Jeremy Hutchins had always considered himself a connoisseur of Minecraft content, which was really just a fancy way of saying he'd wasted approximately seventy-three percent of his waking hours over the past two years watching other people play a block game on YouTube. Not just any Minecraft content, mind you—Jeremy had standards, or at least he told himself he did during those three-in-the-morning moments of existential crisis when he questioned his life choices. He specialized in what the community called "100 Days" videos, that peculiar subgenre of Minecraft content where creators claimed to survive one hundred in-game days in increasingly ridiculous scenarios.
Most of them were, to put it charitably, complete and utter garbage.
Jeremy knew this. He knew it with the kind of bone-deep certainty that came from having watched literally thousands of hours of this stuff. The fake reactions, the clearly staged "close calls," the conveniently edited segments where the creator obviously switched to creative mode to build their elaborate base or gather resources—it was all so transparent it hurt. But like a moth to a flame, or perhaps more accurately, like a person with absolutely no self-control to an autoplay feature, Jeremy kept watching. There was something almost meditative about the predictability of it all. Guy spawns in. Guy says this is going to be hard. Guy somehow has full diamond armor by day ten. Guy builds a mansion by day fifty. Guy "barely survives" a scripted encounter on day ninety-nine. Rinse, repeat, collect ad revenue.
Of course, there were exceptions. LukeTheNotable, the man who'd essentially pioneered the format, actually put effort into his content. His 100 Days in Hardcore Minecraft video had been a genuine survival experience, meticulously edited and genuinely entertaining. That video had spawned an entire industry of imitators, ninety-nine percent of whom missed the point entirely. Luke had proven you could make compelling content by actually, you know, playing the game legitimately and being entertaining while doing it. Revolutionary concept, apparently.
Jeremy had been in the middle of hate-watching a particularly egregious example of the genre—some guy who'd clearly just downloaded a creative world and was pretending to have "survived" 100 days in "the hardest modpack ever"—when his life had taken an unexpected turn. By which he meant he died.
The details were embarrassingly mundane. No heroic sacrifice, no dramatic final stand, not even something interesting like a skydiving accident or a shark attack. No, Jeremy Hutchins, age twenty-four, college dropout, and professional time-waster, had perished because he'd been so engrossed in screaming at his monitor about how fake the video was that he'd failed to notice he'd been eating from a bag of chips that had expired roughly six months ago. The chips had been harboring some truly impressive bacterial cultures, the kind that biology labs would probably pay good money for, and Jeremy's immune system—weakened by months of terrible sleep schedule, worse diet, and the kind of vitamin D deficiency that came from never leaving his apartment—had simply waved a white flag and surrendered.
Food poisoning, the doctor would later tell his grieving mother (who had always said those damn video games would be the death of him, though she'd meant it metaphorically), combined with dehydration and possibly a previously undiagnosed heart condition. He'd collapsed right there in his gaming chair, face-planted onto his keyboard—which had apparently typed out "gggggggggggggggggg" as his final message to the world—and that had been that.
Except it hadn't been that, because Jeremy was currently experiencing what could only be described as consciousness, which seemed rather unfair given that he was pretty sure his heart had stopped beating and his lungs had stopped breathing and all those other rather important biological functions had ceased functioning.
The first thing he became aware of was that he was no longer in his chair. Instead, he appeared to be standing—actually standing, which his legs hadn't been terribly good at after months of atrophy—in what looked like some kind of white void. Not the peaceful, heavenly kind of white void you see in movies about the afterlife. This was more like the white void of a badly rendered video game level, the kind where the textures haven't loaded properly and you're just floating in digital nothingness.
The second thing he became aware of was the text.
It appeared directly in his field of vision, hovering in the air like the world's most aggressive pop-up ad, rendered in that distinctive Minecraft font that Jeremy had seen approximately one billion times:
SYSTEM INITIALIZATION COMPLETE
WELCOME, PLAYER
LOADING WORLD DATA...
Jeremy tried to speak, discovered he had a mouth again (which was nice), and managed to croak out, "What the actual—"
WORLD LOADED: MODDED MINECRAFT SURVIVAL
DIFFICULTY: ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME
OBJECTIVE: SURVIVE 100 DAYS AND DEFEAT THE ENDER DRAGON
ADDITIONAL PARAMETERS: GET GOOD OR DIE TRYING
"Okay," Jeremy said, his voice echoing weirdly in the void. "Okay, so I'm having a dying hallucination. That makes sense. Brain running out of oxygen, firing random neurons, pulling from my most recent memories which are, of course, Minecraft videos. This is fine. This is totally normal. I'm probably actually in a hospital bed right now and the doctors are shocking my heart or whatever and I'll wake up any second and—"
INITIALIZING PLAYER STATUS
NAME: JEREMY HUTCHINS
CLASS: NOOB
LEVEL: 1
SPECIAL ABILITY: CRUSHING AWARENESS OF YOUR OWN MEDIOCRITY
STARTING EQUIPMENT: NOTHING
SURVIVAL CHANCES: LOL
"Is this system mocking me?" Jeremy asked the void. "Is my own dying brain roasting me right now?"
