The Israphel Codex

It starts as a plain survival series. Lewis, who introduces himself as William Riker of the USS Enterprise, and Simon, "a bearded dwarf", spawn in a snowy pine forest and survive their first night in a shack under a tree. They move into a waterfall cave and name it the Yogcave. They farm pigs on a floating island and keep a cow named Daisy as a "housekeeper".

Then things start appearing that neither of them built. The tree outside the base has been reshaped. A torch-ringed pyramid appears on the horizon with a lava-jump trial inside, and the prize turns out to be 17 torches, 3 pork and 4 eggs. They also find a Stonehenge and a wool igloo, and a TNT pressure-plate trap at the Yogcave's back door blows Simon up. "Whoever installed that trap, they've got a devious, evil mind."

They mine down to bedrock, set up the Obsidian Outpost by a lava river, and find diamond. With 25 farmed obsidian, Simon builds a Nether portal in the Cave of Terror near spawn. It won't take them anywhere, but something starts leaking out of it. Moss creeps over the stone, mushrooms and fire spread, and a burning sheep wanders out.

In Part 17 a stranger with a name plate rains arrows on them from a distance. They chase him across a tundra in Part 18 and the name is spoken for the first time: Israphel. He turns up again inside the Yogcave, "pale, wearing a black suit", having dug his own tunnel. Oddly, someone has also put a sign on their door telling them to close it and built a moat to keep monsters out. Following him leads to a huge new structure and a torch-lit road.

The Minecraft beta arrives and the world gains people. At the end of the road an old man named Old Peculier waits for them. He keeps the Skeletal Arms inn in the village of Terrorvale, hands them buckets of milk, and sends them to the blacksmith Daisy. She forges them diamond armour once they mine diamond from the spider caves under the town.

At the church of St Creepers ("A closed mouth gathers no foot") they meet Reverend John, "disciple of Notch". He sends them to recover his Bible from his zombie-infested house on the hill. Peculier lets slip the key fact: the Reverend's dead son is Israphel.

Then Daisy vanishes, leaving her armour behind. The heroes find the Reverend in the crypt, staring at his son's tomb. "My Lord told me I would not see you again," he says, then turns on them, and Lewis kills him. A blood-stained passage proves "the rumours were true". Israphel's old house, where a missing man called Bob now lives, carries the sign "Death is only the beginning".

Under the village lies Israphel's dark castle, with Daisy's and Israphel's name plates glimpsed inside. A zombie boss and a creeper boss guard it, and the boss "kills himself". A long tunnel leads down to bedrock and comes out at the heroes' own Nether portal. "They must have taken Daisy through it," says Peculier. They decide it's best not to tell him who built the portal, and the three step through together.

The hosts present the next ten episodes as "a little break" on Ashien's fan-made custom map. The real reason was that Nether portals didn't work in survival multiplayer at the time, so the story couldn't go through the portal yet. The map is played played Iron Man style: where if either of them dies, the run is over. They get one tree, one patch of dirt, a sea of sand, and a challenge list that includes a two-storey house with 20 windows, a brick fireplace, a jack-o'-lantern scarecrow, and finding the Curator's lost treasure. They drown a skeleton dungeon in sand, grow a tree on top of a zombie spawner, and dig out the treasure from behind a lava-trapped door. It holds TNT, soul sand, netherrack, glowstone, diamond armour, a music disc and a golden apple.

Viewers spot an airship, the Celaeno, hanging over the island, and the heroes spell HELP in torches. In Part 11 it lands, and Old Peculier steps off, haggard and starved. After the heroes "disappeared", he says, he went to Mistral City and heard rumours of "a dwarf and a space man" stranded on a desert island. They are needed "to save the world and rescue his love". They fuel the ship with coal, load the treasure into the captain's chest, and cast off. The last line is "What do you mean, the portal must be destroyed?"

The Series 1 recap cuts straight from Daisy being taken through the portal to the airship leaving, which treats the island as an interlude between the two series.

