Web Video / Minecraft SOS

"Keep your coins close… and don't die."

Minecraft SOS is a hardcore Minecraft SMP series run by fWhip. Other than Mogswamp, all other creators are returning members or guests from the Empires SMP.

Being a hardcore Minecraft series, each player only has one life. However, this mechanism comes with a twist: at the start of the series, each player is given a Fate Coin; if a player dies, they have 24 hours of real-life time to be resurrected using a Fate Coin (or more as the series goes on), or they will die permanently and be kicked from the server.

The series also has a "ban" on lore to facilitate player interactions without having to consider any overarching storylines or character arcs; however, improv and bits are still fair game.

The series began on February 24th, 2024, and is currently ongoing.

Note: Unless otherwise specified, all tropes pertain to the characters, not the content creators that play them.

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Minecraft SOS contains examples of:

• Added Alliterative Appeal: Katherine, Eloise, Scott, and Joey call themselves "the Blossom Bandits" for trying to raid Sausage's house for spare supplies and then actually raiding and taking down Oli's cherry monopoly by stealing his saplings; in response, Jimmy, Oli, and Mog comment about forming "the Pink Petal Police" as a counter-force. Mog also names his starter base "the Midnight Meadery".
• All for Nothing:
  • Oli spends his entire 1st episode trying to make a monopoly on cherry trees and petals to scam everyone out of their resources. Within the same episode, the monopoly is inevitably broken twice — first by Lizzie bone-mealing the free pink petal sample she was given to obtain infinite petals and dye, then by the Blossom Bandits raiding his supply for saplings.
  • In his 3rd episode, Owen looks up whether it's possible to build a beacon out of copper blocks and does so based on the positive search results… only for it to not work, since the instructions aren't even for vanilla Minecraft. He ends up re-making it out of iron off-screen.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: The start of Sausage's 11th episode show that titles in his Lore-Brary include "The Tail of the Ocean Queen", "The History of Sausage Valley", "The Fates in Disguise", "Ten Ways to Survive an SMP by Solidarity", "Diary of Bubbles Volume I–IV", "The Legend of The Watchers", "Into the Bubbleverse", "The Encyclopedia of Air Sausages", "The Wizardress and the King", "The Story of Hermes", "The God Collector", "How the Demon Destroyed us all! A Xornoth Story", "Mystery of the Silent J", "The Misadventures of the Blossom Bandits", and "B O A T B O Y S: Lost At Sea" (the last by Sausage himself).
• Back from the Dead: If a player dies and loses their only life, their life can be restored within 24 real-life hours of their death by another player using one or more Fate Coins.
• Bait-and-Switch: Pix's Episode 6 begins with a shot of the central End island... and then the camera rotates, revealing it was actually of the underside of the island, as the obsidian pillars poke out the bottom as well as the top.
• Chekhov's Boomerang: Lizzie's amethyst farm. It was first built by Mog for Lizzie in an attempt for him to make friends, only for a mishap in the design to cause Lizzie to fall to her death. Later, after being revived, Lizzie scams Owen (and several others) at her auction, which prompts him to trap Lizzie's amethyst farm and lures her there to kill her again.
• Chekhov's Gun: The Fate Coins — each player owns one from the start of the series, and more can only be obtained as rewards from fortnightly events and completing certain advancements. Their purpose is to be used to resurrect a recently deceased player so that they aren't Killed Off for Real, with more and more coins needed to revive someone the longer the series goes on.
• Clock Tower: Mog's starter base, the Midnight Meadery, is described to be "an old, abandoned clock tower, converted to run on beesiel fuel", and intended to act as a beacon in the forest.
• Cult: Played for Laughs. Half the server has assisted in Pix's enormous dig and have dubbed the site "Pix's Hole". It starts with Jimmy joking about yearning for the Hole after his first attempts helping out (due to owing Pix a favour for reviving him), then escalates into various server-members joking about worshipping the Hole and that it's become a cult (and treating it as such), with Pix even titling his livestreams something relating to the Hole's power and Sausage making a hole-y cathedral dedicated to the Hole and its cult.
  Pix: I may have been appointed a cult leader against my will.
• Didn't Think This Through:
  • Oli's cherry tree monopoly almost immediately becomes All for Nothing because despite his signs discouraging others from chopping his trees down, the saplings on the ground that haven't been grown yet are technically still fair game and leaves can easily be broken to obtain saplings, so the "Blossom Bandits" quickly make off with several saplings each to bypass the monopoly.
  • In her 1st episode, Shelby first terraforms her hill into flatland for building her house by simply putting a layer of dirt above a large crevice in the hill. She quickly finds a creeper infestation in the now-dark crevice and has to go down to light up the place and kill them.