YES
ALSO, YOU'RE NOT DYING
WELL, YOU DID DIE
PAST TENSE
BUT NOW YOU'RE HERE
CONGRATULATIONS?
The white void suddenly wasn't white anymore. It was green—a very specific shade of green that Jeremy recognized immediately because he'd seen it in roughly ten thousand Minecraft videos. It was grass. Blocky, pixelated grass stretching out in all directions, and suddenly Jeremy was falling, which seemed unnecessarily dramatic, but then again, death and resurrection were probably allowed to be a little dramatic.
He landed hard on the ground, except the ground was made of meter-cubed blocks of dirt and grass, and the impact somehow didn't shatter every bone in his body despite the fact that he'd just fallen from what appeared to be cloud height. Video game logic, apparently. Jeremy lay there for a moment, staring up at a sky that was simultaneously too blue and too blocky to be real, watching square clouds drift past a sun that was literally just a white square.
"Oh," he said weakly. "Oh no."
OH YES
WELCOME TO YOUR NEW REALITY, PLAYER
OR SHOULD I SAY...
WELCOME TO HELL
Jeremy sat up slowly, and immediately noticed several things that were very wrong. First, his hands were blocky. Not metaphorically blocky, not "wow, I need to moisturize" blocky, but literal rectangular prisms attached to his arms where his hands should be. Second, when he looked down at his body, it was rendered in the distinctive low-poly style of a Minecraft character model. Third, and perhaps most disturbingly, when he turned his head, his entire field of view moved in a way that suggested his head was, in fact, a cube.
"No," he said firmly. "Nope. Not doing this. I refuse."
DENIAL: THE FIRST STAGE OF GRIEF
AND ALSO A RIVER IN EGYPT
BUT MOSTLY THE GRIEF THING
"Who are you?" Jeremy demanded, addressing the text that kept appearing in his vision. "What is this? Why am I in Minecraft? This doesn't make any sense!"
I AM THE SYSTEM
THIS IS YOUR NEW EXISTENCE
YOU ARE IN MINECRAFT BECAUSE SOMEONE THOUGHT IT WOULD BE FUNNY
AND BY SOMEONE, I MEAN THE COSMIC FORCES THAT GOVERN REALITY
THEY HAVE A TERRIBLE SENSE OF HUMOR
ALSO, YOU WATCHED SO MUCH MINECRAFT CONTENT THAT YOUR SOUL LITERALLY BECAME SATURATED WITH BLOCK GAME ENERGY
WHEN YOU DIED, YOU BASICALLY RESPAWNED HERE
IT'S COMPLICATED
Jeremy pushed himself to his feet, which was a weird experience because he didn't have feet so much as he had rectangular blocks where feet should be, and yet he could walk perfectly fine. He looked around, trying to process his surroundings. He was standing in what appeared to be a fairly standard Minecraft biome—plains, from the look of it, with grass and flowers and trees that were made of blocky wood and spherical leaves that somehow floated without support.
Except it wasn't standard at all, because the more he looked, the more he noticed things that definitely weren't in vanilla Minecraft. There were trees that glowed faintly purple. There were creatures in the distance that looked like cows, except they had tentacles. There was what appeared to be a castle just visible on the horizon, except it was floating and also appeared to be on fire. The sky had not one sun but two, and one of them had a face that seemed to be watching him with vague malevolence.
"Modded," Jeremy whispered. "This is a modded world. Heavily modded."
CONGRATULATIONS
YOUR PATTERN RECOGNITION SKILLS REMAIN INTACT DESPITE YOUR TRAGIC DEATH
YES, THIS IS A MODDED WORLD
VERY MODDED
EXTREMELY MODDED
I'M TALKING HUNDREDS OF MODS
MAYBE THOUSANDS
I LOST COUNT
"What mods?" Jeremy asked, though he was afraid he already knew the answer.
OH, YOU KNOW
JUST THE FUN ONES
ICE AND FIRE
RLCRAFT
LYCANITES MOBS
CRAZYCRAFT
ORESPAWN
ADVENT OF ASCENSION
DIVINE RPGM
DRACONIC EVOLUTION
THE TWILIGHT FOREST
THE BETWEENLANDS
THE EREBUS
ABYSSALCRAFT
EPIC SIEGE MOD
AND MANY, MANY MORE
OH, AND THE BEST PART?
MORE MODS GET ADDED AS TIME GOES ON
EVERY DAY, NEW MODS
NEW BOSSES
NEW WAYS TO DIE
ISN'T THAT EXCITING?