Shadow of Israphel opens in flames. The airship Celaeno has crashed near the old Yogcave, brought down by smoke from the base, which someone has blown open with TNT. On the way down it clipped the pyramid and knocked out a wall. The party is now four: Xephos, Honeydew, Old Peculier and Lysander, a Skylord of Mistral City's ruling council. At the portal Peculier finds sand piled around it. "Curse him, he's sealed it… The portal must be destroyed. There are other portals in this world; you must find them." Lewis smashes it with his diamond pick. Peculier then collapses.

Lysander leads them along a damaged road, past the pyramid now pouring lava, to Mistral City, a city of spires, airships and floating platforms. Peculier's family house has been burning for days. The city is full of characters:

• Granny Bacon of the Greasy Spoon, who meets "I DEMAND YOUR FINEST BACON" with a hug
• Father Braeburn, the crooning priest of the Church of the Holy Apple
• Skylord Jasper, sinister and music-mad
• a creeper called Mr Astley, "a proud member of society"
• the deaf, explosive wizard Fumblemore, who has to be coaxed off the toilet

Lysander says Peculier was once a powerful knight, "old before his time", poisoned by "the taint" during his years in Terrorvale. Fumblemore can brew a potion that cures all ills from water, dirt, feathers, five sulfur and two golden apples. Getting the ingredients takes some crime. Lewis murders Mr Astley for sulfur while Simon distracts Lysander over breakfast. They burgle Jasper twice ("reburglarize") for a golden record, which they trade to Father Braeburn for the church's sacred apple. Simon haggles the second apple out of Granny Bacon for seven of Jasper's diamonds. The potion is a bucket of muddy water, and it works.

Cured, Peculier remembers everything: "I need to follow the footsteps of my father." His father, a knight, vanished from his guard post outside the city. A buried note there talks about closing "the Hellgate", and the trail leads to the town mine, closed "around the time my father went missing". At bedrock they find a portal blown apart with TNT and buried in sand, along with the father's armour, blade and farewell sign.

Son, if you are reading this then I am dead. I have walked through the portal to seal it shut… In the Nether is a spirit who would destroy the world. It must not be allowed into Minecraftia at any cost. If it somehow gets loose once again, you must vanquish it.Peculier's father · SoI Part 9

They come back up to find Mistral burning. A hole under Lysander's rug, a confrontation the captions barely catch, and Granny Bacon's cry of "Unhand me, you fiend!" convince the heroes that Lysander is a traitor. Peculier, now Knight Peculier, reads his father's diary: "a nightmare cult, the cult of Israphel", based in the abandoned castle at the edge of town. He sends the heroes in to save Granny and destroy the portal, and rides off to Verigan's Hold.

Inside the Crumbling Ruins ("Abandon hope all ye who enter here") the cult's prison holds Granny Bacon, who has turned undead. She attacks with bacon and they have to kill her, which leaves Simon heartbroken. Deeper in, Reverend John has risen again: "The master promises eternity… embrace the dark." They kill him a second time. He drops a scrap of paper, which turns out to be the first fragment of a map. They destroy the cult's working portal beside the old dead one, and in the sand-filled bottom room Simon notices that there was sand at the Yogcave too.

Through the giant stone skull of Skull Pass they find the Carnivale Del Banjo. Mr Banjo is "not actually a gorilla, just a man". The voodoo seer Madame Nubescu takes 20 gold to read their fortunes:

• For Honeydew: "Do not mourn for your lost love. More bacon awaits you at your journey's end."
• For Xephos: "You shall be met again by a man in blue and a man in red. Trust your heart and know that they are not as they seem."
• For the knight: "His family has secrets… his father is not who he says he is."

Strongman Bruno beats Simon in a strength contest by cheating, and Simon's armour goes missing.

At Verigan's Hold a Templar, Peculier's uncle, shows them the desert from the battlements. "This sand is a disease… a plague." Only the great Wall keeps it from "choking the land till it died". In the archives, the Tale of the Sands tells of an endless summer a hundred years ago. A terror rose out of the desert, and a hero and his son Karpath sealed it beneath the sand. Karpath founded the Templars to stand guard and then vanished. The Templars "await his return".

