The Chained Watcher

Hermitcraft Progresses

An entire year had passed since the portal incident.

Hermitcraft had ended up embroiled in yet another silly war, this time over mycelium and grass. Why did they want to turn the entire shopping district's ground back to mycelium? Well, they didn't. It was about the principle.

Other than that, Mumbo made a weird button machine that gives you different colors of concrete when you press it at different times. Button stealing was rampant on the server, and having a high difficulty piece was a matter of much bragging. Grian's mansion still had an unfinished back, and his barge's business was booming.

It had been a while since he had talked to Scar about magic, hopefully the mayor had gotten more skilled at stabilizing the inactive crystals. A poll was being held in the hub tomorrow, with the topic being to find a name for the portal hub itself. Each server had already done individual polls to get a list of names to vote on together, and communicator IDs were being used to prevent multiple votes.

Voting on the name was technically optional, but no one wanted to have their home stuck with a name they hate so most players should be showing up. The vote was scheduled for several hours to make sure most people could make it.

Grian headed into the hub to see the haggard record keepers working on keeping a live tally up for the most popular options. Currently in the lead was Tinkerer's Paradise, with Builder Bases following close behind. As he watched though, a bit of a dark horse rose up through the ranks. Its growth was exponential, and with less than ten minutes of vote time remaining took the lead.

By the time the voting had ended, the name had been decided with a landslide vote. The announcers climbed up the stage, turning to address the crowd of players with a smile.

"This is it folks, the final votes are in! Let's first give the honorary mentions to second and third place, which were Land of the Fae and Tinkerer's Paradise respectively. Now what you've all been waiting for! The first place winner is..." A drumroll started, with a big sheet covering the display with the final name.

"Minecraft!"

The curtain dropped, revealing the new name for the hub written in blocks much like their builds. While some people were annoyed that their favorite pick hadn't won, none of them were dissatisfied with the name. It didn't feel over the top, but still had some relevance to what they all did here.

A large decorative sign was outlined for building, placed high in the air in the middle of the hub. Over the next couple of days, it would probably go through several palettes before its design was finalized, but that was for the logo designers to fuss over.

With that done, everyone dispersed back to their respective servers.

~~~

Things were winding down on Hermitcraft. 

They had reached that point again where it felt like everything that needed doing had been done, and the space for new things was running low. Mega bases could be found all around the map, with history from the beginning of the season littered around everywhere. Sure, some things weren't quite done to completion, but it was a beautiful sight to see all the stories told by the different builds.

The same sentiment that had risen back with their previous world lifted its head, calling to them with promises of the unknown, of a new beginning. This world had been forever changed by their presence, but it was time to begin anew.

They all gathered near the server portal, circling it from the air with elytras. Shortly after, some of the hermits were landing around the portal as the others flew faster. Whenever one of them ran out of rockets or lost control from the speed, they angled down to the ground to watch the others spiral through the air. It was starting to generate a bit of wind, blowing the hair of the grounded hermits around as they watched.

Seeing as all the hermits had arrived, Xisuma placed down a bell and rang it, sending a single note echoing through the air. The remaining airborne hermits abruptly angled straight up into the sky, letting their momentum fade before gliding in for a landing. No longer being sustained, the wind they had built up dissipated with a whispering sigh.

"Alright, is everyone ready?" Sad nods are given by all those gathered. "Okay, then let's go. We're looking for a portal that hasn't been claimed yet, so we're going to have to go pretty far out to find one."

With that, they left behind their progress, their builds, their farms, all in favor of starting from nothing once more. The hub was fairly quiet at this time, so they were able to leave the center without much hassle. A lot of players had private worlds now, where they would go for some alone time or to test if something would work how they thought it should, so it was even harder to find an unclaimed location to settle in.

It took half an hour of wandering, but they eventually found an empty portal to claim. Xisuma placed his hand on the frame to access the server's magic, blinking in surprise when respawn snapped into place with little to no prodding required. 

"Well that was weirdly fast. Either way, respawn is set up, so let's go see what we've got for a spawn this time!"

As far as spawns go, this one is fairly normal. Plains, desert, some nearby forests: the usual. All the hermits scattered to go explore their new home, grinding to get gear and materials for their new starter bases. Grian took off to the north, looking for a good spot to settle in.

One grinding session later, he'd geared up and found a skeleton spawner relatively close to a prospective base location. Free bonemeal and xp aplenty once he gets that set up. He might have accidentally participated in the start of another cult, what with the strange stack of blocks and boats several of them were now building around. You know, cults happen more often on this server than you may think.

Digging down to bedrock around the boatem pole, the newly named boatem hole was fed several sacrifices to appease it. They planned to use various physics shenanigans to break the bedrock directly underneath their death pit, so with no guard rails around it walking backwards to look at your build just became a lot more dangerous.

Oh, and a minor two person war was brewing, with Grian and Mumbo planting trees in the most inconvenient places they could find for each other. Mumbo was doing a weird 'Peace, Love and Plants' thing this time, and had to replant any trees he chopped down while not killing anything. Scar was manually cleaning all his copper blocks since he didn't have any wax, and had extended that to the other builds nearby much to everyone's amusement.

Looking out over the cluster of starter houses facing a pile of boats over a soon-to-be hole to the void, Grian smiled. This season was going to be great.