Jeremy felt what he assumed was blood draining from his face, except he probably didn't have blood anymore, just polygons and texture maps. "You're telling me I have to survive in a world with all of those mods combined? That's not possible. That's literally impossible. Those mods aren't even balanced for each other! The difficulty scaling would be insane! Ice and Fire dragons alone are endgame content, and Lycanites mobs are nightmare fuel, and RLcraft is specifically designed to be brutally unfair, and—"
AND YET, HERE YOU ARE
100 DAYS, JEREMY
YOU HAVE 100 IN-GAME DAYS TO BEAT MINECRAFT
DEFEAT THE ENDER DRAGON
OR REMAIN TRAPPED HERE FOREVER
"Forever?" Jeremy's voice cracked. "What happens after 100 days if I don't beat it?"
OH, YOU DON'T DIE OR ANYTHING
THAT WOULD BE MERCIFUL
NO, YOU JUST GET TO DO 200 DAYS
THEN 300
THEN 400
AND SO ON
EACH CYCLE GETS HARDER
MORE MODS
TOUGHER BOSSES
INCREASED DIFFICULTY MULTIPLIERS
IT'S LIKE A ROGUELIKE, EXCEPT THE PERMADEATH IS THAT YOU STAY ALIVE
"That's not how permadeath works!" Jeremy shouted at the sky.
WELL, IT'S HOW IT WORKS HERE
WELCOME TO HELL
POPULATION: YOU
ALSO VARIOUS NIGHTMARE CREATURES THAT WANT TO KILL YOU
BUT MOSTLY YOU
Jeremy took a deep breath, except he didn't actually need to breathe anymore, which was disorienting. He tried to think rationally about this. Okay. He was in Minecraft. A heavily modded version of Minecraft. With what sounded like every difficult mod ever created all smooshed together into one nightmarish package. He had 100 days to beat the game, except each day was twenty minutes of real-time, so that was... he did the math in his head... roughly thirty-three hours of actual time. Thirty-three hours to go from nothing to defeating the Ender Dragon in a world filled with modded bosses and monsters that could kill him in seconds.
"I'm going to die," he said flatly. "I'm going to die so many times."
PROBABLY
BUT HERE'S THE THING
YOU'RE GOING TO RESPAWN
EACH TIME YOU DIE, YOU COME BACK
SAME WORLD, SAME COUNTDOWN, SAME NIGHTMARE
YOU KEEP YOUR KNOWLEDGE BUT LOSE YOUR ITEMS
UNLESS YOU HAVE A GRAVESTONE MOD
WHICH YOU DO
BECAUSE I'M NOT A COMPLETE MONSTER
"Oh, how generous," Jeremy muttered. "The cosmic horror tormenting me has the decency to include a gravestone mod."
YOU'RE WELCOME
ALSO, I SHOULD MENTION
THIS IS ALL BEING RECORDED
Jeremy froze. "What?"
RECORDED
FILMED
BROADCAST TO THE MULTIVERSE
YOU'RE A CONTENT CREATOR NOW, JEREMY
CONGRATULATIONS
YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO BE INTERNET FAMOUS, RIGHT?
"I never—that's not—I don't—" Jeremy sputtered. "Who's watching this?"
EVERYONE
ANYONE
INTERDIMENSIONAL CABLE IS A THING
YOU'RE CURRENTLY THE #1 TRENDING SHOW IN SEVENTEEN DIFFERENT REALITIES
PEOPLE LOVE WATCHING SOMEONE SUFFER IN MINECRAFT
IT'S LIKE THOSE 100 DAYS VIDEOS YOU USED TO WATCH
EXCEPT THIS TIME IT'S REAL
ALL THOSE FAKE VIDEOS, ALL THAT SCRIPTED CONTENT
YOU USED TO COMPLAIN ABOUT HOW THEY WEREN'T GENUINE
WELL, GUESS WHAT?
THIS IS AS GENUINE AS IT GETS
NO CREATIVE MODE
NO SCRIPTS
NO RESPITE
JUST YOU, YOUR WITS, AND AN ABSOLUTELY UNFAIR MODPACK
EVERYTHING LUKETHENOTABLE DID, EXCEPT MULTIPLIED BY A THOUSAND IN DIFFICULTY
AND IF YOU SOMEHOW SURVIVE THE FIRST 100 DAYS?
WELL, THERE'S ALWAYS 200 DAYS
THEN 300
THE CONTENT NEVER ENDS, JEREMY
JUST LIKE THE SUFFERING
Jeremy stood there in his blocky body, processing this information. He was dead. He was in Minecraft. He was trapped in what was essentially a cosmic joke, forced to star in the world's most brutal survival series for the entertainment of interdimensional viewers. And if he somehow managed to succeed, his reward would be to do it all over again with even higher difficulty.
"This is because I didn't appreciate LukeTheNotable enough, isn't it?" he asked the void. "This is karmic punishment for all those hate-watches."
