Web Video / Achievement Hunter Minecraft Series

What are we doing, Jack?

"As you know, we do a Let's Play every week, Jack. [L]ately, it's been in Minecraft, and it will continue to be in Minecraft until we all die, because the people demand it..."

—Geoff Ramsey in Achievement Hunter Weekly Update (AHWU) #123 confirming Let's Play Minecraft to be a regular Achievement Hunter series.

On May 11, 2012, five men^note Geoff Ramsey, Jack Pattillo, Michael Jones, Gavin Free, and Ray Narvaez, Jr. decide to screw around in the then-recently-released Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition. Only one of the men^note Gavin has ever played Minecraft before. What happens within the 23 minutes of the video they published of their game session can only be described as hilarious chaos.

Since the release of that episode, Let's Play Minecraft became one of the most prominent shows of Rooster Teeth's Achievement Hunter division. After a bit of Early-Installment Weirdness, the show settled into a more stable format. In each episode, the main crew of six Achievement Hunters, originally composed of the original five and Ryan Haywood, and later members of the group, compete in some game or challenge within their main world of Achievement City to win possession of the "Tower of Pimps", a column of four gold blocks set atop a single block of obsidian. (Although, Ray used dirt or sponge as a base instead.) Occasionally, some episodes has the group visiting other worlds (often in the PC version of Minecraft) or having another member of the Rooster Teeth staff go along with them.

In 2018, the Achievement City map was officially retired due to being too buggy to play any more, and episode 307 marked the founding of Achieveland, later renamed Achievement Cove, to replace it. By 2021, starting with episode 480, the gang moved from Achievement Cove to Achievement Island, an empty island on a Rooster Teeth-wide shared server with a communal events island and separate identical islands for Funhaus, Squad Team Force, and RT Animation.

Recurring or regular segments

• Obstacle Course: A course has been built for the Hunters to attempt to traverse. This began very early on with a Let's Play themed after Wipeout.
• Head to Head: The Hunters split up into two teams, the Lads (Gavin, Michael, and Ray/Jeremy) and the Gents (Geoff, Ryan, and Jack) and compete head-to-head in some form of sport.
• Update Appreciation: Following an update to the game, a challenge is put together usually involving crafting a number of items introduced in the update.
• Fishing Rodeo & Jamboree: An annual event where the Hunters gather for an episode of fishing, with different challenges to complete alongside trying to catch as many fish as they can.
• Scavenger Hunts: A list of items is presented and the Hunters compete to be the first to obtain all (or as many as they can) of the items. This can be anything from blocks, to mob kills, to death messages.
• King: One of the Hunters is the King, and everyone else has to do as they say. Winning challenges earns the other players a piece of the Tower of Pimps, and the first player to complete their tower becomes the next King.
• Mod packs: The Hunters play a modded version of PC Minecraft. This has included Galacticraft twice, Dinocraft, Pixelmon, Stoneblock 2, and...
  • Sky Factory: The longest-running miniseries, running from February 2017 to March 2018, where a number of mods are used in a map which only begins with a single tree. Another miniseries was started in an updated version of the mod pack, Sky Factory 4, in August 2019.
• Board Game: A Minecraft version of a board game. So far this has included two different versions of Monopoly, Snakes and Ladders, Candyland, and Clue.
• Ya Dead, Ya Dead: A typical game of Minecraft with a twist, where any player who dies is Killed Off for Real and has to leave the Let's Play. This lasted all of four episodes.
  • YDYD 2 started in March 2019, and lasted slightly longer at seven episodes. This version introduced the concept of using the Tower of Pimps to revive a player for one more life.
  • YDYD 3 started in April 2020, and lasted nine episodes. This version is the most successful as Jack and Jeremy survive to the end and kill the Ender Dragon.
  • YDYD 4 started in March 2021 and after eight episodes, became Ya Dead, We Dead, where if one player dies, the whole group dies and respawns with them, lasting another seven episodes.
• All 103 Achievements: After Ya Dead, Ya Dead 2 completed, the group tries to find all 103^note The series was originally called "All 102 Achievements", but the game added an additional achievement on the day that the first video was uploaded. achievements in the most updated version of Minecraft. The series was intended to run concurrently with their modded Minecraft gameplay, but has since stalled after six parts, having not updated since 2019.

Here on TV Tropes, "Achievement Hunter Minecraft Series" mainly refers to the group's Let's Play Minecraft series,^*The work page's name was actually chosen to avoid using the otherwise generic name of the series to refer to only the AH series called Let's Play Minecraft. Besides that, we've already done "<Creator> Minecraft Series" once before to refer to another group's Minecraft videos. but it also refers to two other Achievement Hunter Minecraft shows:

• Things to Do in Minecraft, which is actually a sub-series of the group's overall Things to Do in... series, further explained on their Creator page.
• Let's Build, where Team Building Exercise (previously Geoff and Gavin, also known as "Plan G") show off the construction of the things they make for Let's Play Minecraft and Things to Do in Minecraft. The original format came to an end in February 2015 and will be restarted as a live Twitch show.
• Also, there is MegaCraft, created and mainly hosted by Matt "AxialMatt" Bragg, which started as a Community Hunter series before becoming an official AH series. This series is essentially a showcase for many of AH community members' impressive creations within the game.

