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. The first fruits of this long grind would be a series of basic factories to make coal and exotic building blocks, with preparations already made to start gathering goods for the more advanced factories. The various Inferno grinders would be hard at work gathering materials to fuel the budding nation, digging various mines, farming various food and XP goods, and chopping trees. Inferno Citizen Greltam proved to be an impressive grinder in this regard, rapidly chopping enough trees to be the first person to be able to buy bamboo from the jobs shop and being the top lumberjack on the server, a position he still keeps to this day.

A player named Grace would be recruited, with Grace having a silk touch pick looted from a bastion. This silk proved to be a boon that accelerated Inferno progress by at least a week, though the pick would stay longer than it's wielder, as Grace would raid the cave base after only a couple days. Grace was booted, but the diplomatic Prawny managed to acquire the silk pick as recompense, and so overall this event would seemingly be a minor hiccup. However, this raid wouldn't be the first, and definitely not the worst. With this silk pick, enough ore was collected to make an ore smelter, the second to be made on the server. An intermediate XP factory would also be made at the same time, allowing for the first diamond tools to be enchanted. Among all the ores, redstone was surprisingly the hardest to collect for the ore smelter due to it's extreme rarity and terrible optimum y level.

Another citizen, Alberlb, dug a giant quarry right near base, a quarry that happened to encompass the optimum y levels for gold, diamond, and ancient debris. SwordMaster would construct the first major build project outside of the cave base in this quarry: a mall, complete with a ghast spawning arena in the middle and soul soil roads lining the length. He would build the first shop here, selling soul speed boots and books gained from piglin trades. This shop was pretty terrible and made no profit. JeremyFisher would design the Inferno flag at the behest of Prawny, one of the only nations to have a flag at this time besides Mercer. SwordMaster would be the first person to finish a house, and would begin to transition out of the communal living of the time. Also at this time, the general location of the Circles of Inferno was placed, and all Infernals thereafter started, for the most part, exclusively mining there.

Raiding and Building
Bad luck would strike Inferno, however, in the form of a serial raider named Pwigie. Pwigie had been raiding civ servers for years, and the Inferno crew quickly knew he was trouble, especially after he raided a couple other nations beforehand. This raider was particularly dangerous as he had an enchanted diamond sword, a weapon with the power to instakill practically every player due to the tech level being iron armor at best. His first strike would be on the 23rd of January, in which he killed Greltam in the cave base by sneaking into a broken window caused by a newfriend. He then proceeded to run away, but it appears he took a particular liking to Inferno and would soon return the next day. In the second strike, He came upon an unprepared WNS and SwordMaster, with the two Infernals unsure of what to do. WNS had grabbed several valuable items and managed to run away, logging off just outside of Inferno, not logging back in for the duration of the raid. SwordMaster was pearled.

Pwigie then had his fill trying to break into various chests, though he seemed to be unfocused and didn't do too much damage. He broke into the cave base and broke a chest with a great deal of warped wood, easily the greatest casualty of this second strike. He broke into Sword's house as well, though only broke a chest of fire pots. He dug into the chest vault, but did not attempt to steal anything from here when met with the resistance of diamond reinforced chests. SwordMaster, after dying enough times to cause the memory usage of minecraft to inflate dramatically, happened upon Inferno and distracted Pwigie for a solid 15 seconds. He would then have to play spawn roulette a second time, due to pearled players being disconnected from their respawn beacon. Pwigie also killed the Piglins that were being stored in the staffroom of the mall as a barter kiosk.

The carnage was finally stopped when Greltam rolled up and shot Pwigie with a single arrow. Pwigie logged out immediately, just outside of Sword's house. A logbox made out of obby and nether wart blocks would be constructed around the general area he logged out in, however because snitches were broken, the Infernals did not know exactly where he logged out, and so the logbox was way bigger than it should've been. This also unfortunately blocked off the tunnel up to Sword's house, and was genuinely pretty ugly. Sword would construct a second house soon after and connect the two with a gold block elevator. The Infernals waited for the raider to log back in, but Pwigie would not prove to be a nuisance at this time. As minimum damage was done overall, there was no need for any grand restoration projects, although it was determined that certain invaluable infrastructures should be rebuilt or remodeled to make them more secure from future raids. Among these was a replacement for the piglin bartering kiosk, an auto-barter that would automatically trade gold for precious resources.

Later that week, it was announced that there would be a build competition over the next weekend with build XP being tripled and the top 3 nations receiving prizes as Convoy wanted nice screenshots for advertisements. The Infernals determined that as they were one of the most active nations and had some decent builders, they would surely win one of the prizes if they put in the effort. Everyone started planning various builds, with the general theme being a lavafront town along the eastern edge of town on the level directly beneath the base. Through a combination of the efforts of Prawny, WNS, and Sword, various builds were constructed, including: a sea wall, strider docks, a library, a lighthouse, and a newfriend inn. The bridge to the dig site of the circles was prettied up as well, creating an overall excellent view to be proud of. The mall was also finished, adding a food court at the very end with a lookout over the nether wastes outside the mall. Greltam, having gathered sizeable wealth from his intense grinding, created an XP Exchange referred to as the "Void Shop". Despite the mall being relatively empty of shops otherwise, this would prove to be extremely popular with many of the server's denizens in the coming weeks. Greltam also constructed a small gambling kiosk and a soul speed race track in the mall, which entertained Convoy when he visited to judge.

Inferno would place third in this contest, winning a bit of netherite, some gold, and a few prismarine lanterns, all precious materials. A chicken spawn egg was also included, but chicken breeding technology had already been acquired at this time, although it was not effectively used. Alexandria, the second place winners, had grinded enough build levels to acquire trees through their effective leader, TTastic. As Inferno and Alexandria had friendly relations and shared materials in the past, Inferno was quickly able to acquire trees, which would also unlock bees and bee resources. Some other miletstones were achieved at this time, with Greltam being the second person to get a shulker box, the farmer Fuji first to get spider eyes, which would be helpful for potion making, and the creation of diamond armor and transportation factories. Things were going well and Inferno was improving at a good pace, but a few more roadblocks would stand in the way of the developing nation.

Government
Todo