Neverend: The Six-Month Trap, Explained

The Neverend trap is the payoff to the oldest secret on Content SMP, and it works because the thing that makes it possible is the thing everyone's been arguing about for four arcs.

The investigation that walked into it

By this point Noxintrus has been running an investigation into what really happened to the three End Portals. Moriya, Diansu, Talon, Eight and Asai have all been interrogated. The obvious next target is Astronyu, RAT's long-standing ally.

So Noxintrus and Winsweep kidnap Astronyu from the Log Cabin.

They're seen doing it. RAT and Luxintrus follow them into the basement of Smilies and listen to the whole interrogation. Luxintrus gets caught and dies for it — then comes straight back to keep watching, which is very much her.

The investigation then moves to Rattenheim to cross-reference Astronyu's account against physical evidence. Astronyu is released. Winsweep and Noxintrus stay behind, sensing they were followed but unable to prove it.

The reveal

Afterwards Luxintrus and RAT go through what Noxintrus has been building in a hidden room behind a painting in Oceana's library. Seeing the case assembled properly, Luxintrus starts to suspect RAT is lying, and tells him she needs full honesty if she's going to be his ally.

RAT gets vague. Then he takes her to Rattenheim and shows her the third End Portal, intact and in perfect shape.

That's the secret from the opening minutes of the server — the portal he destroyed everything except, and told only Astronyu about. Four arcs of investigation, an interrogation and a kidnapping, and the answer was always sitting in a room in a stronghold.

The trap

Now they're on the same page, RAT and Luxintrus build a trap around it. They test it by tricking Talon into trying it first, specifically to make sure Noxintrus can't find a loophole.

Then Luxintrus lies. Under interrogation at Smilies — after Winsweep threatens Jemmie's life to force her cooperation — she gives an account of the portals, admits to spying, reveals the intact portal, and adds a fabrication: that RAT and Astronyu have been taking trips to the End for resources, and she'll let Winsweep and Noxintrus follow her along on the next one.

They take it immediately. As a reward for "telling the truth", Winsweep gives Jemmie back.

Two days later the trap springs. Winsweep and Noxintrus follow RAT, Astronyu and Luxintrus through the portal, and end up in Neverend with no gear. Talon, offered an escape, chooses to stay.

What Neverend is

It has layers, and they aren't friendly.

Layer one is the arrival. RAT, Astronyu and Luxintrus explore it properly, find diving suits at a chute, and find the trapped party in the pools below.

Layer 2.5, "the Inbetween" is where Luxintrus detours, having got lost, to check whether it might make a suitable home for Jemmie. She tests the water with her axolotl, French Fry, who takes damage and turns a sickly pale. She scratches the idea and goes back.

Layer three has Grandgousiers, which kill Winsweep and Noxintrus a few months in.

The cabin-goers find the chute first, push Winsweep and Noxintrus down to layer two, return Talon's sunhat to him, and leave at speed.

The fish

Jemmie is released into the ocean.

Winsweep had used him as leverage — threatening to kill him to force Luxintrus's cooperation at Smilies, returning him as a reward for the lie that trapped him. So Luxintrus lets him go, so he can never be used against her again.

It's the smallest event in the arc and it's the one that tells you where she's ended up. She can't stop Winsweep taking things. She can remove the thing from the board.

Six months

Winsweep gets separated from Talon and Noxintrus after the deaths on layer three, and spends the rest of the sentence in isolation, escaping shortly after regrouping.

Six months, most of it alone, in a place that exists because RAT lied about a portal at the start of the server.

What it costs everyone

Winsweep comes out and immediately threatens Talon and Noxintrus into silence about it — then, at The Vote, makes the End Portal secret public and forces the server to decide whether he lives or dies by Charter. He is voted to live.

Talon chose to stay. He'd already been broken by the Endust debut, where the substance he made to protect people summoned Shades that killed or scattered his guests. Neverend reads as a man who didn't feel he had much to go back for. Winsweep hallucinates him later, during the bucket list.

Luxintrus gets six months with Oceana's fighters out of the way — which is precisely the window in which she kickstarts The Revolution, retakes Markhett, and eventually kills Diansu permanently.

The trap doesn't just remove three people. It clears the board for the arc that ends the war.

---

Facts drawn from the community-run Content SMP Wiki (CC BY-SA 4.0), written up independently.