As for the gang in this series, they can be identified by the following skins^note with derivatives of them for their appearances in Rooster Teeth Animated Adventures and AH Animated as well as the buildings they live in at Downtown Achievement City, Achievement Cove and Achievement Island:

Regular and recurring players

• Geoff Ramsey's skin is that of Master Chief and his house is the stone Monolith on the west side of Downtown. It's so big (going up to the build height limit) that it's used as a landmark for everyone to find Downtown again whenever they get lost or need to reach it in a competition. In Achievement Cove, Geoff, in stark contrast to his previous home, lives in a small, open air hut built into the cliff-side, accessible by a narrow staircase. For when he appears in Rooster Teeth Animated Adventures, he just wears the SPARTAN armor without the helmet. Like Michael below, starting in Episode 107: "Halo Mashup", Geoff has switched his Master Chief skin from the one found in Skin Pack 1 to the newer, more detailed skin found in the Halo Mashup Pack. Said new skin has prominent shoulder pads and a jet pack, the latter especially fitting considering how much Geoff flies around in episodes. His house in Achievement Island is a small shack built at the top of the mountain overlooking the others' homes and connected to the rest of the island via a railcar system that Ky built into the mountain.
• Jack Pattillo's skin is the biker from Trials HD and his house is a wooden house on stilts on the south side. The house is built over a mine and a giant statue of his skin (with a penis added on) overlooks it from behind. In Achievement Cove, he lives in a stone-frame house with glass walls, with a small wheat garden on a roof extension. When he appears in Rooster Teeth Animated Adventures and AH Animated, he goes without the helmet. His house in Achievement Island is a stone and wooden house with a garden next to it.
• Michael Jones' skin is that of Banjo and his house is a regular-looking wooden house on the east side next to a rail station. In Achievement Cove, he and Lindsay live in an elaborate birch-and-spruce house (built by Lindsay) across the water from the rest of the Hunters. When he appears in Rooster Teeth Animated Adventures, he wears Banjo skin-like clothes, with a bear ear cap on his head, while his AH Animated depiction removes the hat. In Episode 106: "Bodyguards", it was revealed that Michael has switched his Banjo skin from the one he used for the longest time (that was introduced in Skin Pack 1), to the newer, more three-dimensional Banjo introduced in the free 2nd Birthday Skin Pack. Said new skin has Kazooie in the backpack, which for Michael is a symbol of his marriage to Lindsay. He originally lived in a giant birch box next to Ky's house that Lindsay annexed through their shack, but Lindsay has since remodeled both their houses into in a massive modern-style black and white mansion next to Ky's house.
• Gavin Free's skin is an anthropomorphic Creeper. His house is a partially-underground cobblestone house loaded with paintings inside on the northeast corner of Downtown. In Achievement Cove, his home is a pile of wood on the cliff-side with a facade making it look like an actual house. When he appears in Rooster Teeth Animated Adventures or AH Animated, it's just regular clothes in the Creeper pattern, with the Creeper face on the shirt. Since his only appearance to date on the island was the 500th episode, he has no home on it, so a Creeper face made of gold and emerald was built in the center of the village in homage to him. The winners of the Tower of Pimps challenges post signs of their wins on the face.
• Jeremy Dooley's skin is that of a muscular shipwrecked man. At the end of Episode 177, to commemorate winning his first Tower of Pimps, he was given the rebuilt house. In Achievement Cove, he lives in an acacia wood house built on the water, adjacent to the Achievement Hunter logo that he built. He lives in a wood house next to Jack with an orange and purple tile on the front in Achievement Island.
• Lindsay Jones' skin is that of Kazooie, which reflects their marriage to Michael. They had only appeared in the occasional early episodes, but has since become a regular player. In both Achievement City and Achievement Cove, they live with Michael in a bed adjacent to his. Their house in Achievement Island is a shabby shack appended to Ky's mansion and subsequently annexed to Michael's house, connecting the three of them together. They have since subsequently rebuilt their house into a massive modern black and white mansion with a massive glass window.
• Matt Bragg's default skin is that of Jack of Blades, but tends to change in certain themed episodes, reflecting his Game Master status. He had no permanent home in Achievement City. In Achievement Cove, he lives in a large, wooden mansion with an interior fountain, a second floor deck, and a boat dock in the back. His house on Achievement Island is a massive two-story mansion built between Trevor's and Jeremy's houses.
• Trevor Collins' original skin was a man wearing an iron golem mask. He had no permanent home in Achievement City. In Achievement Cove, he lives in a modern smooth stone house near the wheat farm, after his old dirt house was annexed by Gavin's woodpile. In 2021, he replaced his iron golem mask with Chuck E. Cheese. His house in Achievement Island is a multi-floor narrow tower.
• Alfredo Diaz's skin is the default Steve, having spent the first six months as an employee of Achievement Hunter avoiding Minecraft before getting dragged in for Ya Dead, Ya Dead. He also had no permanent home in Achievement City. In Achievement Cove, Alfredo lives in a spacious but unfinished home on top of the cliff, accessible by a ladder. His house in Achievement Island is an underground bunker with a small hole and pumpkin on top indicating the entrance, and has a giant tree in the middle of it that placed there by someone from the other groups as a prank.
• Ky Cooke's skin is Constable Neyla from Sly Cooper. She joined the gang for the first time on Achievement Island in June 2021. She's also the first one to build a house on the island, with a stone mansion on a raised platform with a garden underneath.
• BlackKrystel's skin is Blackfire from Teen Titans. Her home on Achievement Island is under construction on a small beach where the giant AH logo is built.
• Joe Lee's skin is a self-described "shitty" Pikachu. He has claimed Alfredo's tree as his home with a railcar system (built by Matt) to access the top.

