In Episode 11, the group continues forward after leaving Dean on a pirate ship after he gets infected for a third time in the series. Afterwards, they reach a small town and, while there are zombies, they manage to get hold of some good gear. Things seem to be looking up for the group, when, out of nowhere, Jared screams "PIG ZOMBIE!" before being immediately killed by the resulting explosion, just as the group is ambushed by more zombies.
Episode 14, where McJones dies and PBG is forced to kill his own brother's zombie. Complete with sorrowful music (although it does keep getting interrupted when McJones's zombie refuses to stand still) and PBG saying a sorrowful goodbye.
PBG: McJones... I'm sorry...
In Episode 16, Barry becomes the Sole Survivoryet again after his two comrades have fallen in battle. One of the saddest parts of the whole fight is Barry watching Ian's zombie slowly advance towards him.
Barry: Not like this... Not like this! Not like this! *starts sobbing* No!
Minecraft #4
In Episode 11, Caddy's death at the hands of a crowd of zombie pigmen after falling behind the group while Dean watches and screams in horror is quite sad.
Caddy: I'm so sorry, I panicked, I panicked! Dean: Oh no! Caddy! FUCK! [Afterwards:] Dean: Oh, my heart... I watched him die, he got surrounded. PBG: Aw, no, Caddy...
Minecraft #5
This season is commonly recognized as one of the saddest seasons, as every death here hits hard.
Barry's death in Episode 7. After falling into a spiderweb, he gets poisoned and gets left with half a heart, with a Cave Spider spawner next to him and a Cave Spider immediately behind the spawner. He's left immobilized by the web, and nearly dead. With a final Heroic Sacrifice, he breaks the spawner, and though he attempts to kill the spider after, he ultimately gets attacked and dies. What makes it even more tragic is that by looking at his screen, he's frantically clicking, trying to bat the spider away, even though it's more efficient to do solid swipes. He's panicking the entire time, trying to stay alive.
Jared's death. In Episode 9, the group's back in the mine, and near the episode's end, Jared is ambushed by a spider, knocked into lava, and burnt to death. As he burns, Jared attempts to at least get his valuable Diamond Sword to safety so the rest of the group can use it. He fails to do so and it ends up burning with most of his gear. As if losing Jared by itself wasn't enough, Episode 10 really hammers the nail in, first with a shot of him going up in flames from PBG's perspective, and his feelings of guilt for being helpless to save him, everyone arguing over what caused his death, and minutes later with a moving tribute showcasing his highlights throughout the series.
In Episode 13, the remaining survivors split into two groups, one of them being Ray, Jeff, and Dean. Partway through the episode, the group's making a new path in the fortress while looking for the Nether Wart, when Ray accidentally unearths some of the lava, the lava engulfs Dean, and he burns to death. Worse yet, because of the angle of the lava note Dean was boxed in a corner when the leak first started, and was ultimately trapped dead centre of a pool of lava several blocks wide that surrounded him from all sides, Ray and Jeff can do nothing but look on as he dies, try as they might. Doubly painful for Ray, as he was the one who opened up the pocket of lava. His panicked apologies as Dean burns alive says enough.
Episode 15 starts at a high note as the group of 4 escape the Pigmen and make it to the fortress. It only goes downhill from there, as after an ongoing battle, Ray and McJones are dead from wither poisoning and burns respectively, with Austin and Jeff nearly dying as well and the survivors trapped in a bunker. The episode ends with a flashback reel of the team joyously starting off in Episode 1, followed by all of the deaths thus far. The last thing we see is the chibi graveyard, with five graves. Special attention to the extremely somber music that plays after Ray's death.
For a while, the duo of Austin/PBG and Jeff were doing well, but in Episode 20, Austin is blown up from behind by a creeper. To say that Jeff doesn't take it that well is quite the understatement. The music and flashbacks do not help. PBG's bloodcurdling scream and Jeff's anguished Big "NO!" as PBG dies is just painful to listen to. Especially since Jeff saw the Creeper just a fraction of a second too late to save PBG, and that Jeff was just inches away from getting caught in the blast himself. Just when things were looking up, the game twists the knife.
