Season 5 opens on a "GopherCraft UHC Season 5" title and six team cards: Team Blue, Monster Bait, The Kids Table, Team Epic, Team Booger and, last, Rooftop Raiders, Basket's team. Then Scoti_Garbidis types "GO!!!" in chat and the match starts. This season's map is a whole city, with streets, a water tower and a basketball court, and the in-game chat prints Basket, pikerize and xzosimusx in the same red.
A city to learn
The first minutes are about the map itself. A creeper comes out from under the water tower before anyone has a sword, and the team backs off and deals with it together. Someone points out cobwebs strung along the fences like barbed wire, a source of string. Someone grabs stone from the basketball court, and the team puts a crafting table in the middle of it. The court is walled in with only two ways in, which makes it a decent place to duck into in a pinch.
The warnings come quickly. Stay out of the sewers. The subway is worse. Watch for holes in the streets. "Our names are really gonna stick out," someone says, and nobody argues.
The shipping containers
The real loot turns up in a row of shipping containers. One holds almost a full set of mixed iron and chainmail armor. Another has three obsidian, coal, a couple of gold nuggets and two blaze rods. Some chests are duds. The gear comes with random durability, and one stone axe shows a strange red bar instead of a green one. There is an apple, a raw potato to plant, and a bow with some arrows.
A spawner in the dark
With half a day left, the team picks a building to hole up in. It is dark inside and full of mobs: a skeleton, then a baby zombie. One teammate hits another with an arrow by mistake. "I didn't let go of the button," comes the apology. They find the spawner, and with no torches yet they just break it.
A ladder leads up to the roof, and a second one climbs the center spire. From up there the city spreads out in every direction, down to the church on the corner.
Sealed in for the night
The team plugs every hole where sky shows through, then sorts inventories. Between them they have an apple, a few gold ingots, coal for a stack of torches, nine obsidian and forty lapis. Someone floats building a Nether portal and trapping it, if they can find gravel. The world border is visible, not far off toward the church, so the plan is to move in the morning and hit the graveyard there first.
In chat, Gopherboy asks if anyone has found a bed. pikerize answers "Several." Th3pooka writes "moon beat me at tic-tac-toe."
The night goes to bread from hay bales and baked potatoes while the rain keeps falling. A server message reads "20 Minutes" and lists all eighteen players, so nobody is out yet. The episode ends in the sealed room as a chicken dies. Basket is alive, safe for the night, and the border is still coming.