Former players

• Ray Narvaez, Jr.'s skin is called "Tuxedo Steve", which he wears as a Shout-Out to Tuxedo Mask from Sailor Moon. His north side house is made of dirt, with a wall of paintings inside that hide a wall of dispensers filled with cakes nicknamed "Slice of Hell". When he appears in Rooster Teeth Animated Adventures, he just wears the tuxedo. His last day with Achievement Hunter was April 18th, 2015. His house was promptly dismantled the second Ray left and rebuilt into something better the next episode.
  BrownMan has left the game.
• Ryan Haywood's skin is called "Scottish Steve". His dirt house ("Kung-Fu House") is adjacent to Geoff's house along the south side of the Monolith and has a basement for his pet cow, Edgar. In Achievement Cove, he lives above the rest of the Hunters in a lavish cliff-side lair accessible by a waterfall. When he appears in Rooster Teeth Animated Adventures, he wears the dress coat and shirt with the kilt.
• Caleb Denecour's skin is usually a nurse. He has been banned from participating in Let's Play Minecraft for cheating, though he was allowed to compete again one time in Episode 71. His "house" in Achievement City is a 2x2x1 block pool of water (shown to be emptied in Episode 96) towards the south between a cactus patch and a stone bridge.
• Kerry Shawcross's skin is based off of Juno from Jet Force Gemini. He has only appeared in episodes 74, 89, and 90 so far, and joined Team Gents for the same Capture the Tower game mentioned above. His "house" in Achievement City is just a small fern with an obsidian block, but as of Episode 89 he now lives in Michael's newly-added basement called the Queerian Lanister. He has not appeared in any episodes since the death of Achievement City and so does not have any permanent home in Achievement Cove.
• Fiona Nova has had multiple skins: her original skin was Bart Simpson, then in "All 102/103 Achievements", she had changed it to a pirate. As a relatively new addition to the Achievement Hunter team, she does not have any home in Achievement City, nor does she currently have one in Achievement Cove. Joining the other new Hunters to play the old Wipeout course was the first time she had ever played Minecraft. In her most recent appearances in Minecraft, her skin was a boy in a blue jacket, named "Blue Jacket Boi" in the credits of the final episode of Ya Dead, Ya Dead 3.

See also Let's Play Grand Theft Auto, AH's other flagship Let's Play series.

Note to tropers: When linking to this page on a trope page, do not simply type the name of this page to refer to any of the three AH Minecraft shows mentioned here. Please make a Pot Hole^note i.e. ''[[LetsPlay/AchievementHunterMinecraftSeries Let's Play Minecraft]]'', which gives Let's Play Minecraft that displays the proper show when linking. In other words, we want to see "Let's Play Minecraft" in blue, not "Achievement Hunter Minecraft Series".

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Let's erect our "Tower of Tropes" here:

• Absurdly Ineffective Barricade: In Episode 29 (The Walls), Geoff at one point uses TNT as a makeshift barricade for his and Ray's cave. Gavin wastes no time blowing it up and indirectly killing Ray, followed by Michael pummelling Geoff to a pulp; the incident inspired their Team Nice Dynamite nickname.
• Achievements in Ignorance: In the episode 159, the crew is playing with a mod that adds dinosaurs. Ryan and Geoff are looking at a machine that creates eggs and embryos from DNA, and Ryan's wondering why it doesn't seem to be working. Geoff puts a chicken egg in the machine as a joke, and it turns out that eggs are the "fuel" for the machine.
• Alcohol-Induced Idiocy: Gavin was drunk during episode 2, and out of his shenanigans the Tower of Pimps was born.
  • Thanks to copious amounts of Four Loko during an Off Topic recorded immediately before it, Jeremy and Michael are absolutely shitfaced throughout episode 322, to the point where when it's over, Jeremy can barely stand up.
• Anti-Climax:
  • The Iron Golem episode ends kind of flat, since everyone had been getting pumped up to fight their created Iron Golem. It turns out that player-spawned ones never retaliate against the player, only world-spawned ones do, making the "death-match" a one-sided stomp.
  • Jack's Nightmare has Ray winning easily with a deadpan "I won". The episode devolves to just looking around their houses.
  • Feels Fishy has Ray winning abruptly two-thirds of the way through the episode after he fishes up ten ink sacs at once (a mechanic that nobody apparently knew about), so the rest of the episode is spent using the tornado mod to wreck up Achievement City.
• Arc Number: Four, after the four gold blocks comprising the Tower of Pimps. Many challenges reflect this and require 4 objectives (one for each gold block) like the King Let's Plays in order to win.
• Arrows on Fire: The Lava Wall Let's Play made every arrow fired (or dispensed) one of these.
• As You Know: Normally averted as Michael usually doesn't know some Minecraft mechanic so Geoff and Gavin have an excuse to explain. Defied with the rules to the King challenges.
  Geoff: "Jack, you ask the same question every single time!"
  Jack: "Yeah, well, what about the one guy who hasn't been watching the other ones and doesn't know the rules?"
  Michael: "That one guy can go FUCK himself!"
• Awesome, yet Impractical:
  • In Episode 33, they show off the Achievement Racetrack, complete with shortcuts. However, when they finally use them (well, Geoff uses them), it's revealed that they're more "slowcuts" than anything else.
  • Plan G. It was to only serve one purpose: Trolling Jack by detonating the entire city. However, it had the penchant of Creepers wandering in and exploding setting it off from above. After Jeremy came onboard and kept accidentally attracting Creepers, Geoff finally got tired of it and deactivated Plan G, replacing it with a memorial.
  • There's also the Indoor Pool, a Let's Build experiment showing how to keep water propped up on a layer of signs. Cool as that is, Gavin and Geoff wired the pool to dump all the water and flood Geoff's house, and put the lever that triggers it close enough to the door that pretty much everybody set it off at least once before it got removed.
  • Later on, there's the Team Nice Dynamite victory room, which is literally Made of Explodium.
  • Some of the houses in Achievement Cove are this. Matt's house is so big that he can only focus on one area building it, thus he gets ambushed by the monsters in the area; Gavin's "mansion in the cliff" was obviously not thought out so it does look like a pile of wood on a cliffside (not to mention immediately next door to Trevor's cliffside home); Michael and Lindsay's home has its first floor so claustrophobic as Michael can't even jump. Thankfully, Michael was able to fix the floor problem and Matt was able to focus on the walls.
• Ax-Crazy: Everybody becomes this at the end of episode 70. What makes it hilarious is that it started when Jack sets himself on fire and everything just spiraled downward from there.
  Geoff: "Let's kill!"
  • Ryan is becoming progressively worse as episodes progress, starting with encasing his cow companion Edgar in a glass cage, to the point where a nickname of his is "the Mad King."
  Ryan: "You don't understand. Edgar is the one in the hole."
  • His second reign as the king, in the meantime, is completely insane with increasingly bizarre challenges that involve people dying. It turns out that none of it even mattered. And then there's his third reign after winning King Gavin, though this one was subverted, as Sky King Ryan wasn't that murdery.
  Ryan: I'm not going to lie. It's all going to be murder.
• Back from the Dead:
  • Ya Dead, Ya Dead 2019 has this added as a new rule: by constructing a Tower of Pimps, they're allowed bring back one dead player. The catch is that It Only Works Once, so if they die again, they really will be Killed Off for Real. As of Part 3, Michael and Ryan have both used up their one-time returns. As of Part 6, so have Jack and Geoff.
  • For a couple of episodes at the beginning of May 2019, Achievement City rose from the grave so all of the new Hunters could play the Wipeout course built in 2012. Geoff quickly shoots down the idea that the map's there to stay, though, and it's possible to date the version of the map they're playing to 2014.
• Batman Gambit: Geoff pulls one off that gets derailed and rerailed when he attempts to follow Jack and steal the win in "building a portal to the Nether". He gets lost and loses Jack, but when Jack builds the portal, only to get killed through a combination of getting crushed by gravel and Michael attacking him, Geoff finds it and finally makes the win.
  • In the Potions Let's Play, when Gavin and Michael are about to win, Ray teams up with Jack to kill Gavin and Michael. Gavin runs away as Michael stays back to defeat Jack and Ray, when Ray seemingly leaves Jack to be killed, only to be revealed to have caught up to Gavin, murdering him and making the two lose all their items.
  Jack: "Ray, where are you?"
  Ray: "I'm sorry, I'm sorry!"
