some people edit things very short, some people do long videos, some people are builders and some are very into the roleplay - i bounced pretty hard off the first pov i watched but switching to someone else worked for me, so in a way having so many options is great bc it means you can shop around, so to speak.

and i will close this out with a few of my personal favorite seasons! just for funsies.

inthelittlewood 3rd life (s1) - probably my personal fave. in which an early game alliance becomes an intensely charged king/knight relationship that they both take WAY too seriously (honorific)

smallishbeans last life (s2) - have you ever wanted to watch someone do a very, very bad job at murdering a lot of people?

pearlescentmoon double life (s3) - in a season where everyone has canonical soulmates, pearl ends up the odd woman out because her soulmate doesn't want to be with her. it is an insane and compelling character arc

ldshadowlady secret life (s5) - diversity win! this woman is so so bad at "what if minecraft were taskmaster"

and as a side note i tend to prefer the tightly edited stuff, so if you know that you Do Not prefer that, i would point you towards ethoslab secret life or grian 3rd life! or tbh still towards pearl double life.

[sunflower-chai]

Hi!! This is a really dumb question, and you 100% don't have to answer it, but I keep seeing your reblogs of dsmp - what is it? What's it about? How had it taken a hold of your soul and what do you take from it?

oh mouse. you have opened the floodgates.

so basically dsmp (aka dream smp but i don’t call it that anymore bc the content creator dream, who the server is named after, is a terrible person. which is a whole other can of worms i won’t get into) is a survival multiplayer (hence SMP) minecraft server that tells a story via improvised roleplay. it ran from april 2020 - april 2023 and grew from 4 members on the first day to 39 members by the end. it also featured a handful of guests including, i kid you not, michael clifford from 5 seconds of summer and lil nas x. the story was primarily distributed via livestreams on youtube and twitch, though some members and fans created highlight videos on youtube.

how do i explain what dsmp is about? overall, it’s a heavily character-driven story with many different factions, wars, and eras. each member essentially wrote their own story, and fans could pick whose POV they were most interested in and follow along with whatever lore was created. (at one point there was a head writer who, surprise surprise, also turned out to be a terrible person. are you sensing the pattern here?) so honestly the answer to “what is the dsmp about?” is different depending on which members/characters you choose to pay attention to.

i got interested in the server in early 2021 when someone i followed on tumblr for a completely unrelated fandom started posting about it (which is how i get into most new interests these days lol). i looked up some clips on youtube and discovered the content creator tommyinnit via an among us gameplay video. i thought he was really funny and checked out his channel. the first video of his i watched was “the funniest minecraft video ever,” which was edited from one of his dsmp streams where he and two other members created a religion based on twitch prime subscriptions. it’s ridiculous and still makes me laugh to this day. so after that i decided i wanted to know what this minecraft server was all about. i found VODs (archived livestream recordings) of the big events on the server and watched as many as i could. honestly i had to skip around a lot because there was simply too much content to catch up on, and a lot of members didn’t save their VODs. that was another reason i tended to follow tommy’s POV, he uploaded all of his twitch VODs to a separate youtube channel. he also streamed less frequently and for shorter time periods than most of the members so it was a more manageable amount of stuff to watch. after i got decently caught up, i started tuning in for the dsmp streams live. and boy oh boy did i become obsessed. spring of 2021 i was a junior in college and i hardly left my apartment because of covid restrictions. i was incredibly bored and developing depression (which i would not realize until i went to therapy that summer and got referred to a psychiatrist for diagnosis. but i digress). dsmp was genuinely the only thing that got me excited anymore.

spring-summer 2021 was honestly a golden age for dsmp fans because so much lore was happening at such a rapid pace and it was EXHILIRATING. the fandom would churn out analysis, fanfics, art, animatics, and even original songs at the speed of light. everyone would liveblog during big lore events and it was just such a fun community to be a part of, even though i mainly lurked on tumblr back then. the source material was nothing but minecraft blocks and webcams, so i think it really allowed the fans’ creativity to flow. the fans truly carried that server, particularly SAD-ist’s animatics on youtube and derivakat’s fan songs, though my favorite song was beetlebug’s “an ode to l’manburg.”