The wall has been breached. In the Battle of the Breach the heroes find Peculier wounded in a watchtower, patch the hole while Israphel snipes from the dunes, and relight the signal tower, which drives the undead back into the desert. The uncle recognises the paper: "This is Karpath's map." It is written in code, shows a way through the desert, and is only a quarter of the whole. They need the other three pieces.

The Granny Bacon's Funeral special, a live multiplayer event the hosts say they'll "never refer to again", has Father Braeburn call her "Grandmother". The wiki treats the special as non-canon. During the service Granny climbs out of the grave, and a lava pit opens under the church onto one of Israphel's underground castles ("Hugs and kisses, Israphel").

Peculier leaves again on "unfinished business", setting up a checkpoint for them first. Nubescu points them to "Fumblemore's brother" in the ruins of Mistral, which have since grown into a forest. There they meet Swampy, a pig-riding, levitating hermit: "Get out my forest, man! You wear iron, you defile the Earth." He gives a prophecy of the three missing pieces. One is surrounded by cutlass and cannon , one is held by a lord of the sky, and one is buried deep below bedrock among beards.

A secret passage behind the carnival's archery range, the Bootlegger's Path, leads to BBQ Bay, a pirate haven. When the bay refuses rival captain Grimjaw Slugface port under "the Code", he opens fire. The heroes are press-ganged by the pirate Jock Fireblast, wake Spacker (an undead dwarf pirate whose kidneys keep falling out) to shore up the platform, and burn Grimjaw's ship. "Your maps be going with it too!"

Jock tells them to chase Grimjaw's hoard, which a rival is already after: the Dread Pirate Norris. Her name plate reads Isabel Peculier. On Grimjaw's Booty Island they switch on a golden robot, the Tinman. He helps them through Grimjaw's Trial, a vault of note-block, lava and pressure-plate puzzles. At the end there's no treasure, only a music disc that plays like security footage. It shows Jock taking the hoard.

The vault comes out in a desert, where they find a temple holding Professor Grizwold's hollow diary (it has a whiskey bottle inside). Nearby is the obsidian-sealed Tomb of the Dark Pharaoh ( Lehparsi, which is Israphel spelled backwards), quarantined "by order of High Templar Verigan Antioch". Back at the bay, Jock claims he has been framed. A hidden shaft under his submarine leads to a working portal, which they step through. It opens on Experimental Space-Time Fissure No. 8, a metal room of TV screens looking out on the Nether, signed "Decommissioned July 2077". When they return, BBQ Bay is on fire.

Yarr, now that those fools are dead I can burn this place to the ground, just as I did to Mistral City.Jock · SoI Part 24

So it was Jock, not Lysander, who burned Mistral. They kill him, and he bleeds redstone. Isabel hands over a map fragment found in the water and tells her story. She is Knight Peculier's younger sister. When they were babies "a terrible evil abducted our mother, and shortly after our father disappeared". She never believed her brother's talk of "Israphel, the pale-faced man" until Israphel walked into her cabin one stormy night and a metal man fought him off. "He has my sword for when the final battle comes."

The Legend of Verigan (three-part prequel special) replays history. Lewis plays Karpath and Simon plays Verigan, "founder of the Templars". The present-day characters appear as younger versions: a young emo Fumblemore, a living Spacker, Granny Bacon, and Karpath's hot-headed younger brother Adaephon as a raw recruit. They answer Professor Grizwold's call. He had dug up an ancient obsidian gate north of Mistral, switched it on by accident, and let "evil creatures not of this world" in. These are the first creepers; the party names them "Viners" until Lewis blurts out "creeper" by instinct. Verigan breaks the portal with Spacker's diamond pick, though only partly: "some may be usable". Grizwold immediately starts talking about the other portals in his research.