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Early on in "Mega Dig", Gavin notes that Silverfish and the blocks they hide in are underused in Minecraft. A couple hours of recording later, after many deaths from swarms of Silverfish, Gavin sorely regretted opening his mouth.
• Berserk Button: Michael obviously already has many, but Gavin presses a particular one in a Let's Build episode right here. Since there were no facecams, they were kind enough to illustrate Gavin's perspective in this incident.
• Bittersweet Ending: YDYD 3. While Jack and Jeremy stand as the only survivors, they successfully defeat the Ender Dragon and bring the series to a successful conclusion.
• Brick Joke: Early in Episode 2, Geoff made a hole in the roof of Ray's house so he could get inside much more easily. A good ten minutes later, we get this.
  • In the first King Ryan episode, Gavin makes a pool of lava after losing a challenge and uses it to kill a cow. In the second, 28 episodes later, he's running back to the throne room after losing a challenge... and runs directly into it. As pointed out by "Vhavoc11" on YouTube:
  Funny thing is Gavin actually put that Lava there last time Ryan was King right after he lost the Lava challenge. He used it to kill a cow. Thats his Lava
  • During the original building of Achievement Cove, Jeremy has to travel for thousands of blocks to find a desert biome to get cactus for green dye. This comes back to bite everyone in ROYGBaa since the cactus he brought back is off-limits.
• Brutal Honesty: At the beginning of Achieveland, Geoff flat-out says that the Achievement City map is finally dead.
• The Cake Is a Lie: At the end of "Mad King Ryan II", Ryan reveals that all the gold blocks earned in the previous challenges mean nothing, and one challenge will decide the winner of the Tower and the next king. Also see Golden Snitch below.
• Call-Back: Almost all Let's Play Minecraft episodes take place in the same world, centered around a small town called "Achievement City". It's common for them to use locations shown in previous episodes of both the regular series and Things to Do in Minecraft as points of reference.
  • The first thing Gavin does at the beginning of Sky Factory 4 is to veinmine the leaves of the tree everyone's standing on, sending Jack, Ryan and Jeremy into the void below, mirroring the first time he learned how to veinmine in the previous series. Though, the first time he did it because he was Too Dumb to Live; the second time he was just being a Troll.
• Call-Forward: Occurs occasionally in the Let's Build episodes, as the Let's Plays associated with them are usually released first. Examples include Gavin and Geoff talking about how hard the final jump of Thread the Needle will be (Jack gets it in a single attempt), and Gavin building his Chamber of Victory, which the others discover later.
• Chekhov's Gun: In Episode 2, Gavin used loads of Ray's gold to build four gold blocks and place them outside a house, jokingly naming it the "Tower of Pimps". Five weeks later, the Tower of Pimps is now the main prize for the winners of their obstacle courses.
  • An oft-missed one is Gavin saying "It is Achievement city down here!" in the first episode. It might not be related, but the fact Achievement City was created only a few weeks afterwards makes this somewhat significant.
  • Also in Episode 14, Plan G makes a comeback when Gavin uses it in an attempt to stop Ray from building the tower and claiming victory.
  • In Episode 13, Gavin comes across a tower of diamonds, but due to his lack of iron he is unable to mine it. Ray later comes across the same tower with an iron pickaxe, mines the four diamonds, and crafts himself a full set of diamond armor, as well as several diamond tools. This leads to him winning the game in Episode 14, as nobody else could beat him.
  • Episode 19 is filled with these. They used wool, pistons and red stone to make a gigantic pig and sheep, with brown wool coming out of the sheep's rear and a ladder connecting it to the ground. When Gavin was running around, trying to get some supplies, a Creeper blew up near the pig's ladder. Shortly thereafter, the lever that grows the word "Fart" out of the ground makes a re-appearance. A Creeper chasing Gavin sets off the Plan G bomb and demolishes Achievement City, and the Wipeout Death Course shows up again.
  • Episode 28 has Gavin notice Caleb behind Ryan and going through his chest. Gavin does not think much of it and it is soon forgotten. It becomes this at the end of the video, when Caleb reveals that he was the one who cheated by stealing Michael and Gavin's fishes and placing them in Jack and Ryan's chest.
  • The giant stack of mushrooms in Minecraft ended up being used by the guys as a safehouse for their journey to a Nether Fortress.
  • In one episode of Things to Do in Minecraft, Geoff and Gavin show off the Hop 'Til You Drop obstacle course. It becomes Geoff's bane in Episode 44 when he teleports himself there via Ender Pearl. In the lava pit portion. With the Tower of Pimps.
  • Episode 46, Ray finds a sponge block that was randomly placed in a chest. After he wins a round, he places the sponge next to the Tower of Pimps. Later on, he gets knocked out of the pit the Tower is in, so he tries to get back in by breaking the ice wall, only to release a waterfall in the pit, forcing Geoff to use the no-longer-pointless and very fitting sponge to plug the hole and stop the waterfall.
  • In Episode 58, it's the first game where they do a "King" series of games. Geoff mentions that after they're done, whoever wins will become the next king. Michael mentions that Gavin will never be king. But come episode 90...
  • A huge one - literally and figuratively - is the room under the Altar of Pimps. No one was allowed in because Gavin and Geoff had spent over a year preparing it for the final challenge of Episode 100.
  • Episode 100 ends with a Chekhov's Gun being introduced and lampshaded. Jack, the winner, is rewarded with three items from a chest (a potion of night vision, a wither skeleton head, and a golden apple), with Geoff informing him they will come in handy in Episode 200.
