The Chained Watcher

Glitches

(Xisuma's POV)

Everything had been running smoothly. Things behaved how physics said they should, even if for some things that amounted to very little. Mobs stayed on the ground (except for those meant to fly), farms worked with no problems, and generally everything was normal.

Then, the glitches started happening. It started out small, just a sand block forgetting to fall or redstone not triggering correctly, but soon enough the squid were rising out of the rivers and challenging the sky. Right now, even water and lava weren't flowing correctly, not to mention how most of their elytra rockets felt like duds when taking off.

At this point, Xisuma was ready to ask some other servers' admins for help finding the problem. Heading to the portal hub, he was surprised to discover an unusually large number of players just... idling, in the hub. Who idles in the hub? While looking over the gathered players, he spotted an admin acquaintance from one of the lesser known servers.

Making his way over, he saw them talking with a fairly large group of admins from what seemed to be Hypixel by their outfits. Their voices became clear enough to discern once he got close enough, but the content of their conversation was concerning.

"Do we know what's causing it?"

"Not yet, but at least the hub itself is unaffected. Have we found any glitch-free servers?"

"No, all of the servers we've checked got hit with the glitches. At least it hasn't messed up respawn yet."

The glitches weren't just a Hermitcraft thing then? The group of admins noticed him approaching and his friend waved. "Xisuma! I take it you've got glitch problems too?"

Well wasn't that an understatement. "Yeah, I figured I'd go get backup to try to find the source of the glitches but... You guys seem to have your hands pretty full already."

Groans resound from the group of admins, one of them lightly smacking their forehead against a nearby wall. "Every single server we've checked has had glitches, and they're only getting worse. We've been resolving them one by one, but the underlying problem is still there."

This was more widespread than he had thought. "What if we all check a single world for it? See if there's something we can do with a brute force number of admins?"

Thoughtful looks go around the group. "That just might work, now that I think about it." The speaker's face turns to amusement, "I don't suppose you have any suggestions for which server to check first?"

"Well, I figured we'd try on an empty server to start with in case something goes wrong, but after that... Your assumptions are correct, I would recommend Hermitcraft once we've figured out what we're doing."

They all started heading towards the nearest sign-less portal, which with how the hub reorganized itself was further than one might think. It takes several minutes to find an unused one, and upon entering they spread out to start working their admin abilities. Some of them are formatted like binary code, others like magic circles, while more still had holographic screens slowly orbiting them. Quite a sight for the average player, seeing the server magic being handled so deftly by so many admins all at the same time.

Xisuma sits cross-legged and pulls up his own admin panels, trying to trace back the glitches through the code. Wow, that was a lot of glitches. This was a private world, so respawn was already in place, but... the sheer quantity of glitches makes it nearly unplayable. With this many problems, some would have to be solved before the source even came into view.

Thankfully, this many admins all working on the same server straightened out the tangled mess of magic in record time, revealing... nothing. There was nothing! None of them could find the source of the problems, and even as they watch more glitches are popping up. A nearby chicken makes a ghast noise as it explodes. Great, just great.