MAYBE
OR MAYBE THE UNIVERSE JUST SUCKS
EITHER WAY
TIME'S TICKING
DAY 1 HAS OFFICIALLY BEGUN
CURRENT TIME: DAWN
DAYS REMAINING: 100
DEATHS: 0 (FOR NOW)
EQUIPMENT: NONE
FOOD: 0
SHELTER: NONE
WEAPONS: YOUR FISTS, WHICH ARE BLOCKS
BOSSES DEFEATED: 0
BOSSES THAT WANT TO KILL YOU: ALL OF THEM
GOOD LUCK, JEREMY
YOU'RE GOING TO NEED IT
Jeremy looked down at his blocky hands, then up at the sky with its two suns, one of which was definitely still watching him judgmentally. In the distance, he could hear sounds that definitely weren't in vanilla Minecraft—roars, shrieks, what sounded like someone playing a vuvuzela made of nightmares. A shadow passed overhead, and when he looked up, he saw something with wings that was definitely a dragon, except it was made of ice and looked about the size of a small airplane.
"Okay," he said, more to himself than to the System. "Okay. I can do this. I've watched hundreds of these videos. I know how Minecraft works. I know how mods work. I just need to start with the basics. Punch a tree, get wood, make tools, find shelter before night. Basic survival. I can do basic survival."
He walked over to the nearest tree, which looked normal enough despite the purple glow emanating from some of the trees in the distance. He raised his blocky fist and punched the trunk.
The tree exploded.
Not metaphorically. It literally exploded in a shower of splinters and what looked like purple fire. Jeremy was thrown backward, landing hard on his cubic rear end, and watched in horror as the explosion started a chain reaction, setting several nearby trees ablaze with that same purple flame.
OH, RIGHT
FORGOT TO MENTION
SOME OF THE TREES ARE EXPLOSIVE
YOU'LL FIGURE OUT WHICH ONES
PROBABLY THROUGH TRIAL AND ERROR
MOSTLY ERROR
"You're kidding me," Jeremy wheezed, watching the purple fire spread. "The trees are explosive. Of course the trees are explosive. Why wouldn't the trees be explosive?"
TECHNICALLY ONLY SOME OF THEM
THE OTHERS ARE FINE
EXCEPT FOR THE ONES THAT SPAWN MONSTERS WHEN YOU CUT THEM DOWN
AND THE ONES THAT CURSE YOU
AND THE ONES THAT ARE ACTUALLY MIMICS
BUT OTHER THAN THOSE, TOTALLY SAFE
Jeremy picked himself up and started running away from the spreading fire, which seemed like a good idea until he nearly ran face-first into what he initially thought was a cow. Upon closer inspection, it was definitely not a cow. It had the basic shape of a cow, sure, but it also had six legs, three eyes, and tentacles where its udders should have been. The thing looked at him with its multiple eyes and made a sound that was like a cow's moo mixed with a screech of existential dread.
LYCANITES MOB DETECTED: SPRIGGAN
DANGER LEVEL: WHY ARE YOU STILL STANDING THERE
Jeremy did not need to be told twice. He turned and ran in a different direction, his blocky legs pumping in that characteristic Minecraft sprint animation. Behind him, he could hear the Spriggan—because apparently that thing was called a Spriggan—giving chase, its multiple legs allowing it to move with disturbing speed.
"This is day one!" Jeremy shouted as he ran. "Day one! I haven't even punched a normal tree yet and I'm already running from Lovecraftian cattle!"
YEAH, THE LEARNING CURVE IS PRETTY STEEP
BY WHICH I MEAN IT'S MORE LIKE A LEARNING CLIFF
A VERTICAL LEARNING CLIFF
MADE OF SPIKES
ON FIRE
Jeremy ran until his stamina bar—which he could now see at the bottom of his vision along with his health and hunger bars—was nearly depleted. The Spriggan had apparently lost interest or gotten distracted by something else, because when he finally stopped and looked back, it was nowhere to be seen. Instead, he found himself standing at the edge of a forest, except this forest looked wrong in ways that went beyond the usual Minecraft wrongness.
The trees here were dark, almost black, with wood that seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it. The leaves were a sickly red color, and the grass beneath them had turned gray. There was a fog hanging over everything, and Jeremy could see what looked like gravestones scattered among the trees.
BIOME DISCOVERED: DEADWOOD FOREST
RECOMMENDATION: DON'T
"Don't what?" Jeremy asked.
JUST... DON'T
DON'T GO IN THERE
SERIOUSLY
NOTHING GOOD HAPPENS IN THE DEADWOOD FOREST
"Well, what am I supposed to do?" Jeremy gestured around at his surroundings. "The plains have explosive trees and nightmare cows! The forest is apparently a death trap! Where exactly am I supposed to go?"
THAT'S THE NEAT PART
EVERYWHERE IS A DEATH TRAP
SOME ARE JUST MORE OBVIOUS ABOUT IT
YOU'RE IN A MODDED HELLSCAPE, JEREMY
THERE IS NO SAFE ZONE
THERE IS NO EASY MODE
THERE IS ONLY SURVIVAL AND DEATH
AND USUALLY DEATH
Jeremy wanted to scream, but he was interrupted by a sound that made his blood—or polygon equivalent thereof—run cold. It was a hissing sound, that distinctive sssssss that every Minecraft player had learned to fear. He spun around and came face-to-face with a Creeper, except this Creeper was wrong too. It was larger than normal, crackling with red energy, and had what appeared to be flames coming off its body.
