The Federation was the dominant Wynncraft war alliance of 2018, founded around 16 Feb 2018 out of the Coalition remnant and the War Syndicate remains, and led by Drew1011. It took the entire territory map on 21 Feb 2018 and held it for 8 months and 25 days, grew to 37-40 member guilds, and died by internal collapse in a single day on 10 Nov 2018.
The Federation (tag Fed) was the dominant war alliance of 2018 on Wynncraft — the largest alliance the game had yet seen, holding the entire territory map for eight months and twenty-five days before collapsing in a single day on 10 Nov 2018. Founded and unofficially led by Drew1011, it grew to 37–40 member guilds and gave its name to the Federation era.[1]
History
Formation
The Federation was born from the fracture of the Coalition. On 16 Feb 2018 the Coalition published a guild-by-guild division of the province of Wynn; within an hour five guilds left and formed Alliance Alliance with two others, and held the map by nightfall[2]. The Coalition remnant merged with the remains of War Syndicate — the power the Coalition had wiped the previous Christmas — into a new alliance, founded and led by Drew1011.[3]
The Discord @everyone announcement of 16 February 2018 setting out the Coalition's guild-by-guild division of Wynn, from HackForums' allocation down to Immortalish's single region. Its publication triggered the split that produced the Federation.[4]
Drew1011 wrote that the merger was his own proposal, that he first messaged BuildCraftia's co-leader without response, and that simplyinfinity_ of Sins of Seedia was the first to accept[2][1]. He gives the name a mundane origin: "The name 'Federation' began as a joke, considering Coalition had also been named just by being a synonym for alliance, I joked we should do it again with the name Federation, but people liked it and it became our name", and says the bloc "copied the exact same structure that Coalition had"[5].
Even its genealogy was disputed among participants: Lego_DW described the Coa–WS merger in 2020 as "a creation of fed"[6], while Slayne posted a rival claim on the tribute thread on 14 Nov 2018 — "In a way, you could say that I created Fed because I (along with some others) created Double AA. Take that drew! Owait. Im also drew."[7] The claim is causal rather than direct: "Double AA" is Alliance Alliance, whose split from the Coalition triggered the merger that produced the Federation.
Governance
The alliance ran on a Discord server built by AurumKitsune of KingdomPhoenixes, thanked in Drew1011's tribute "for setting up the discord and coming up with things such as the 2/3 majority voting rule that contributed greatly to its success".[1] That two-thirds majority is the bloc's only known decision rule; how it was applied in practice, and to what class of decisions, was never written down.
The first battle, 17-19 February 2018
The war opened with an attack by Snowythewolf, a chief of Hall of Fame, on Emorians' Llevigar territories, chosen because she had heard the guild's leaders discussing a low bank. Drew1011 joined the attack on the night of the 17th and stopped at about 3 AM on the 18th with Llevigar still held; Emorians was defending at the full 1,000-mob cost of roughly 2,500 emeralds a defence despite being near bankruptcy. By noon on the 18th Llevigar had flipped and Emorians was, in Drew1011's words, "almost totally bankrupt".[5]
Drew1011 wrote that he then coordinated the alliance's war effort personally for about fifteen hours, and that the Federation had "ballooned into at LEAST 22 guilds, fighting 7 of the strongest guilds Wynncraft had to offer". Viaire of Fantasy defected from Alliance Alliance mid-battle on 18 February in exchange for keeping his canyon territories, after which "Fantasy immediately began targeting Hax".[5] Fantasy's Alliance Alliance stint ran until 19–20 Mar 2018[3]; the defection and the stint's end were different events. Drew1011 credited IceBlue Team with holding the night shift of 18–19 February and taking the Light Forest and Aldorei while the rest of the alliance slept.[5]
The wipe of HackForums
On 19 Feb 2018, three days after forming, the Federation attacked HackForums' 111 territories and wiped them to zero in under 12 hours[3] — the end of Hax as a territorial power, a year after its 2017 peak of roughly 350 territories.[8]
After the Federation had taken Llevigar, the swamp, the Dark Forest and the Light Forest, "at the very latest hours of the 19th, Snowy announced it was time to attack Hax. At the time they held 111 territoires. Less than 10 hours later, they had none."[5] Accounts differ on the duration — under ten hours or under twelve. A leaderboard of 22 Feb 2018 shows the map's largest holder with only 43 territories[9]: guilds such as Blacklisted "managed to rise to the top of the leaderboards out of pure chance. They were not Fed so AA did not attack them, and they were not AA so Fed did not attack them", and so topped the table for about a day[5].
When the map was won
The Federation took the map on 21 February 2018, four days into the war, holding 356 of 383 territories, or 93%, against Alliance Alliance's 24[10][11]. Drew1011's account agrees — "Three days after the Civil War had begun, Federation had won the map"[5] — as does the arithmetic of his tribute, whose "8 months and 25 days" of map control counts back from the collapse of 10 November 2018 to mid-February 2018[1].
Map control broke once. Federation holdings fell to 164 territories on 2 March and to 43, or 11%, on 3 March, with Alliance Alliance back at 308, recovering to 114 on 4 March and to roughly 300 from 6 March[12] — the interruption the tribute describes as "aside from ~3 days in March"[1].
The community timeline instead dates the Federation's map control to 19–20 March[13]. Those are the days Alliance Alliance fell from 72 territories to one and the Federation reached 380 of 383 territories, or 99%[14] — the elimination of the opposing bloc and the end of the war, a month after the map changed hands.
