Inferno

A nation on Devoted Hell known for its shopping mall, soul speed racing track, and cute lava-front buildings.

Pre-History (December 28th, 2020-January 15th, 2021)
The idea of Inferno began almost as quickly as the server of Devoted Hell was announced, with Prawny331 wanting to start a nation that could tide him and his friends over until the next version of CivEx came out. As Devoted Hell was aptly "Hell" themed, Prawny decided to base his nation off of the description of hell from Dante's Inferno. There would be 9 circles, each a city in its own right with a Lord to rule over it.

Prawny asked a gathered selection of his old FSA compatriots if any would like to join, and several responded they would like to. Some disagreed, as they were playing rival server CivUniverse that launched around the same time as Devoted Hell. Among the people who were to become Lords were SwordMaster7777, WNS2, IKEA_FRIDGE, and MrJeremyFisher, the latter two coming from Prawny's Realms nation of Otonabee. Some others filled Lord positions, although their lack of play within the first months leads into question whether they'll keep them. Prawny himself would also be a Lord, highest among them all. Some players would lose interest after it was announced that the server would be pay to play, but still Inferno trudged on.

They then would discuss plans of how they wanted to approach building the "9 Circles of Hell" and after much discussion came up with an acceptable design. In order to properly know how to survive this new version of the nether, they set up a survival world and played on it for a couple hours to get acquainted with the new items and mechanics. The day they had this survival preparation also happened to be the day the trailer dropped, and so all stopped what they were doing to watch the trailer part way through the session.

The Cursed First Day
Many players from Inferno showed up at the 1PM Pacific start time of the server on the opening day, the 15th of January. The lobby of the server had been open to the public for about 36 hours beforehand, and a couple of players had already done the lobby quests, which just left the portal to hell at the center of the lobby to be opened up so that the descent to hell could begin. The barriers to the portal were removed, and the dozens of players flooded down into the maw of hell, however, the portal didn't work. The players, unperturbed, kept jumping down into the portal, only to be teleported back up to fruitlessly try again. This led to the admins telling the players to run the command /worldspawn, which allowed the playerbase to actually enter the nether. As this hilarious event was completely unexpected, nobody recorded video of it happening.

These brave pioneers were met with many bugs, a particularly laggy server, and a great trek north up to what they determined to be the most valuable shard: Cerberus. Many people spawned in A or B shard, so it took a great many hours for most to even get to C in the first place. The Inferno voice channel proved to be the one of the most popular voice channels on the discord on opening day, with a great many people proving for a bit of a hectic VC for the first several hours. A player named Coldboy had his game sounds on which could be heard through his mic with the addition of the narrator option turned on. This led to interjections of the phrase "Narrator narrates chat" which became a running joke for the day.

A location on the northern side of the shard in a warped forest was found that seemed good enough, However Arcation also desired to settle here. Two of their members came upon Ikea, who was in the area awaiting his fellow compatriots, with swords drawn intent to show force. Ikea then pulled out his diamond sword he found while looting surrounding nether structures in a show of greater force, though he was outnumbered. It was decided that it was better to just let Arcation have the location, and so Ikea peacefully went on his way.

Prawny and SwordMaster then entered the shard, having met up at the northern border of B shard and subsequently working together to navigate the treacherous terrain. They had seemingly found another good spot on the edge of a crimson forest, though it was also close to where another nation, Mercer, wanted to settle. They then proceeded to get murdered and pearled by a pvper from Mercer with an enchanted sword as Prawny and SwordMaster were discussing the issue of Inferno and Mercer being too close with the leader of Mercer in voice chat, being the first people to be pearled on the server. They were quickly released and their stuff chested at the location, though Prawny and Sword would have to randomspawn to find it again.

The first place Sword respawned after being pearled actually proved to be a near perfect location, and they decided that this spot would be where Inferno was to be located. Luckily, nobody else was settling nearby. Everyone then slowly made their way there, and after 6 grueling hours, all the first day players had made it.

The settlers would carve a cave into a basalt cliff which would become the central base of operations, and pretty it up with wood from the surrounding warped forest, making basic roads as necessary. Nothing except the chests and the respawn beacon were reinforced, as the netherbrick reinforcement was bugged, requiring one netherbrick block as opposed to the item. Not wanting to waste netherbrick, reinforcing would generally be avoided at this time, unless it was valuable enough to be reinforced with gold.

Sometime after the pioneers got settled, one of the many server crashes that plagued the server at this time fried namelayer to the point that nobody had any access to previously created groups, and so they had to play a few hours not being able to access any of the items they had collected. Luckily, new groups created after the crash worked, and this was used to store items in the meantime. Namelayer did not have a GUI at this time in addition to other problems, generally making the use of namelayer a scuffed experience compared to previous iterations.

A small monument was built where Prawny and Sword were pearled in dedication of the event. It still stands there to this day. Mercer would later move to a different location, making that part of the odyssey near pointless, although Inferno did end up with a better location in the end.

The Great Grind
Despite the plans for the server to be pay to play, the admins decided that until they fixed all the problems plaguing the server, it would effectively be free to play in the immediate future. This allowed people who had bought/won subscriptions and those less fortunate alike to grind out the foundations of what Inferno would become.