Season 8 opens with a "GopherCraft UHC 8" title and seven team cards: Yella Belly, Red Die #40, Team Panic!, White Team, Team Citrus Sensation, Team Key Lime Pie and Team Space Jam. Basket's team is Team Citrus Sensation, the orange team, and its card shows BasketMC with Pikerize and PsychoSFK. The title has no episode number. Then the match starts in a forest.
Wood and crafting tables
The first job is wood. Logs get passed around so everyone can make a crafting table, counted out for each player. Someone runs through the rules: "For the first day we do have a grace period," and "Normal rules, no strip mining." Chat fills with achievements from every team as the season gets going, and pikerize earns Getting Wood early on.
Counting apples
Oak leaves drop apples, and in UHC that matters, because nothing heals on its own. The team keeps a running count. "I got an apple!" comes first, then "Another apple." Later the tally reaches six. Between trees, the team kills cows for steak and leather ("I have eight leather"), picks up sugar cane and mushrooms, and finds some coal on the surface. Someone warns about the extreme hills nearby, where mining could turn up silverfish.
Into a cave at dusk
The sky turns red and hunger starts to bite. "I'm down to four haunches." The team regroups near where they spawned and heads down into a cave by the trees, lighting it with torches. PsychoSFK and another player meet Basket inside, where the cave opens up.
Cooking underground
The team builds a furnace next to a crafting table and gets food cooking right away. There is plenty of coal to go around. Someone finds out the furnace will not take wooden buttons as fuel. "I can't burn buttons? That's stupid." A creeper and a zombie show up close by, and the team walls them off with cobblestone.
The Tab list around this time still shows all 21 players in the match, Basket's team among them.
A skeleton by the iron
Heading deeper, the team mines down through stone and runs into water and a possible ravine. A skeleton keeps getting heard below, and a creeper sits right next to it. "I don't really want to go near that skeleton." Basket makes stone tools and digs on. Then a vein of iron shows up, with the skeleton standing in a gap right beside it. "Iron pick first," someone says. "I am so paranoid right now," someone admits.
The server posts "Mark 20 Minutes, End of Episode 1" with the list of current players, all 21 of them. The episode ends with Basket alive underground with the team.