Touching a map piece triggers a vision. A voice speaks from it: "You found a piece of my map, and by touching it I can communicate with you." It shows them a ruined future of evil Tin Men and dragons. "You must find my grandson, a knight called Peculiar, and help him fulfil his destiny. Unite the map pieces, stop the sand invasion, and put an end to the evil beyond the Veil." Spacker joins them, and Swampy adds a riddle: "Man in red, man in blue, underneath you'll find the clue."

At the Skylord summer retreat, a flamboyant Jasper ("Do you like bees?") keeps Lysander locked in his basement for burning Mistral. The heroes know better, free Lysander with a crafted lever, and escape with the tiki man Um Bongo. They take a carrier ship and a biplane and fly to Skyhold, the floating citadel of the Skylords. Skylord Vitali, one of the last two Skylords left, tells them Skylord Amber is dead and the rest have vanished since "that creepy Carnival came to town". Lysander's grandfather, Skylord Baako, lies dying under Nubescu's care. He sets the heroes the trials of the Skylords and then explodes.

They clear the Trial of Fire (flaming netherrack), the torchless Trial of Ice, and the Trial of Life and Death. A planted diary frames Nubescu ("I killed them Skylords good"), but the heroes have learned not to jump to conclusions. Um Bongo, freed from a cage, points them to a pale man burying bones under an apple tree. Below it are a crypt of murdered Skylords (Vimes, Finnigan, Horus and James, each killing recorded in a rhyme) and a coffin: Vitali is a vampire and a member of the cult. "Power, Lysander. The Dark Lord knows the true power of this Skyhold." Xephos stakes him with a stick, and Honeydew takes his goggles. His record, Never Gonna Give You Up, opens the control room. Skyhold's true power is that it can fly, and it would have become Israphel's "dread fortress". A clue on the screens ("It's turtles all the way down") leads to a fake giant turtle below the citadel with a map fragment inside. Lysander stays to rebuild the Skylords and pledges his sword for the final battle.

The dwarf city of Stoneholm has sealed its gates over a "rotting plague". Spacker sneaks them in through a skylight. His nephew Rory and the armourer Moira Magmabloom reveal the plague is a cover story spread by the guard captain Kormag Darkforge. King Finbar died and "rose again with great powers", and now turns his subjects into mindless zombie dwarves. Rory is rewarded for refining obsidian for the king's portal by being turned into one. Moira shoots Kormag with an arrow, and in the jail they free the prisoner he had been torturing: Knight Peculier. He came looking for the pact Verigan made with the dwarves to make sure the wall would never fall, and he fears the answer lies in the Deepcore.

Moira forges a key, which is really a lever, from beer, lava and gold. In the Deepcore they find silverfish traps, a diamond mine, a giant dwarven drilling machine, and the "legendary Bedrock mine of Stoneholm". A tunnel leads to a hidden facility, where Verigan left a letter:

To defend this land from a terrible evil, this machine has been activated — the machine that awoke the sand god in the first place. Now, through the wall, it keeps him chained… If you are pure of heart, then maybe you can do what I could not. Take this map piece and unite it with the others, then seek out the evil at its source.Verigan · SoI Part 34

They take the final map fragment and restore the generator, but its power is being drained up a Spire topped with a portal. Finbar built the portal on top of the generator to divert the Wall's power to the N-Comm Systems JADE SENTINEL Central Power Core. At the top, a creeper-faced Finbar is waiting for them. "You're too late. Our dark master is awakened once again." Asked where Daisy is, he replies: "That tasty morsel will make a fitting meal for our god." KP kills him in fury, but the screens read Jade Sentinel online · time until full operation: 3 days 7 hours. "The evil that my father and my grandfather died to seal away is now free again."

A portal network of metal corridors drops them at Lastwatch Hold, a Crimson Cross bastion Karpath built, now a city buried in sand. By the campfire KP finally tells his story. He was four when "a terrible pale face" took his mother, Minthor, on a stormy night, and his father left soon after. He walked the length of the wall chasing the legend of Verigan. Nightmares and the taint aged him until he couldn't lift a sword, so he hid in Terrorvale as an innkeeper. There he fell in love with the blacksmith, Daisy, and felt something controlling him. He brewed poison to end his life, then the heroes arrived. "Then Daisy was taken, just as he took my mother."