  • At the start of the fourth server event, Joey decides to take the King of the Hill totem to play Hide and Seek with, with Oli, Eloise, and Scott giving him a 10-second head-start before trying to hunt him down. This proves to be a poor decision as Joey just flies out of render distance within those 10 seconds, causing the rest of the server to resort to more extreme methods to either track him down or threaten him to return to his base.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: With the server's "ban" on lore, storytelling is treated like a Fantastic Drug throughout the server: there are joke-threats to kill or ban anyone who accidentally or deliberately brings up roleplay or even the word 'lore'; Shelby treats her attic like an illicit substances den, hiding her enchantment and potions set-up there with a "Wanted!" Poster of her Cute Witch character from Empires SMP Season 2 (using a custom texture pack); and in his 4th episode, Sausage recounts being "so upset that [he] started to lore a little bit" in response to his first pet camel Mayday suffocating in a Nether portal, while resolutely denying that a mention of inter-species reincarnation is lore of any sort.
• Dramatic Irony: In the last quarter of Owen's 2nd episode, he overhears her commenting on a certain aspect of content creation, while both are live on stream.
  Eloise: The reason streams are a fun, funky little time is because pretty much none of what is on the streams will be in the episodes, and none of what is in the episodes will be on the streams–
  Owen: (almost does a spit-take)
  Eloise: –Um, so, you get the most frest content if you turn up to both!
• Friendly Rivalry: Eloise and Lizzie have one in the former's 1st episode and the latter's 2nd, first collaborating then racing to uncover pottery sherds and make pots in order to obtain a Fate Coin.
• Infinite 1-Ups: The King of the Hill Totem from the fourth server event isn't used up after the player holding it "dies", but is ejected from their inventory. If a player is able to hold on to the Totem without anyone hounding after them, this should be possible.
• Innocent Innuendo: "Pix's Hole" refers to his huge cylindrical dig site, and any and all jokes related to its massive size should be ignored.
• Interface Spoiler: In Owen's 2nd episode, Eloise overhears the sounds of blocks breaking near her house, suspects he's sneaking around her house, but fails to find him. Minutes later, Owen completes what he intended to do in her house, but immediately books it back down his tunnel after realizing what he's accomplished shows up in the in-game chat.
  OwengeJuice has made the advancement [Careful Restoration]
  soupforeloise: :0
• Ironic Echo: At the end of the second challenge, Lizzie auctions off a map to a "cursed item" to Owen for 15 stacks of bone blocks, only for the map to lead to a barrel containing a single black candle, renamed to claim that it brings death when lit. Owen responds by trapping Lizzie's amethyst farm with a dripstone stalagmite, fully intending for this to be lethal, while lighting his candle there, with the message "Seems you've met a terrible fate, haven't you?.."
  Lizzie: You used my own candle against me?!
• Irony: For all its talk about a "ban" on lore, fWhip being the voice of "the Fates" — announcing community events and distributing resultant coin rewards — suggests the existence of "the Fates" as an in-universe entity, i.e. worldbuilding and lore.^note Albeit as soft lore, without the overarching storyline and intensive roleplay aspect of hard lore.
  Shelby: Is a Fate Coin not just lore itself?
• Killed Off for Real: If a deceased player is not successfully revived using Fate Coins within the 24-hour grace period after their death, they die forever and are kicked from the server. So far, this has not happened to anyone yet.
• Lighter and Softer: Enforced. Due to the "ban" on lore, Minecraft SOS is more about creator-character interactions than any overarching roleplay storyline like in Empires SMP or other series.
• LOL, 69: More than one creator-character has commented on having a "nice" amount of XP levels after they reach level 69.
• Misplaced Wildlife: In Owen's 5th episode, he stumbles across a sun bear in a cold tundra and questions how it got there, before bringing it home to the jungle with him, back to its natural habitat. Out-of-universe, it's a retextured polar bear (which naturally spawn in the tundra) that he was assigned to keep as a pet for a server event.
• Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal: After watching next to no one log on for the second day of the King of the Hill Totem challenge, Scott and Eloise, being initially on Team "Everyone Gets a Coin", decide to make a deal with Oli for being the only other person to consistently log on for the event to split the Fate Coins between them. While they later decide to make individual Fate Coin distribution deals with other players for favours or appeasement, the rest of the server has, in turn, put them on an unofficial "server-wide blacklist" to not revive them if they die.
• Mushroom House: In his 14th episode, Sausage builds a house with a large red and white mushroom tower as the place of residence of his challenge-assigned pet frog, Squishy.
• Mythology Gag:
  • Jimmy's insistence that he cannot be the first to die in this series, complete with Eloise code-naming him "Canary" at the start of her 1st episode.
  • Pix's tool funerals are based around the same concept as the Vigil, and originated from an old server from when he first started playing Minecraft.
  • The Blossom Bandits isn't the first time Scott has participated in busting down a tree monopoly in a group of four.
• Needle in a Stack of Needles: In the King of the Hill Totem event, the Bedwars fortress that Team "Everyone Gets a Coin" makes to keep the Totem in is eventually revamped by Scott into a fountain-tower of chests and barrels, covering a small core of obsidian containing the real chest where the Totem is kept in. Subverted in that it's actually a Red Herring as the Totem isn't even kept there.