so you’re probably wondering: what the heck is l’manburg? so this gets into what i think truly made the server worth investing in, which was the storytelling. “l’manburg” was a fictional country created on the dsmp server. it actually started out as a van used to sell “drugs” (aka minecraft potions), created by c!tommy and c!wilbur (c! = character, to differentiate between roleplay and the actual content creators). basically wilbur wanted to roleplay breaking bad lol. a bunch of the other server members cracked down on this “illegal” business, so c!wilbur decided to form his own country on the land surrounding the van (now a hot dog van), declaring independence from the greater SMP so citizens would be free to do what they want. he called it l’manburg because it “sounded european,” and all of the citizens at the time were european while those still loyal to the greater SMP were mostly american. the citizens of l’manburg at the time were c!wilbur, c!tommy, c!tubbo, c!fundy, and c!eret. the greater SMP didn’t take kindly to this new country’s existence, so c!dream issued a declaration of war, and thus began the l’manburg war for independence, which was really an excuse to do hamilton roleplay (yes, it’s all very silly but i love it. it gets much more serious later on). anyway i don’t want to say much more in case you decide to give it a watch, but if you do good luck. i would recommend blueberry tv on youtube, who does a great job condensing the most important moments into 20ish minute episodes. they have a playlist called “dream smp plot playlist” which is a good place to start.

okay now i’m taking this opportunity to gush a little about c!tommy, one of my favorite characters in anything ever. he starts out as a loud, funny, slightly annoying, mean-to-your-face but kind-at-heart sixteen year old kid, and by the end he’s eighteen, he’s literally been to hell and back, he’s a little quieter, a bit jaded, and doesn’t easily trust others or even his own mind. but even after everything he goes through, he still tries to believe the best in people and stubbornly holds onto hope that things will get better. he’s incredibly loyal to his friends. he loves things that most people would overlook and he loves them hard. he communicates his feelings in convoluted metaphors that are accidentally poetic. he constantly listens to music, probably has an unhealthy attachment to it, but he’s willing to give it up if it means freedom and happiness for his friends. he deals with so much unfair treatment and abuse and trauma and he could so easily give into despair or allow those experiences to darken his morals but nothing is ever able to completely dull his spark. it would honestly be easier to give up or become the villain, but it’s just not in his nature. i just love him so much man 😭

[mj1343]

Theres not really a point to this post and im not hating on anyone this is kind of just something thats been in my head that i want to throw out there

After the explosion of the Dream SMP (and before anyone asks, i watch it. not as actively anymore but i still tune in every now and then. this is not a hate post) people creating minecraft servers seem to have two ideas in their head-

they need to have lore and need to call it an smp

for the easier of the two- smp??? really?? even when SMP earth and live was a thing i didnt see anyone calling their server smp’s they just called them....... servers. smp feels like such a youtube thing just so they dont have to write Dream Survival Multiplayer like you can call your server by what brings you together or give it a fancy name or litereally just My Server without adding -smp to it

As for the lore thing like... its just minecraft you dont need a plot. i feel like theres an expectation to have /rp and /c whenever anyone talks about any server ever now. I played on a few servers run by the same mods, all of which had loose lore. The servers always had a fantasy name and a big decorated spawn, and one of the mods was super super adamant about building areas and scripting plugins to make custom mobs. We had a swamp steampunk area, a shopping area, a pokemon area where they recreated all of the routes up till the boat from the first game, and they programmed custom mobs for all of them. I collected all the pokemon i could and fought broken down robot clones of the mod because she loved making lore. But like... if i didnt want to interact with it i didnt have to. Nowadays i see servers where you HAVE to have a character sheet filled out to APPLY to join the server. I know not every server is like this but it just makes me wonder like guys.. i understand you want to roleplay and im down for that but it is also Minecraft, a Video Game

like i said theres not really a point to this. im not like. angry at dream smp members or fans or the people who make servers with deep lore or whatever. end of the day its cool i dont really mind and if you want to roleplay thats fine. But like... dont feel like you have to i guess?? is the point? If you wanna play minecraft just play minecraft you dont have to set up a twitch account and call it an smp or spend days writing a script bc it is just a blocks game. anyway thanks for reading my rambling