Season 2

Oz held the daylight still while the first houses went up. It was 27 February 2022, the old world had been replaced, and the players needed somewhere to live before night made things difficult. When he returned a little later, someone had already built a substantial house above him. His own plans were more modest: put together some cheap housing and let the better builders get on with theirs.

Nexus was one of those builders. He wanted to spend time making things, and his work soon drew both Linguine and Oz over to admire it. Bufong suggested a building contest between Nexus and Dio Brando. Stone, bricks and wood were worth asking for again. After the final days of the previous season, when so much conversation had revolved around rare weapons, ordinary materials had suddenly become important.

There was an agreement, or at least the beginnings of one, that this world should last. On the day after the reset, a suggestion to fight Skeletron brought That New Guy and KDY into the conversation. They wanted people to slow down. The world was only a day old, and there were houses to finish, places to explore and players who were not ready to follow the fastest group into the next stage.

For a while, there was room for all of that. A hellevator made travel beneath spawn easier. Nexus kept building. Ludaw worked on the shared routes through the world and eventually added a teleporter to Hell near the hellevator. These were useful things to have even if nobody summoned another boss that afternoon. Each project gave the next person who joined a little less work to do.

Making things also brought questions about what was fair. Trading was allowed; duplicating items was not. When Hasty described using a duplication glitch, he was warned to stop, agreed, and soon returned to talking about fishing crates. Builders needed large amounts of material, but Oz was willing to help supply blocks rather than let that need become a reason to ignore the rules. The community was still working out how to support ambitious projects without making everything else meaningless.

By 2 March, the early bosses had fallen and the world was still on the near side of Hardmode. The following day changed that. Wall of Flesh went down, then the mechanical bosses began appearing on the defeated list. KDY asked people not to progress too quickly. It was becoming harder to make the request sound practical when there was always somebody with enough equipment for another attempt.

Two days later, Plantera and Duke Fishron were already behind them. Hasty asked for a server reset because it was running badly, meaning a restart to clear the problem. Dio took the word differently: they could not reset yet, because they still had to finish the game. The misunderstanding said quite a lot about where everyone's attention had gone. There was one boss left that could make the end feel official.

Moon Lord did not make it easy. During the fight on 6 March, KDY complained that the lag seemed to be healing him. Worthy Creppers counted an extraordinary number of deaths; Dio was doing the same. The chat became a mixture of disbelief, instructions and increasingly impatient demands for the boss to die. At 11:29 that morning, Dio finally announced that he had finished him.

Almost immediately, someone was thinking about the next reset. Hasty still wanted a fight and a chance at the drops, so the completed world stayed busy a little longer. Meanwhile, Bufong began planning an underground settlement for the next season. There would be houses, a church, a hospital and somewhere to fish. Hasty agreed to help. They had not left this world yet, but the next one already had a building project waiting for it.

On 7 March, galangmeh arrived at an especially unfortunate moment. With the reset approaching, he found a Corruption Key and became absorbed in the possibilities of the dungeon chest. Oz was watching a different sort of opportunity disappear: the minutes left before shutdown. Galangmeh objected, but at 4:51 pm the bridge disconnected and the world went with it.

Nine minutes later, the connection returned. KDY, Oz, galangmeh and EarthwormSally began joining the replacement world. Galangmeh's disappointment had already turned into enthusiasm for playing again. Somewhere in that new terrain was room for Bufong's town, and Nexus could find another place to build. The season that was supposed to take its time had lasted barely more than a week. Its players had managed to leave with more plans than they arrived with.