With three days left to save Daisy, they ride a rail line under the Carnival. In Bruno's private stash they find an invisible pickaxe, which is how he cheated Simon. They also find a pair of tight pink underpants, and Simon refuses to take them off. They reach Verigan's Hold, now drowned in sand, and wake the feverish uncle, Adaephon, who raves about "Sentinels… they boil the desert with their eyes." He tapes the four pieces into one map, then hands KP a sealed letter.

I have changed my name to Peculiar and, under the guise of a city guard, I have infiltrated a cult. Tonight I halt the corruption at its source… travel to the Spider Tree; from there seek the tomb of our ancestors… I have left Isabel and young Verigan in the care of Granny Bacon. Never tell my children of my fate.Karpath, to his brother · SoI Part 36

The Last Letter rewrites the family. KP's father was Karpath, the Templar of the legend, living in Mistral under the name "Peculiar". KP's own true name is Verigan Antioch II, after his grandfather. The uncle says Karpath named him the last of the Templar Kings, and the title passes to KP when he dies. What the "terrible burden of our bloodline" is, he doesn't know.

The heroes shoot down zombie-crewed hot-air balloons, steal two, and fly south along a wall now overrun by an avalanche of sand. Beneath the Spider Tree, where KP once stood as a child, they find maps leading through a ruined Templar fortress and out into the desert, toward the Hand. It's a colossal metal hand sticking out of the dunes. Inside are the logs of Templar Enoch, who signs every entry "kiss". He set out to debunk "Grizwold's theory that a giant robot army is buried underneath the desert". Grizwold's own note records that the metal was regrowing. Enoch's thirst, his dreams of the pale-faced man, and his writing in blood after touching a green fluid end in a last realisation: "The sand is not evil. It is a prison for these dark machinations." The wiki fills in what the logs imply. Enoch was part of Grizwold's own expedition with Templar Kesha and the scribe Anno, and once Grizwold left, the tainted Enoch murdered them both. The heroes find his dismembered remains. On a minecart ride over radioactive lava, Old Peculier falls in and is gone.

They raise a beer to him "the Dwarven way" and push on inside the buried machine. A defective cloning vat spits out two naked evil Honeydews. One is lured with Jaffa Cakes and killed; the other escapes. In Cloning Facility 4 they thaw out Webley Grizwold, grandson of Professor Horatio Grizwold. He has been frozen for months since "a pale-faced man was looming over me". He knows the legend of "a dwarf and a man not of this world", and recognises the taped-together map: "the map to the Tomb of the Templar Kings". He also confirms Enoch was right: "The sand is simply a defence system put in place to keep these terrible machines rusted and broken."

To heal Webley they cross the desert past a dragon skeleton. They befriend a stranded French captain, Shiplord Hubert (beer, a four-year-old baguette "harder than diamond"), and reach a walled Oasis. Swampy has come back from a "spirit journey" to find his ancestral grove of healing herbs overrun. The heroes hold off zombie Templars while he regrows it, and he hands them healing herbs and a pipe for Webley. Part 42, released on 27 July 2012, is the last episode the Yogscast made.

The official epilogue. On a Jingle Jam stream in December 2018, Lewis and Tom Bates showed an unfinished animation intended for Part 43. Lewis explained that it was what Old Peculier saw as he fell into the lava at the end of Part 38. In the vision the giant robot wakes, every faction faces it (dwarves in tanks, the Skylords on Skyhold, the wizards, Swampy), and all of them lose. Peculier is crushed underfoot. A fan who watched the stream describes the animation ending with Peculier waking up in the lava pit, climbing out, and finding the robot hand still buried. Lewis said the vision was meant to open "the next chapter", and that the series stalled when the animator "disappeared and then we lost interest". That stream is the last canon material.

In the official story, Daisy is never rescued, Israphel is never confronted, and the Sentinel countdown never runs out. See Open threads.