Yep, we're tackling that question today.

So let's get right into it. Lore is Minetown's story. If it's anything else, it doesn't work. It can't just be yours or mine, not just Rodney's, Bumpy's, or anybody else's, it has to be all of it. Not what happens to a single player, but what happens between all the players. Simply put, lore is what you get when you throw a whole bunch of people into a big toybox and turn every little squabble, every alliance, every fight, and every build into a grand narrative the size of any novel. Let me reiterate what that means:

It's all of our stories together that create the lore.

Now of course that's a pretty hard concept to envision at first. I mean why would anybody read about epic tales like 'what happened at the enderman farm!' We already know how that goes, we've all seen it a hundred times. BobbityBillus and JortsLucPicard yelled at each other in chat for forty-five minutes, BobbityBillus decided he had enough and killed JortsLucPicard, and JortsLucPicard is now ranting on the discord about how his first duty is to the truth. People fight about stupid stuff, they team up and get so rich nobody likes them anymore, two clans accuse each other of ruining the server, and somebody makes a giant sweater house that literally everyone wants to take a flint and steel to. It ain't exactly Dune. Worse still, no two players are building the same stuff either. We've got anthropomorphs, robots, wizards, and space marines all playing the same field. In a situation like that, how do you reconcile who wins in a fight between a wooden steampunk cruise liner and a quadcopter sci-fi laser drone? At its core, Lore has a really big and obvious problem in that nobody's on the same page and everybody's the main character.

Lore seasons 1-3 were an attempt to solve these problems. We made stories about the people, taking creative liberties with things the server faced together. Hackers and exploiters became demons, players who had quit or been banned were immortalized as Void Soul Fragments, and looming threats like a world reset were given faces and names like The Winter Lord. We fought with each other, but the lore didn't count who had more diamonds or if lasers can ignite wood, it put who we were on display. We won and lost by being a part of that story, by contributing to it. All it really took was reaching out and collaborating with other players to explore the world we'd made. For those that showed up and joined the adventure, rewards were given and names were recorded. Books carrying the stories of those events - told in spirit if not %100 word-for-word - became a new thing to reach for and be a part of.

To answer the big question in the title, getting into the lore is about connecting with each other and playing together. Those are the things that matter. Every name listed in this post added something to the community with their presence and that's what counted most towards their inclusion.

We're still trying to figure out what that means. Season 3 was our biggest experiment yet. We included boss fights, world-spanning book hunts, pre-season lore stories about events across the server, and there's a whole list of players to thank for it. We know there were things we didn't get quite right, but this big and beautiful experiment called Lore never would've happened if we'd been afraid to get anything wrong. What matters most now that it's all coming to a close is that we learn from it, and find ways to make it better going forward. Our goal has always been to make BobbityBillus and JortsLucPicard's epic clash over the future of the end into a story worth reading, and we need everyone's help to make sure it does justice to the world we've decided to share.

Which brings me to the final part of this Dev Diary, and the real reason we're all here.

Season 3 credits:

BeckyTheCultist, the wayward son. Beck put on one hell of a show as Winter's general this season and deserves a huge round of applause for being the player everyone loved to hate for the last year.
MatthewIsAnApple and NootNToot, the sellswords. Out for whichever side paid, these two were an absolute joy to write for, and spent a good portion of the season being the people you didn't want to cross.
SirTZN and Go4thandbuild as the leaders of the Resistance. From TZN's early raid on Halcyon Bay and Go4thandbuild's role as the Wizard's Niece and the girl with a secret, both of these players stood out as the center of conflict.
FearedManiacs and FyrnX as lore latecomers who jumped right into the thick of the story and set to work untangling it as the new sci-fi kids on the block.
Wichien and DS9, one of Minetown's newest lore-focused clans. DS9's contributions through translation and fact-finding played a huge role in both the Resistance and the Winter Army's paths through the season.
mutn, Commander of the allied fleet during the Winter War's final engagements, and patron of all things naval over the course of the season. Spotting the admiral's contributions is as easy as looking up.
NobodyAtAllEver, one of the biggest beasts in the Winter War's final chapter, killing a solid quarter of Winter's army by himself.
PL45M4, Pryzm__, Dave10301, Domitaz, AbeliaGG, Alkaban_YT, Tessbeth, and many more who contributed over the course of the season.

Finally, a special thanks to all our proofreaders and testers who helped us write and design the content for this season.

And that about wraps it up for Season 3! Rewards should be going live at the same time this Dev Diary does, and trust me: there's some bangers in there. In addition, we'll be posting some polls in #legends-and-lore over the next month for post-season feedback, but if there's anything specific you'd like to add, go ahead and post it here or in the lore channel and help us make Season 4 even better.