Minecraft creators from all over the community will be drawing their guns to protect or steal the Sweetwater gold, in a brand new Minecraft event next week. Which side will prevail: the townspeople or the bandits?
To get ready for the Wild West showdown of the year, we talked to Sysyphys Delta, Riqua, and ChamanthaPlays, who together with Kylierouge make up the four staff members of The Sweetwater Heist.
With Sweetwater only being their second project, the crew is still very new to the event scene. So new, in fact, that they haven’t even picked a name yet. Communication with the public currently happens mainly via Sysyphys’ Discord server and Cham’s twitter account. They have a proper rebrand planned for the coming few weeks, which will also include dedicated socials – but for now, they’re four friends who had an idea for an event and wanted to make that event happen.
“I brainstormed adding the gun mod to another event, but it didn’t really fit,” Riqua says. “I couldn’t let it go, so I proposed a cowboy event. I love Western movies and gun games. Cowboys are awesome, they’re like pirates with more aura,” he says, clearly smiling. “I really wanted an event with cowboys, but it took a year to convince Sysyphys.”
In the trailer we see Riqua and Sysyphys in a face-off, showing the public some features they can expect – like guns and a part of the map. While they role-played, complete with accent, that is not a requirement for the event.
As such, the town of Sweetwater doesn’t have much pre-existing lore. It’s a little town located in a vast desert, and they have gold that inhabitants will protect with their lives. They might just be taken up on that, because there is a group of bandits preying on that special gold.
“We wanted to focus on the experience,” Cham explains. “We want people to feel like they’re a cowboy in the Wild West. We chose the mods to build out that concept, to make it feel close to what people would be imagining that scenario to be like.”
“We believe that if we achieve the proper flavour, the roleplay will come naturally,” Sysyphys continues.
Cham calls it ‘the power of a concept’. “While Sweetwater is not intended to be lore-heavy, our shared inventory event showed that players don’t need much to come up with some wild lore like a yaoi religion,” Cham says. “I think that’s my favourite part of Minecraft events. The random things that people make up on the spot just to make things a little more interesting for themselves.”
What better way to make someone feel like a cowboy than to give them a holster on their hip? The main focus in the change of gameplay is the TaCZ (Timeless and Classics Zero Guns) mod, but with Hamsterbaron’s Gunpowder Revolution add-on to introduce more 1800s style guns. In addition, the Explosives Overhaul mod will allow for more realistic explosives, which can cause tinnitus or leave you temporarily deafened if you’re not careful.
With speedrunning currently running the scene, the team wanted to slow down the experience of playing Minecraft. “We wanted a clear divide between the preparation and the fighting stages. With the town being in a desert, the puzzle of finding enough food for that many people is going to be one they’ll need to solve early on.”
Riqua is most excited for the gun fights. “Hopefully they will lean into acting – so they don’t just die and that’s it, but make it really dramatic and act it out.”
“We tried to create a specific vibe,” Cham says. “People will probably take that and run with it. I fully expect some Bonnie and Clyde lore to go on. But I’m curious to see what experience they’ll create.”
“It will be like watching a Sims game,” Riqua adds.
“I expect people to come up with strategies outside of my wildest imagination, some of which may break the event,” Sysyphys says. “I don’t know, there’s no way for me to know. But I expect both teams to come up with some strange strats to get a leg up on their opponents.”
While the Sweetwater Heist hasn’t happened yet, the group is already looking to the future, not only in regards to their rebrand, but also in terms of their projects. “We plan to run some larger projects as well as smaller ones,” Sysyphys explains. “Modswap, for example, which is a multi-month SMP where different factions have access to different mods, which they can trade with.”
Cham wants to run some smaller, community-focused events, like a murder mystery in Minecraft, in the style of Clue, and Riqua is already brainstorming another event like Sweetwater: “Pirates looking for treasure, maybe?”
Player announcements for the Sweetwater Heist have dropped and can be found at @ChamanthaPlays on X. You can tune in to these players’ streams on 14th and 15th May, at 6pm BST / 1pm EDT. To stay up-to-date with the crew and their future plans, you can join Sysyphys’ Discord here.
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