Map dominance
The Federation took full map control on 21 Feb 2018[11] and eliminated the Alliance Alliance guilds as a territorial force on 19–20 Mar 2018, ending the Coalition Civil War and absorbing them.[3] It held the entire map for 8 months and 25 days, with a roughly three-day interruption in March.[1] On 16 Apr 2018 all fifteen territory holders on the map were Federation guilds, together holding 384 territories.[15]
The March interruption began with a game update. Drew1011 writes that "beginning almost as soon as the clock struck midnight and March 1st began, Hax & Co. began attacking Gavel. We quickly discovered that there had been a mob update and that they were using broken defenses that the vast majority of players were unable to overcome". Tntdestroyd coordinated the first two days of the counter-effort, concentrating it on House of Sentinels alone, and handed coordination to Drew1011 on 3 March; "by the 5th, the entire map once again belonged to Federation". Paladins United was admitted at Slayne's request on 7 March, and House of Sentinels left Alliance Alliance on 12 March and returned to neutrality, at which point Drew1011 considered the war over.[5] His tribute thanks "@Tntdestroyd, for fighting hard to reclaim the map back in March".[1] The trough of the relapse fell on 3 March, and the Federation was back near 300 territories from 6 March — a day later than the "by the 5th" of his account[16].
Replying to the tribute on 13 Nov 2018, the member Lego_DW asked recognition for "the absolute gods of war this alliance created" — himself, 21(n), Goden, Antho74, InnerJoker, 0x7cf and snowy — who "along with too many others to credit, were the ones that really held the alliance together in terms of war power".[17] Of the seven, only Goden, a Kingdom Foxes officer, is otherwise known.
Membership churned heavily — Titans Valor alone served three separate stints.[3] Within the bloc, Fantasy, Sins of Seedia and IceBlue Team formed the Aesir Pact on 25 Mar 2018[3], a pact of sister guilds dedicated to Gavel.[18] Fantasy itself left the Federation in late May 2018 — the departure was never recorded in writing, and sustained fighting began in the week of 28 May — and fought the bloc across more than 220 territories all summer before rejoining on 29 Oct 2018.[19]
Internal conflict, spring 2018
Drew1011 records an unstable spring: BuildCraftia's seizure of Serpentem Empire's share of the swamp without penalty; a dispute over the Sky Islands; an attack by BuildCraftia on Kingdom Foxes territories while a vote on their status was still open, and a retaliation by Fox, Imperial, Paladins United and The Hive that he says he called off himself the following morning; and a vote to expel BuildCraftia opened on 30 March 2018, which its leader pre-empted by leaving.[20] He also names an alliance that guild's leader attempted to build from inside the Federation, "Centurion"; a thread post of 25 April 2018 has Tntdestroyd writing "We have already begun forming what it is your looking to do now, join us if you like"[21]. Whether that guild was expelled or left of its own accord remained a live dispute between the two men into 2019.
Collapse
At around 3 AM EST on 10 Nov 2018, one guild left the Federation — and the alliance cascaded apart within a day.[1] In the sequence of the Federation's death, The Hive had left a month earlier, then Odysseia; Imperial's exit for independence "snowballed into a major attack on Fed together with the enemy alliance [Ent]"; Arisen followed, and after 14 hours of constant warring the Aesir Pact guilds quit, ending it.[22] The tag [Ent] is the only identifier ever given for the opposing bloc, which is otherwise unrecorded. "What killed Federation was... internal affairs," wrote Drew1011 in his tribute, posted three days later with the full member roster.[1]
Membership
The founder's tribute names 37 member guilds — one of them, "Death Reapers", is otherwise unknown — and with renames and re-joins the alliance counted 37–40 guilds.[1] Three roster guilds renamed during the alliance's life: LE Flowers → DiamondDeities, DogsAmongUs → White Lotus, As Darkness Falls → Constellations.[19]
Legacy
The Federation's fall ended 2018's era of single-bloc dominance and opened a winter interregnum in which, per the community timeline, "all guilds keep to themselves with valk owning most of Gavel" — the territorial peak of the Valkyrie network.[8] SOL was created in the post-collapse chaos[8], and Luna was formed to counter it in February 2019, beginning the Alliance Wars of 2019.[13] No later alliance matched the Federation's duration of total map control.
References
- ^ Alliance - Federation Tribute original
- ^ Drew1011 storytime — first-person account of early Wynncraft guild historyretrospective original
- ^ Chronicle alliance and event records (TAq database)derived original
- ^ Drew1011 storytime — first-person account of early Wynncraft guild historyretrospective original
- ^ Drew1011 storytime — first-person account of early Wynncraft guild historyretrospective original
- ^ A Very Never Ending Guild Timeline! original
- ^ Alliance - Federation Tribute original
- ^ A Very Never Ending Guild Timeline! original
- ^ Haxforums Has Fallen At Last. original
- ^ territory_exchanges — the territory capture log original
- ^ territory_exchanges — the territory capture log original
- ^ territory_exchanges — the territory capture log original
- ^ Wynncraft guild history timeline (community document)secondary original
- ^ territory_exchanges — the territory capture log original
- ^ Pre-2018 territory snapshots (recovered leaderboard captures) original
- ^ territory_exchanges — the territory capture log original
- ^ Alliance - Federation Tribute original
- ^ Alliance - The Aesir Pact original
- ^ territory_exchanges — the territory capture log original
- ^ Drew1011 storytime — first-person account of early Wynncraft guild historyretrospective original
- ^ Alliance - ♜ Revolution ♜ original
- ^ Alliance - R.i.p Fed original