• Oh, Crap!: In Eloise's 1st episode, she and Lizzie both have this reaction whenever a trident-wielding drowned starts attacking them while they're investigating underwater ruins for suspicious sand and gravel.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: While Pix's massive dig is initially just referred to as a dig, as the weeks pass, it's near-ubiquitously referred to as "Pix's Hole" or simply "the Hole".
• Our Ghosts Are Different: Recently deceased players are able to possess nearby non-hostile animals while in Spectator mode to guide other players to help revive them. They are still able to interact with players, e.g. punching them, and retain their XP level upon death, but cannot access their inventory as their items are stored in their gravestone. The host animals they possess can be killed and bred, though, but it doesn't physically affect the player's ghost.
• Out-of-Context Eavesdropping: In their 1st episodes, Oli gives Eloise a free sample of pink cherry petals at spawn, which she promises to keep "where the Sun don't shine" so that no one can see (as in her inventory), only to be conveniently interrupted.
  Sausage: WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT? WHO– WHAT DID I WALK INTO?!
• Prisoner's Dilemma: The fourth server event plays on this concept, revolving around a "King of the Hill Totem": if the totem is in a designated chest at Spawn by the end of the 48-hour challenge, everyone receives a Fate Coin, but if someone has it in their inventory by the end, they receive 10 Fate Coins and an otherwise unobtainable totem of undying while everyone else gets nothing.
• Running Gag: There is no lore on the server; they are just people playing Minecraft, and any and all mentions to past roleplay-intensive series are entirely coincidental and should be ignored.
• Shout-Out:
  • One of the segments of Eloise's 3rd episode is titled "Ha, Ha, Ha, Ha, Staying Alive" and fittingly chronicles Sausage reviving her after a mishap in the Nether.
  • Eloise's 4th episode ends with her and Mog encountering an Identical Stranger to fWhip who distributes their Fate Coins they earned and leaves, then telling fWhip that there's an impostor of him on the server when he's confused by this. fWhip replies that it seems very "sus".
  • In his 6th episode, Joey refers to the book of 'criminals' he keeps at Spawn his "Burn Book".
• Starter Equipment: Every player is given 32 steak at the start of the SMP to ensure they can set up a base and steady food source without dying from either being unable to heal up or starving.
• Switching P.O.V.:
  • As standard, the series is posted or livestreamed across just over a dozen perspectives on YouTube or Twitch, meaning certain events and interactions can be viewed through multiple perspectives, should one choose to do so.
  • Eloise and Owen's 2nd episodes intersperse between each other's perspectives near the end to show Owen's pottery heist by breaking into her house and re-crafting her pot so he can get a Fate Coin for himself, and her live reaction to finding that out.
  • Scott's 7th episode features Jimmy's live reaction to his dropped anvil pranks from the latter's livestream.
  • Mog's 3rd episode inserts a clip of Lizzie's first death from her perspective as it took place in the amethyst geode mine he built at her request.
• Theme Naming: In Pix's 7th episode, he and Eloise name a couple of striders 'Shiver' and 'Timbers'. While the former is in part due to striders shivering when out of lava, when combined, they're close to forming the phrase 'shiver me timbers'.
• Trail of Bread Crumbs: At the start of the series, Oli leaves a trail of pink cherry petals on the ground to where he grows cherry trees for his monopoly, intended to be followed by anyone wanting to seek out cherry-based resources for themselves.
• Trial by Combat: Owen's contribution to Spawn is "the Debate Settling Ring", a stone fighting arena where two individuals can duke it out physically with Good Old Fisticuffs, with the first person to fall into the ditch surrounding the perimeter being the loser.
• Video-Game Lives: Each player only has one life; if they aren't brought back in 24 hours, they're gone for good.
• Visual Innuendo: Oli's Hog has a window right under its tail, which quickly becomes a magnet for innuendo.
  • First, Katherine adds a stream of dirt blocks from the window to the ground beneath, which Oli calls out for being crass. Later, Joey suggests knocking out the window to make a butthole and pouring a bucket of water down from said window, lamenting how Minecraft doesn't have bucketed swamp water.
  • Later, at the suggestion of his comments section, Oli adds a pink water elevator, "the Hog Tube", located between the Hog's hind legs; Jimmy kindly points out on stream (and in Joey's 3rd episode and Oli's 2nd) that the latter is "a little bit on the sus side". It takes all but a few minutes for Oli to start reconsidering his design choices when Jimmy runs off, scandalized.
• Wham Episode: For a series which proclaims to be free from hard-lore, Sausage's 10th episode takes a twist halfway through as he hands in his completed task challenge to "fWhip" and receives his Fate Coin… then "fWhip" says, "Fates away!", disappears all of a sudden, and fWhip walks up to Sausage again 30 seconds later, asking how he's doing with seemingly no recollection of what just happened.

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When you're in the mine and it's not looking fine, say, "S.O.S."
Your hunger's getting low, you're starting to walk slow, say, "S.O.S."
If you're strong, I'll be needing your coin to go on
If you're strong, I'll be needing your coin to go on