CHARGED FIRE CREEPER DETECTED
EXPLOSION RADIUS: YES
TIME TO DETONATION: NOW
"Oh fu—"
The explosion was tremendous. Jeremy felt himself being launched into the air, his health bar dropping from full to nearly empty in an instant. He sailed in a graceful arc—if by graceful you meant flailing wildly and screaming—over the Deadwood Forest and landed with a crunch somewhere deep within its foggy depths.
DEATH #1: CREEPER EXPLOSION
TIME SURVIVED: 7 MINUTES
NEW RECORD: 7 MINUTES
RESPAWNING IN 3... 2... 1...
The world went black, then white, then Jeremy was standing back in the plains where he'd first spawned, completely unharmed but also completely without any items, not that he'd had any items to begin with. The System helpfully displayed a summary of his first life:
FIRST LIFE STATISTICS:
DURATION: 7 MINUTES, 23 SECONDS
BLOCKS MINED: 0
TREES PUNCHED: 1 (EXPLODED)
MOBS KILLED: 0
TIMES KILLED: 1
CAUSE OF DEATH: HUBRIS (AND ALSO A CREEPER)
ACHIEVEMENTS UNLOCKED: NONE
VIEWER RATING: 8.5/10 - "PROMISING START"
"Viewer rating?" Jeremy asked weakly. "People are rating my suffering?"
OF COURSE
YOU'RE ENTERTAINMENT
CURRENTLY HAVE ABOUT 47 MILLION VIEWERS ACROSS VARIOUS DIMENSIONS
THEY'RE VERY INVESTED IN WHETHER YOU'LL SURVIVE
SPOILER ALERT: THE BETTING ODDS ARE NOT IN YOUR FAVOR
Jeremy stood there for a moment, trying to process everything. He'd died within ten minutes. He hadn't even managed to punch a tree successfully. He had no food, no tools, no shelter, and apparently every single mob in this world was a juiced-up nightmare version of its vanilla counterpart. He had to survive 100 days of this. And if he somehow managed that impossible task, he'd have to do 200 days.
"I'm in hell," he said quietly. "I died eating expired chips and went to hell, and hell is a Minecraft modpack designed by a sadist."
TECHNICALLY YOU'RE IN PURGATORY
HELL COMES LATER
AROUND DAY 50, ACTUALLY
THAT'S WHEN THE NETHER MODS REALLY KICK IN
LITERAL HELL
IT'S THEMATIC
"I hate everything about this," Jeremy declared.
THAT'S THE SPIRIT
NOW GET BACK TO SURVIVING
DAY 1, ATTEMPT 2
TRY NOT TO IMMEDIATELY EXPLODE THIS TIME
Jeremy took a deep breath that he didn't need and looked around. Okay. New strategy. He needed to be more careful. He needed to actually learn the mechanics of this hellish modpack. He needed to figure out which trees were safe to punch, which mobs to avoid, and how to not die within the first ten minutes.
He started walking, more cautiously this time, scanning his surroundings for threats. The plains stretched out in all directions, dotted with those same potentially explosive trees, wandering Spriggans, and what he now recognized as several other modded mobs scattered about. In the distance, he could see different biomes—a desert that seemed to sparkle with what might have been glass, a mountain range that floated in the air, and what looked like a massive chasm that glowed with an ominous red light.
He approached a tree carefully, this one looking relatively normal—oak, by the look of it, without any purple glow or other warning signs. He raised his fist hesitantly and tapped the trunk. It didn't explode. Encouraged, he punched it properly, and was rewarded with the satisfying crack of breaking wood. A log popped out, and Jeremy felt a surge of accomplishment that was entirely disproportionate to having punched a virtual tree.
ACHIEVEMENT: GETTING WOOD
CONGRATULATIONS ON MEETING THE BARE MINIMUM REQUIREMENT FOR MINECRAFT SURVIVAL
ONLY 99 DAYS AND 23 HOURS TO GO
"Baby steps," Jeremy muttered, punching the tree again. He gathered several logs, then moved to another tree and repeated the process. He was just starting to feel like maybe, possibly, he might have a chance at surviving this nightmare when he heard a sound that made him freeze.
It was a roar. Not a Minecraft zombie groan or a skeleton's rattle, but an actual honest-to-god roar that sounded like it came from something very large and very angry. Jeremy slowly turned around and looked up—way up—at the creature that had apparently decided to spawn directly behind him.
It was a dragon. A full-sized, modded, Ice and Fire dragon, with scales that shimmered like ice in the sunlight and eyes that glowed with predatory intelligence. It was absolutely massive, easily the size of a house, and it was looking directly at him with an expression that suggested it was considering whether he would make a good snack.