In general, SpaceHamster went through way too much in this particular Hardcore. He started off with six of his friends to find the Elytra, and poor Jeff was either present or involved with everyone's deaths. During Barry's death, he himself was poisoned so much that he couldn't help him from assisting him, and Dean calls him out for it. After Jeff chickened out of getting the danger water, ProJared dies in lava, and Dean and Ray started blaming him for his death. When the group split up in the Nether, he watched Dean and McJones die in lava and by fire respectively, unable to do anything. And last, but certainly not least, when PBG couldn't have been any closer, he watched the last group member be killed, leaving him all by himself. And unlike most other hardcores, every death shakes up the group's morale to a noticeable degree. Now, he's the only one to bear that weight all the way through.
On his search for the stronghold, Jeff finds a group of wolves he befriends with all of the bones he got from fighting skeletons. However, most of them eventually die off. Several are killed from lava during Jeff's journey through the stronghold for the End Portal. The couple wolves he does manage to bring with him to the End predictably get killed by the Ender Dragon. Even more sad considering that they were his only companions after losing the rest of his party.
The season finale starts with a lengthy shot of the graveyard, stopping on each grave and showing a slow, somber panning shot (in third-person) of the areas where each of the fallen party members died, complete with various dialogue from that person over the course of the series. Special mention must be given to the shots of the mineshaft where Barry died, the fortress passage where Ray withered away (made worse by a single dropped red flower that was left while the survivors salvaged what they could from his body, which hadn't despawned yet), and the crater caused by the blast that took PBG's life. The series ends with Jeff dying and an extremely sad shot of everyone's graves as his own (made of gold) is added.
PBG seems to cross the Despair Event Horizon after Jeff dies, as shown by this blink-and-you-miss-it exchange, when PBG and McJones are arguing over who should take the grappling hook they claim to be cursed because it caused Jeff's death:
McJones: Who better to take the cursed grappling hook than me?
PBG: Who better to die than me?!
Even though the group as a whole was doing well, Dean dies in Episode 22. This one hits hard because he was always the first person to watch for others standing on spikes saving Luke twice, yet he didn't watch his own health. Luke's and Lucah's eulogy for Dean makes the end of Team New Kids one of the saddest moments in the entire season.
The finale ends on a Pyrrhic note, as the group defeats the Wall of Flesh only to get massacred by a goblin army when they arrive back home. Everyone, including McJones in-game and post-death, comments on how unsatisfying the victory was.
MineZ #2
During the season finale, PBG, convinced that not everyone is going to survive the next step, brings the surviving party members together for one somber last meal of cookies before they make their attempt. Worse, he's proven right— he and Barry both die roughly a minute after the party makes their push onto the first Floating Isle, and the rest of the survivors drop like flies shortly thereafter.
Minecraft #6
McJones's death hits the rest of the team hard, in no small part due to how early in the season it occurred, and the circumstances surrounding it. As the team starts to explore the mine, McJones sees a zombie attacking PBG and Chad, and runs in to help them. Unfortunately, what he thought was a small ledge that he needed to leap down from was actually a small, incomplete bridge that Chad was in the process of building to block off a lava vein when the zombie attacked (the angle of which, as the audience can see from Chad's perspective after his death, makes it look like a complete path). Neither Chad or PBG saw him approach in time to warn him, and he burns to death almost instantly, not even having time to let out a death scream. Chad immediately blames himself for not being fast enough in blocking it off, PBG is left audibly stunned, and Dean announces that the team has already lost. To top it all off, this happens in the second episode of the season, setting the tone for the rest of the adventure.
Jared's team's adventure to the jungle to recover the Totem of Undying is a success, but the group is instantly teleported back to the spawn, in the middle of a horde of mobs. Right when it seems like everyone makes it home safely, and the gang is about to be restored to full strength for the first time since the second episode by reviving McJones, Dodger is one-shotted from behind by a Creeper mere feet from the safety of the house (and even worse, she was originally safe inside the house, but left to help rescue Jared and Jeff, who had fallen behind, and was blown up mere seconds after leaving safety).