    • Eventually subverted. Geoff straight up thanks Jack for holding onto the items for him, and informs him via Exact Words that he'd said they might come in useful in episode 200. The actual payoff is Geoff being a little nicer to Jack.
  • The longest-running currently unresolved one is the tunnel between Gavin and Michael's houses that we the viewers are not allowed to see inside. Not even Episode 100 gave us any real glimpse of what is in that tunnel. According to someone who worked as a Guardian at RTX 2014, where people were allowed to play at Achievement City, there was nothing in there but some remnants of a Let's Play that was scrapped due to it being too hard to make.
    • However, in Episode 151 we finally (sort of) find out what's in there: it's a gateway to the outside world, shown when Ray leaves Achievement Hunter and exits through it.
  • The Nice Dynamite victory room was first discovered in episode 92 and may have been built significantly before that. The room connected Michael and Gavin's houses and was meant to hold the tower of pimps if Michael and Gavin ever won the tower jointly. To Represent Gavin and Michael's team name, nice dynamite, the tunnel was constructed out of alternating diamond and TNT blocks. At the the time the heavy use of TNT in construction wasn't much of a problem, due to the tunnel abutting the crap tone of TNT that was plan G anyway. However Plan G was disabled leaving the victory room the only source of TNT in downtown achievement city. In episode 216 the Victory room finally bit team Nice Dynamite in the ass, after an angry Jeremy decided to blow up Gavin's personal victory room with TNT. The resulting explosion ignited all the TNT in the tunnel and blew up Gavin and Michael's house while auto save was on.
• Chekhov's Gunman: If Edgar the Cow is considered a character rather than an object. During Episode 47, Ryan mentions how a random cow moved into his house and refused to leave, so he might as well name his new pet Edgar. If only they knew how he'd come up again 13 episodes later...
• City of Adventure: Achievement City, while not fitting the strictest definition, certainly qualifies. While it only has a few houses, it also serves as the location for about ninety percent of their Let's Plays, with Gavin and Geoff adding on new events and games all the time (including Dark Achievement City, which exists in the Nether).
• Curb-Stomp Battle: "Human Hit List" very quickly becomes almost comically one-sided in Ryan's favor due to the fact that he was the only one initially who had an iron sword and a piece of armor, and each time he successfully killed one of the others, he would only gain more and more resources until he was decked out in full iron armor, multiple swords, and tons of food. It eventually reaches the point where the other Hunters all band together to both gang up on Ryan and protect Gavin (his final target), but even that fails.
• Cuteness Proximity: Gavin will start cooing in baby talk and Squeeing when he sees rabbits or other cute animals around. Case in point, in the Episode 229, he spots a turquoise bunny and is giddy enough that Michael and Jeremy simultaneously ask him what he saw. Ryan has even pulled him aside to show him a bunny in a suit and top hat.
• Dark Horse Victory: Episode 90 ends with King Gavin, who had only won a single block the entire Let's Play and had only become king because of the final, all-or-nothing challenge.
• Dark World: Episode 56. It reveals that Gavin and Geoff built a version of Achievement City in the Nether. While the layout is the same, some of the block materials have changed (notably, Ray's house is made of Soul Sand, so his house is shittier), Edgar is replaced by a villager, and the Tower of Pimps is upside down. Michael and Ryan even reference the trope namer.
  • There's also a series of Let's Build episodes showing the construction of Dark Achievement City.
• Deader than Dead: In YDYD 2019, anybody who's died, been brought back to life and then killed again is counted as this. As of episode six, this counts Michael, Ryan, Jack and Geoff.
• Death Course: Geoff and Gavin designed a Wipeout-style course in Minecraft for Jack, Ray, and Michael to compete in for the Tournament Arc.
• Death from Above: Seen in normal playthroughs but a little more prevalent in YDYD are 'Drop Creepers', creepers that spawn on high ledges in ravines and have a tendency to drop onto and kill people with little to no warning.
• Death Seeker: Done intentionally in the "Darwin Awards" videos, where the goal is to die in as many different ways as possible.
• Did Not Think This Through: A couple of the constructions have had some questionable design decisions, including the original Creeper Soccer (which, being made out dirt, got destroyed and required Save Scumming frequently) and The Pit (which had the chance to spawn ghasts and blazes... and was a small building made of wood, and one of the items was a bucket of water which immediately dispensed itself when chosen, washing away the buttons used to spawn the enemies).
  • Not even the build team is immune to this; the Things to Do: Incredible Disappearing Creeper derailed almost immediately when it was noticed that invisible creepers still emitted potion effect wisps, rendering the whole premise pointless.
  • More recently, in the Sky Factory series, Gavin and Michael built a 'Lad Pad' full of Decocraft items as a place for them to hang out. It's a couple of episodes before they realize that they built it directly over the solar panels, effectively cutting off power to the rest of the platform.
  • The second challenge in Sky King Ryan involves breaking chance cubes. One of the possibilities is spawning a Wither, so Ryan built a number of enclosures of Wither-proof glass for everybody to use. It turns out that while he may have accounted for the Withers, he failed to account for pretty much any other chance cube effect, and it's not long before the entire platform is full of holes, clogged with mobs, and the enclosures are full of lava.
  • In the long term, both Plan G and the Indoor Pool start reflecting this, as in the former case, it can blow up whenever a creeper shows up on the surface, and in the latter, when everybody mistakes its activation lever for the button to get out of Geoff's house.