ICE DRAGON DETECTED
LEVEL: 5
DANGER RATING: YOU'RE GOING TO DIE AGAIN
RECOMMENDATION: MAKE PEACE WITH YOUR GODS
OH WAIT, THE GODS ARE PROBABLY WATCHING THIS FOR ENTERTAINMENT TOO
NEVER MIND
The dragon opened its mouth, and Jeremy saw frost beginning to form in its throat. He didn't need the System to tell him what was about to happen. He turned and ran, clutching his handful of logs like they would somehow protect him from dragon breath.
The ice blast hit him in the back, and Jeremy discovered that being frozen solid in Minecraft was exactly as unpleasant as it sounded. His health bar plummeted, and he found himself encased in a block of ice, unable to move, watching helplessly as the dragon approached.
DEATH #2: DRAGON BREATH
TIME SURVIVED: 12 MINUTES
NEW RECORD: 12 MINUTES
IMPROVEMENT: 5 MINUTES
AT THIS RATE, YOU'LL BE READY TO FIGHT THE ENDER DRAGON IN APPROXIMATELY NEVER
RESPAWNING...
Jeremy respawned again at his starting point, now thoroughly frustrated. The sun had moved slightly in the sky—it was later in the day, which meant he had less time to prepare for nightfall, which he was absolutely certain would be even worse than daytime if this modpack followed standard Minecraft logic.
"Okay," he said, trying to psych himself up. "Third time's the charm. I can do this. Just need to be smarter. More careful. Avoid dragons. Definitely avoid dragons."
GOOD PLAN
UNFORTUNATELY, DRAGONS CAN SPAWN ANYWHERE
AT ANY TIME
INCLUDING RIGHT BEHIND YOU
JUST KIDDING
THERE'S NOT ONE BEHIND YOU
THIS TIME
PROBABLY
Jeremy spun around quickly, just to make sure. No dragon. Just more plains, more potentially deadly mobs wandering around, and more trees that may or may not explode when punched. He took a moment to actually assess his situation properly. He needed food, tools, and shelter, in that order. Night was coming, and he was willing to bet that nighttime in this modpack was going to make the Deadwood Forest look like a pleasant vacation spot.
He started gathering wood again, this time from multiple trees, testing each one carefully before committing to actually harvesting it. He managed to collect a decent amount without any explosions, which felt like a victory. He quickly crafted a crafting table—muscle memory from watching countless Minecraft videos guiding his blocky hands—and then crafted wooden tools. A pickaxe, an axe, and a sword that would probably be about as effective against a dragon as a toothpick against a tank, but it was better than nothing.
ACHIEVEMENT: TIME TO MINE
ACHIEVEMENT: TIME TO STRIKE
YOU'RE ON A ROLL
BY WHICH I MEAN YOU HAVEN'T DIED IN ALMOST 5 MINUTES
IMPRESSIVE
With tools in hand, Jeremy felt slightly more prepared for the nightmare hellscape he was trapped in. He looked around and spotted some sheep in the distance—or at least, creatures that were shaped approximately like sheep, though he couldn't tell from this distance if they were normal sheep or some kind of nightmare sheep variant.
"Please be normal sheep," he muttered, approaching cautiously. "Please, please be normal sheep."
They were not normal sheep. Of course they weren't. These sheep were larger than usual, had glowing red eyes, and when he got close enough, he could see that their wool was shifting through different colors like some kind of rainbow nightmare.
MODDED SHEEP DETECTED: PRISMATIC DEMON SHEEP
DANGER LEVEL: MODERATE
SPECIAL ABILITY: TELEPORTATION, FIRE BREATH, EXISTENTIAL DREAD
DROPS: WOOL (MAYBE), YOUR HOPES AND DREAMS (DEFINITELY)
"Of course they breathe fire," Jeremy said. "Because normal sheep would be too easy."
He decided that getting wool could wait. Food was more important. He spotted what looked like a chicken wandering nearby and approached it, sword raised. The chicken looked normal enough—just a regular Minecraft chicken, bobbing its head as it walked in that characteristic way.
ANALYZING...
THAT'S ACTUALLY JUST A CHICKEN
CONGRATULATIONS, YOU FOUND THE ONE NORMAL MOB IN THE ENTIRE MODPACK
IT'S PROBABLY A TRAP
Jeremy didn't care. He was hungry—his hunger bar was starting to deplete—and he needed food. He attacked the chicken with his wooden sword, and it died in two hits, dropping a single piece of raw chicken. He picked it up, feeling another small surge of accomplishment.
ACHIEVEMENT: COW TIPPER
WAIT, THAT'S NOT A COW
ACHIEVEMENT: CHICKEN MURDERER
THERE WE GO
He killed several more chickens, gathering enough raw chicken to at least stave off starvation. He looked around for a good place to build a shelter. The plains were too exposed—he'd seen what kinds of things spawned out here. The Deadwood Forest was obviously a no-go. In the distance, he could see what looked like a hillside with some exposed stone. That might work. He could dig into it, create a basic shelter, maybe survive the night.
He started running toward the hill, his inventory now containing wood, basic tools, and raw chicken. He was actually making progress. He might actually survive day one. He might actually—
The ground beneath him suddenly collapsed.
