Recently, there has been a strange bout of mysterious player deaths occurring for seemingly no reason. However, Picarona Sun reporters have discovered the reason why: the MusterCull plugin, employed to curtail the use of lag-causing animal farms and bemoaned for wiping out three-sheep farms, recently received an ominous update: the addition of players to its crowd-curbing configuration.

“Recently, we received a large wave of new players as a result of our advertising campaigns on /r/MCServers and other subreddits,” head CivEx developer Kenshin_Woo said in an official statement Wednesday. “Players are one of the biggest causes of lag on the server. Honestly, I should’ve done this sooner.”

CivEx has been under a lot of server stress recently. The host suffered major power outages, leading to total data loss of the entire map earlier in the week. Kenshin_Woo and the rest of the developer team (read: Kenshin_Woo) stayed up for 36 hours to get the server back online, which was probably unnecessary since the issues were entirely host-side and there was nothing he could do until it was fixed. “I was thinking of taking drastic steps in order to prevent serious lag spikes and service issues. I’m quite glad that most of our problems have been solved by five new lines into MusterCull’s code.

He turned to give a Hot Chocolate to a newbie, but due to the close proximity of him, the newbie, and this Sun reporter, the newfriend had already been Culled. At press time, the unidentified newfriend had only this to say: “At least I’m not rubber-banding everywhere.”