The map as Cucumber Company formedMay 1, 2022 →

The realignment era began with two blocs at war, the survivors of the Great Collapse, and ended with nearly all of them inside smtn elf — the last era with a public alliance record. It is also the first era with a published scoreboard: guild seasons launched on 5 July 2021^[1], eight weeks into it, and from then on the map's politics can be read against a table of winners.

Valhalla and Khaos

On 11 May 2021 thirteen guilds including The Aquarium formed Valhalla while nine ex-Goose guilds formed Khaos^[2], and the Valhalla-Khaos war began the same day^[3]. Valhalla took map control within days and dominated the year - 'the meta of being top 10 on the guild sr leaderboard is to join valhalla', a September 2021 forum post complained^[4]. Fighting was sustained at roughly a thousand exchanges a week at its peaks, continuing into spring 2022^[5].

The season table bears the complaint out only partly. Season 1 (9 Jul - 20 Sep 2021) went to ShadowFall, Season 2 to Emorians, Season 3 to The Aquarium, Season 4 to Nefarious Ravens^[6] - four different winners in a year, three of them Valhalla-line guilds and the first of them a guild that had defected from Artemis to Goose eight months earlier.

Betrayal and the twenty days of Vanir

In late 2021 The Mage Legacy and TheNoLifes turned on their Valhalla allies - friction visible from August, erupting into open war in December (5,359 territory exchanges that month)^[7]. Both were excluded when ten Valhalla guilds reorganized as Vanir on 28 November 2021^[3]. Vanir lasted twenty days: on 18 December Emorians, Nefarious Ravens, IceBlue Team and Avicia left and it collapsed; Niflheim officially dissolved the same day^[3]. Khaos's war against the ex-Valhalla guilds - its opponents known as 'the Pineapple Pact', a name never written down at the time^[8] - peaked in January 2022 at 500-800 territory exchanges per week and faded to nothing by mid-July^[9].

Cucumber Company and smtn elf

The 2022 realignment merged the ex-Valhalla and ex-Khaos worlds into Cucumber Company, formed for guild Season 5 - 'our first season being a part of the new Cucumber Company war alliance', wrote Titan Times^[10]. Season 5 ran from 3 March to 2 May 2022^[11]. Its 14-guild roster, posted to the forum megalist on 26 June 2022^[12], was the last public alliance roster ever; the megalist's alliance section was deleted twelve days later^[13]. At the start of Season 8, which began on 12 September 2022^[14], 'Cucumber was archived. The new alliance name is called Smtn else' - the same newsletter recording Gang of Fools having 'left and betrayed the alliance' and welcoming Paladins United, The Simple Ones and TerraLune^[15]. Renamed 'smtn elf' for Christmas 2022 and never changed back^[8], the super-alliance was crowned - satirically - 'unquestionably the greatest super-alliance of 2023' that February{{cite:https://forums.wynncraft.com/threads/306790/|Wynncraft forums thread 306790, 17 Feb 2023}}. In spring 2023 busted moments and Idiot Co joined^[17]. Meanwhile the community layer turned over: as Hestia declined, the leaders of Titans Valor and Empire of Sindria founded Adonis around May 2022 as its effective successor^[10].

Under the super-alliance the crown circulated among its own members - The Aquarium in Season 5, KongoBoys in Season 6, Avicia in Season 7, The Aquarium again in Season 8 - and then stopped circulating. Avicia won Seasons 9 through 13 without a break, from October 2022 to August 2023^[18], a run that begins inside smtn elf and ends after it.

The Eden coup

Somewhere in this period Eden, a founding guild of Khaos, was overthrown from within. A player called xK6TA, applying to Titans Valor in April 2023, wrote: 'I was a part of Eden when it was #1 and slightly after it got couped.'^[19] The coup's actors and date were never recorded, beyond that it happened by April 2023, and what '#1' meant is not known - Eden never won a guild season^[20].

The end

In June 2023 The Aquarium and Avicia quit smtn elf, rejecting pressure to shrink their claims^[3], and opened the Avocado split against their former allies. smtn elf was last mentioned in Avicia's season post of 10 June 2023^[21], in the closing days of the Season 12 it had won; its end was never announced. With it ended the era of publicly named alliances, and the private diplomacy era began.