Jeremy fell, screaming, down into darkness. He landed hard in what appeared to be a massive underground cavern, his health bar taking a significant hit from the fall damage. He could barely see anything, but what he could see was not encouraging. There were glowing eyes in the darkness. Many, many glowing eyes.
CONGRATULATIONS
YOU FOUND A LYCANITES DUNGEON
THESE ARE SCATTERED THROUGHOUT THE WORLD
FILLED WITH HIGH-LEVEL MOBS
TREASURE
AND DEATH
MOSTLY DEATH
GOOD LUCK
The eyes started moving toward him. Jeremy scrambled backward, but he could hear them coming from all directions. Clicking sounds, growling sounds, sounds that no Minecraft mob should be able to make. He pulled out his wooden sword, knowing it was useless, but needing to do something, anything—
Something hit him from behind, hard. His health bar dropped to critical levels. He swung wildly with his sword, hitting nothing but air. Another hit, this time from the side. Then another. Then—
DEATH #3: OVERWHELMED BY LYCANITES MOBS IN UNDERGROUND DUNGEON
TIME SURVIVED: 18 MINUTES
NEW RECORD: 18 MINUTES
NOTES: MAYBE DON'T FALL INTO RANDOM HOLES
JUST A THOUGHT
RESPAWNING...
Jeremy respawned and immediately punched the ground in frustration, which hurt his blocky hand and also reminded him that he was, in fact, trapped in a Minecraft world with video game physics. He looked up at the sky. The sun was getting lower. He'd died three times and night was approaching. At this rate, he'd be lucky to survive until dawn.
"This is impossible," he said to the System. "You know that, right? This is literally impossible. I can't survive 100 days of this. I can't survive one day of this!"
AND YET, PEOPLE ARE WATCHING
AND HOPING YOU'LL SUCCEED
WELL, MOST OF THEM
SOME ARE HOPING YOU'LL FAIL SPECTACULARLY
VIEWER POLLS ARE SPLIT ABOUT 60/40
GUESS WHICH CATEGORY HAS MORE VOTERS
Jeremy didn't want to know. He took a moment to calm himself, to think rationally. Okay. He'd learned some things. Trees could explode. Mobs were buffed to nightmare levels. Dragons existed and could spawn randomly. The ground could collapse into dungeons. These were all good things to know. Knowledge was power, or at least it was power to not immediately die in the same way twice.
He needed a new strategy. He needed to be more careful, more methodical. He needed to treat this like an actual hardcore survival situation, not like one of those fake 100-days videos where the creator already knew where everything was and had probably scouted the world in creative mode first.
He started his fourth attempt at day one.
This time, he gathered wood without incident, made his tools, and actually managed to kill several chickens for food. He found a hillside and, rather than running blindly toward it, carefully checked the ground for any signs of instability. He found a spot that seemed solid and began digging into the hill, creating a basic cave shelter.
It wasn't pretty. It wasn't sophisticated. It was literally just a hole in the side of a hill with a door made of wooden planks. But it was shelter, and night was falling fast. Jeremy could already hear the sounds of mobs spawning in the darkness outside—and these weren't normal Minecraft mob sounds. There were roars, shrieks, sounds like metal scraping on metal, and what he could have sworn was someone screaming in the distance.
He sealed himself inside his basic shelter and placed torches to light the interior. Then he pulled out his raw chicken and started cooking it in a hastily crafted furnace, using some of his wooden tools as fuel. It was wasteful, but he needed food, and cooked food restored more hunger than raw.
ACHIEVEMENT: MONSTER HUNTER
YOU'VE SURVIVED YOUR FIRST NIGHT
WELL, YOU'VE SURVIVED UNTIL NIGHTFALL
THE NIGHT ITSELF REMAINS TO BE SEEN
ALSO, SOMETHING IS DIGGING TOWARD YOUR SHELTER
THOUGHT YOU SHOULD KNOW
Jeremy heard it then—the sound of blocks being broken, getting closer. Something was tunneling toward him. He grabbed his wooden sword and pressed himself against the back wall of his tiny shelter, watching the wall near the entrance. The sound got louder, closer, and then—
A clawed hand burst through the stone.
It was followed by a head—a skeleton's head, but wrong, with glowing purple eyes and what looked like moss or vines growing from its bones. The thing pulled itself through the hole it had dug and stood up in Jeremy's shelter, towering over him.
LYCANITES MOB: CRYPT ZOMBIE
SPECIAL ABILITY: TUNNELING, POISON, RUINING YOUR DAY
DANGER LEVEL: HIGH
YOU SHOULD PROBABLY RUN
OH WAIT, YOU'RE TRAPPED IN HERE WITH IT
WELL, THIS IS AWKWARD
Jeremy swung his wooden sword at the creature. It connected, doing what appeared to be absolutely minimal damage. The Crypt Zombie swung back, its clawed hand raking across Jeremy's chest and sending him flying backward into the furnace. His health bar dropped precipitously, and he saw a new debuff appear in his status: POISONED.