  • While it's unlikely they could have thought it through any better, the seed for Achieveland includes no deserts for thousands of blocks in any direction from the spawn, meaning no easily accessible cacti unless you want to walk for an hour in a direction that might not even have one at all.
  • In part 10 of their 2018 attempt at Galacticraft, Ryan, Jeremy and Michael head to the moon better prepared than they were the previous time - to be more precise, they have breathing gear, they're prepared to hold space to slow down and not crash into the moon, and they've prepared special teleporter blocks so they can build a quick way to get back and thus transport materials. As soon as they get to the moon, three things quickly become apparent. 1 - Since they last played it, Galacticraft was updated, and now requires a player to be wearing pressure suits in a vacuum. Jeremy failed to read up on that, so as soon as they leave their landers they start dying. 2 - The teleporter requires 9 Teleporter blocks in order to build it, but Ryan only picked up 8 and gave the last one to Geoff, so they can't build the teleporter and get back. 3 - The return rockets that are provided in the landers don't come pre-fuelled, so they can't get back that way either, meaning that Jack, Geoff and Trevor have to organize a rescue mission.
  • Ryan's insistence regarding his cheating in Clouds.^note mining the blocks that the approaching Michael was standing on While he's correct in that it wasn't exactly stated in the video, this one line of defense becomes rather shallow when you take into account that a) as Geoff says, players are not allowed to alter the environment unless specified, b) if someone was allowed to break the blocks, then as Michael says, "why not just alter the entire course", and c) as they are forced to do, they would have to reload the game constantly.
• Disaster Dominoes: Ya Dead Ya Dead 2018 ends up going this way. In a single episode, they go from just Lindsay dead to everybody but Michael dead. Gavin is murdered by Ryan, Geoff is killed by a Verne, Alfredo and Jack are killed by creepers, Ryan is killed by Jeremy as revenge for Gavin, and Trevor and Jeremy commit suicide together. The only reason Michael survives this is because he spends the entire episode lost in the jungle listening as the episode devolves into chaos.
• Dismantled Macguffin: The Tower of Pimps is their objective for most episodes, but since it is composed of 4 blocks of gold and 1 block of obsidian, the challenge often involves finding the 4 pieces or winning parts of the challenge for a gold block in order to assemble the full tower. This is featured prominently in the "King" Let's Plays, which consists of each King issuing challenges for his subjects to compete for a gold block- the first one to assemble their tower is crowned King for the next episode.
• Distant Finale: The ending of Minecraft YDYD 2018 takes place 50 years in the future, where Michael finally dies and reunites with everyone in Hell.
• Doppelgänger: Ray had one appear during the Thunderdome episode, which proceeded to walk and fly around mysteriously while being impervious to damage. To this day they still haven't figured out the cause of "Ghost Ray", as they've ruled out someone else in the office joining the game and using Ray's skin to mess with people (although it probably had something to with the fact that immediately before this, Ray and Michael managed to kill each other at the exact same time).
  • Ghost Ray made a brief return in the spawn area of Cloud Down, at one point being rubbed for luck by Ryan before he had another attempt at the map.
• Down to the Last Play: Episode 36 ends with the winner, Ryan, crafting a potion five seconds before the next person, Michael (working with Gavin).
  Gavin: "How could I have a four-hour Let's Play and lose in the last five seconds!"
  • Episode 53 also comes close to this, with almost everyone within one or two items of completing the "shopping list". The winner this time is Gavin, who came back from squandering an early lead.
  • Episode 54, "I Spy", falls under this category. The player in second place, Ray (with 4 points), attempts to coerce a skeleton into shooting a creeper in order to get a music disc and tie the leader, Jack (with 5 points), before the sun rises and the game ends. It rises mere seconds before he gets the disc, so Jack keeps his lead and wins.
  • Invoked and exaggerated during the Mad King's second reign. All of the challenges save for the last one did not matter at all, even when Ray got all the pieces, and that the winner is decided by the last challenge.
  • King Gavin part 2 has an unprecedented FIVE-way tie for the win before the final challenge.
• Downer Ending: Ya Dead, Ya Dead 2018, by episode four. Michael, the only one left alive after the Disaster Dominoes of episode three, abandons the base, wanders the map for fifty years, then eventually dies of shock and old age, only to find that in the meantime his friends have stayed at the age they died in hell, and that his wife's left him for a zombie pigman.
  • Achievement City ends not with a bang, but with a whimper, as after episode 300 it's determined that it's too old and buggy to try and rescue.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Episode 15 has the guys wandering around the Achievement City map, this time stumbling across a handful of half-completed structures of future episodes of Let's Play Minecraft and Things to Do In Minecraft.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: Most striking in the first ten episodes or so of Let's Play Minecraft, when their character skins weren't set, the Tower of Pimps wasn't used as a prize, everyone except Gavin was still learning how to play, Caleb was a lot more prominent, Matt was their Game Master for their multiplayer maps before his 2014 hiring, and Ryan was not part of the main group yet.
• Epic Fail: While playing Minecraft for the first time, the guys lost track of their house, so one of 'em decided to make another one... before turning around to see their original house two feet away. Ray walks right past the old house before he starts working on the new one.
