Sheepocalypse

The Sheepocalypse occurred on July 24th, 2020. When this event took place, a mass dying of many multitudes of sheep, horses, donkeys, and other various mobs occurred. Incidentally, mobs with nametags, or that were recently used by players, were not always spared. There are recorded cases of mobs having survived the Sheepocalyspe despite other mobs of the same type dying at the same location; some survivors had been stripped of equipped items such as saddles.

Due to the scale of the sudden loss it drew immediate public notice, and this wiki page was formed to help capture the scope of the event. The primary list below includes the documented impact and scale of this impact where quantifiable, followed by information about other livestock loss that may or may not be related, and then below that information regarding the resolution to the damage wrought by the incident.

If you believe you were impacted by this issue, you should contact a staff member for assistance and limited recovery options.

Verifiable Losses

A list of known users and sites impacted by the event was assembled on this page shortly after it took place. The unaltered, contemporary list consists of the following:

•  darkdiplomat's Diplomat Farms: all sheep

•  Kiatarie's Mega Base: 6 horses, most of the remaining horses have had saddles removed.

•  bcMineOut's Upsidaisy Farm: 17 horses, 3 donkeys and all saddles removed from remaining livestock.

•  Scampi_'s The Vaults of Zin: Several pet cats, giant slime, indestructible sheep, spider jockey, chicken jockey, and Halloween endermen slain.

•  snakyman and  r9q's Newport's Sheep farm : all sheep

• Snaketown's black sheep farm: all sheep

•  Aziroeth's stacked jeb_ sheep and two horses

•  Dianthiauwu hidden sheep farm : all blue sheep

• Modos's sheep farm : majority of the sheep, black sheep all gone

•  swissm4n's sheep farm: all sheep

•  Void42_'s sheep farm: all sheep

•  DorpEngineer's underground sheep farm : all sheep

• North Of Nowhere's sheep farm : majority (not sure if it did not recover from the last murder by  misterbabayaga)

•  L_Oczans's cows and chickens

•  RunRun_5's pet wither

•  d3dw8t's sheep farm: two pens

•  Enjoku's sheep farm: all sheep

•  Sftsace's Private Horse Collection: All horses including a few special admin horses.

•  Yourshadowdr's Public sheep farm lost all white and cyan sheep (two floors). The other color sheep did not seem to be affected. A loss of about 60 sheep.

•  GriffinLord12's god horse

Other losses

While it is unknown if these losses are related to the same issue that caused The Sheepocalypse, there are reports of other mass losses on the server occurring since early 2020, multiple players such as  tyhdefu,  swissm4n, and  WideEyedBass had reported these losses publicly without resolution at the time. It was assumed that these cases may have been due to intentional administrative action, such as the killing of entities to stabilize server performance, and thus it remained unnoticed by the public eye.

•  Flamehaze97's Wool Farm in Dragon River Peak City, it's very possible that her sheep were affected too due to coming back from a two month long hiatus and having to close the wool farm due to suspected sheep killings. The spawner incident was more recent in November 2020.

• Possibly the peaceful zombies at Batugus and mobs in the mob hallway at Batugus Labs, though they have died (fallen off), or vanished from other causes many times before; it isn't confirmable if they were affected by the Sheepocalypse specifically, although unique variants of hostile mobs having died from the Sheepocalypse is not without precedent.

• Craig the giant, upside down zombie had disappeared on July 24th, while the chunk he resided in was loaded by a player. It is still undetermined if the Sheepocalypse is the cause.

Resolution

After outcry from the playerbase and preliminary investigation by mods such as  Void42_,  LordOfTheShadows and the Admin  Eclypto18 the day after the event, Administrator  jimmyd93 logged in to carry out an extensive investigation of the issue and uncover the cause. His initial review ruled out that the event was tied to abuse of admin or donor abilities. At the investigation’s conclusion, he stated that he had discovered the cause, which had been user error on the part of server staff, specifically a misuse of the /butcher command by an administrator. Due to the nature of the event’s cause, the Sheepocalypse could not be correctable unless a server-wide rollback was implemented. Deliberation resulted in consensus against this course of action; admins and mods were therefore given permission to replace entities affected by this event within reason.