This especially hurts because up until that point, McJones was the only fatality, and now the group has to make a Sadistic Choice between which player to resurrect: McJones, the experienced veteran who was killed near the beginning of the season due to negligence, or Dodger, the New Meat who, in spite of her inexperience, not only helped recover the Totem that allowed them revive a fallen teammate in the first place, but died entirely because she tried to prevent two other party members from getting killed. While most deaths in Hardcore get a response for the rest of the survivors very quickly, Dodger's death goes a step further as it's met by an immediate, visceral Big "NO!" from the entire party (aside from Dean, who drops a pained Big "WHAT?!" instead). The Mood Whiplash from excitement for reviving McJones after 8 episodes into remorseful dread for now having to make the aforementioned choice of who to keep dead is palpable.
After Dodger is revived, most of the team, particularly Dean, grows paranoid and begins to distrust her, with Dean speculating on a Manchurian Agent scenario and wondering what pact was made to ensure revival. Worse, there's hints it's a Came Back Wrong scenario and the 'real' Dodger is still dead.
During Episode 14, after PBG somehow manages to find his way back to the group in the Nether, it finally seems that they have a fighting chance, with the group reunited. Unfortunately, after PBG makes the fatal mistake of hitting a Pigman, the group is sent into a panic, and they dash towards the Nether portal, which has no back and leads directly into a free fall with lava below. PBG is aware of that, but a charging Baby Pigman attacks him, pushing him off. And Dodger, who has been brought back to life, was not aware of the portal lacking a backside, and she falls off of the platform with PBG. Like with McJones's death, Chad blames himself for the tragedy. Dodger's second and final death came just three episodes after being revived from her first death, rendering the quest for the Totem nearly pointless in the grand scheme of things. After this disastrous expedition, half of the party is dead with little to show for it.
In the season finale, the quest ends with a Bittersweet Ending. The team successfully reaches their goal and kills the Wither—however, Jared, who had been targeted nearly exclusively by the Wither for the entire fight, is finally brought down literally five seconds before the boss is killed, sucking the air out of what would have otherwise been a spectacular victory—especially considering that this was the first season that Jared was part of that ended in success after a lengthy streak of failures, and he was so close to living long enough to see his unlucky streak finally end.
Jared's epitaph drives home how instrumental he was to the team's victory.
Gravestone: Jared, he fought valiently, and was our SHIELD
Starbound
In Episode 22, PBG's death is brazenly unfair, and the entire party knows it. While riding an elevator downwards, PBG's recurring lag problems cause a glitch that makes him suffer repeated fall damage as a result of rubberbanding, eventually splattering him at the bottom of the shaft. Luke even argues that his death shouldn't count, but because the game is explicitly set to Hardcore mode, there's no way to bring him back.
Minecraft #7
In Episode 2, thanks to the season's addition of positional audio and lack of death messages, the party initially has no proof that Jared and Barry were killed in the Zombie attack. While it doesn't take long to find Jared's dropped items and confirm his death due to him dying on the ground floor of the house, they desperately cling onto hope that Barry managed to wall himself off and save himself, and even start a search party, feebly calling out for him in the off-chance that he's too far away to hear them. Unfortunately, as viewers, we know that this search is in vain, as Barry was the first to fall.
After Dean's death, the group is shocked but not too demoralized... until Luke dies later that same episode, and then Ray dies in the next episode, sending PBG and Jeff into a Heroic BSoD and wondering how everything fell apart so fast.
When PBG and Jeff return home and see the dogs Billy and Waffle, Waffle is waiting for Luke and won't respond to their commands (in a manner that PBG compares to the infamous "Jurassic Bark" episode of Futurama), and flashbacks are played of Luke naming Waffle and telling him to sit. They then decide to take Billy along for the adventure and vow that he has to make it home to cheer up Waffle, becoming very protective of him.
Episode 19 has Billy/Buddy die to a Creeper, complete with a gravestone shot, demoralizing Jeff. Then, despite all his efforts and extensive preparation, Jeff dies when the Ender Dragon rams him off the tower, complete with slow-motion to Chariots of Fire and a flashback about ladders potentially being dangerous. To rub salt in the wounds, the last thing seen in the series is Waffle waiting at home for Luke.