He scrambled away from the creature, trying to get to the door, but the Crypt Zombie was faster. It grabbed him, and Jeremy felt his health ticking down from both the damage and the poison. He flailed desperately with his sword, getting in a few more hits, and miraculously—absolutely miraculously—the creature's health bar finally depleted and it collapsed into a pile of drops.
Jeremy grabbed the items—some bones, some rotten flesh, and something called a "Crypt Key" that he had no idea what to do with—and stumbled outside. His health was critical, he was poisoned, and night had fully fallen.
Outside was chaos.
The world was dark, lit only by the square moon hanging in the sky and the occasional flash of lightning from a storm that had rolled in. And everywhere Jeremy looked, there were mobs. Not just Minecraft mobs—though there were plenty of zombies and skeletons mixed in—but modded nightmares. Things with too many limbs, things that glowed with unnatural light, things that defied description.
And they all saw him.
CURRENT THREAT LEVEL: EXTREME
MOBS AGGRO'D TO YOU: 37
SURVIVAL CHANCES: MINIMAL
LAST WORDS?
"I should have appreciated those fake videos more," Jeremy said, and then he was running.
He ran blindly into the darkness, with no idea where he was going, just knowing that staying still meant death. Things chased him—he could hear them, could occasionally see them in flashes of lightning. Something flew overhead, blotting out the moon. Something else erupted from the ground in front of him, forcing him to change direction.
He ran until he couldn't run anymore, his stamina depleted, and turned to face his pursuers. There were so many of them, a whole horde of nightmares, and his wooden sword felt like a child's toy in his hand.
"Well," he said, raising his sword. "At least the viewers are getting their money's worth."
VIEWER COUNT: 89 MILLION
TRENDING IN 43 DIMENSIONS
#1 MOST WATCHED STREAM
THEY REALLY ARE ENJOYING THIS
The mobs attacked.
Jeremy fought. He actually fought pretty well, all things considered. He managed to kill three zombies and two skeletons before something huge—something that looked like a bear made of living darkness—slammed into him from the side.
DEATH #4: MAULED BY A SHADE BEAR
TIME SURVIVED: 31 MINUTES
NEW RECORD: 31 MINUTES
CONGRATULATIONS ON SURVIVING PAST NIGHTFALL
EVEN IF ONLY BARELY
RESPAWNING...
And so it went.
Jeremy died six more times before day one finally ended. He died to mobs, to environmental hazards, to what the System identified as a "random meteor strike" that he was pretty sure was just the universe showing off at that point. Each death taught him something new about the hellscape he was trapped in. Each respawn gave him another chance to try a different strategy.
By his tenth attempt at day one, he'd developed something resembling a routine. Gather wood carefully. Make tools. Kill chickens. Find or dig shelter before night. Survive the night by any means necessary. He'd learned which mobs to avoid at all costs (anything with "ancient" or "boss" in its name), which areas were immediately deadly (anything glowing, anything in the Deadwood Forest, anything that looked interesting), and how to maximize his limited time.
His eleventh attempt was his most successful yet. He'd managed to gather enough resources to make stone tools, had found a small cave system that wasn't immediately filled with nightmare creatures, and had even managed to kill a few mobs for their drops. He'd survived the entire first night by blocking himself into a small chamber deep underground and just waiting it out.
When dawn broke on day two, Jeremy emerged from his hidey-hole and checked his status.
DAY 2 BEGINS
DAYS REMAINING: 99
TOTAL DEATHS: 10
TOTAL TIME ALIVE: 2 HOURS, 47 MINUTES
EQUIPMENT: STONE TOOLS, LEATHER ARMOR (BARELY), COOKED CHICKEN
CURRENT OBJECTIVE: DON'T DIE
SECONDARY OBJECTIVE: STILL DON'T DIE
TERTIARY OBJECTIVE: SERIOUSLY, JUST TRY NOT TO DIE FOR FIVE MINUTES
Jeremy looked out at the Minecraft world, with its modded biomes and nightmare creatures and dragons flying in the distance. He thought about the 99 days still ahead of him, about the Ender Dragon he somehow had to defeat, about the fact that even if he succeeded, he'd just have to do 200 days next.
He also thought about the 89 million beings across multiple dimensions who were apparently watching him struggle for survival.
"Alright," he said, gripping his stone sword. "Let's give them a show."
And with that, Jeremy Hutchins began his second day in hell, armed with nothing but basic tools, minimal knowledge, and a growing understanding that this was going to be the longest, hardest, most absurd challenge of his life—or rather, his afterlife.
In the distance, he could hear another dragon roaring. Somewhere underground, a boss mob was spawning. The System helpfully informed him that a new mod had just been added to the world, something called "Advent of Ascension" that apparently added twenty-one new dimensions and over three hundred new mobs.
Jeremy sighed, checked his inventory, and started walking toward what he hoped was some iron ore and not another death trap.
It was, of course, another death trap.
But he was getting better at recognizing them, at least.
That had to count for something.