  • In Episode 37, the gang frustratingly had to jump on snow and ice blocks in the sky, mine the Tower of Pimps and place the tower next to a sign with their name on it. Towards the end of the episode, Ray made it to the end and mined the tower. Gavin caught up to Ray while in the middle of constructing the tower, ensuing a fight involving diamond pickaxes. Ray falls off a cliff nearby and Gavin acquires the rest of the tower. He places the rest where Ray left off, only to realize that he placed the rest right next to Ray's name, accidentally declaring Ray the winner. This resulted in an epic scream from Gavin and plenty of jabs from the rest.
  • "SURPRISE, MOTHERFUCKER!... Aw Goddamn it, I fell. I fell, fuck. Ah, fuckin' hole."
  • Geoff landing in the lava pit beneath Hop 'Til You Drop twice in a row during the Ender Pearl Race.
  • Michael's attempt at building a TNT cannon in King Gavin part 2 ends with him shooting Gavin out of the sky, killing him and making him lose his crown. However, this also helped him win the challenge as he was the only person to actually hit something.
  • Gavin's attempt at escaping a rocket that he was on in Galacticraft Part Four led to him plowing into the surface of the moon after doing donuts in the sky for a few minutes, leaving a massive crater.
    • Also from Galacticraft, Ray's rocket taking off straight into a tree they'd failed to clear away.
  • In Lets Build Dark Achievement City, Geoff burns down his the copy of Jack's house he'd been building for over 30 minutes. He essentially completed the house except for the stopper in the hole to block the lava. When he installed the lava it leaked out and burned the house down exactly like it was suppose to. Gavin then literally added fuel to the fire by trying to use wood blocks to put it out. And indirectly as a result of this (as Gavin had hastily replaced blocks he had temporarily removed to rush over to the Nether to "help" Geoff), Jack's house in the Overworld ended up burning down as well.
  • In the Ender Pearl Race episode, Geoff ends up accidentally teleporting himself into Hop Til You Drop, twice, and the first time while he had the Tower of Pimps in hand, causing it to burn in lava.
  • The entirety of Creeper Soccer, beginning with the extremely poor design choices (such as constructing the arena out of dirt, having irregularly-sized stadium lights, having the dispenser located low enough for creeper explosions to reach it, and beds that spawn you outside of the arena), Lindsay having to climb up a high tower every time they reset the game to film them and occasionally falling off and dying (which resulted in her spawned so far away she couldn't get back), and having to reset the game every few minutes because the creepers kept destroying the field.
  • In Wolf Spa, Gavin got killed six times, four times not even by his wolf (he burned to death, fell down a chasm, got blown up, and even drowned). Keep in mind, this was a straightforward "get from one end of the map to another" challenge while leading an angry wolf. His wolf got itself killed when it fell down Felix Baumgartner and also managed to drown. Like pet, like owner apparently.
  • After a few years of playing in Achievement City, you'd think that everybody would know that the lever on the inside of Geoff's house door activates the Indoor Pool. ...Nope.
  • Early on in the Sky Factory series, Jeremy reads out loud the instructions for vein mining. Naturally Gavin immediately tests it out and destroys most of their platform, sending everyone bar Jeremy and Jack to their deaths.
  • Their attempt to establish a moonbase during their second attempt at Galacticraft started with a controlled, three-man mission, and quickly spiralled out of control until everyone was stuck on the moon with the exception of Matt.
• Everything Explodes Ending: How the second Galacticraft series ends. After Ryan accidentally nukes NASA, everyone goes into creative mode and begins destroying the world with antimatter and red matter missiles.
• Evil Brit: Gavin freely admits that his main job in the early Minecraft Let's Plays was to antagonize and irritate the rest of the crew as much as possible to make things more interesting. This is most noticeable in the second episode.
• Evil Counterpart: Starting with Episode 104, the Tower of Pimps now has one in the form of the Negatower, which has the four blocks of gold replaced by four nether quartz ore blocks. Should a player create the Negatower in the Let's Make a Deal-style competition they played in that and the following episode, that player is eliminated and no longer gets to compete for the Tower of Pimps for the remainder of the game. The first "winner" of the Negatower was Ray, although the elimination was rendered moot as he completed it in the last-played round of the competition, right after Gavin completed the Tower of Pimps.
  • The only other appearance of the Negatower thus far was in Mega Dig, again disqualifying anyone who found all four blocks for it before assembling their Tower. It was ignored this time, too, for two reasons. One, that although Gavin technically completed it, the last block was actually found by Jon Risinger, who took over briefly so Gavin could get some water; and two, that the game crashed immediately afterward.
• Exact Words: During the "King" challenges, several times a claimant to the throne uses this to their advantage, especially Ray, Ryan, and Geoff. For instance, after narrowing down the exact wording of the challenge to "bring a wolf that you tamed yourself to the throne room", Geoff just retrieves his dog from Achievement City instead of finding another one, as he did indeed tame it himself. This has lead to people extensively clarifying the rules to see if there is any loose end in the wording to exploit.
  • "Look, you don't understand: Edgar is the one in the hole."
• Explosive Stupidity: In the second Galacticraft series, Ryan builds a rocket launcher and makes increasingly more destructive missiles to shoot from it. He accidentally blows himself (and his teammates) many, many times since.
• Failed a Spot Check:
  • Combined with Late to the Punchline. In episode 28, Michael ends up discovering a picture of two karate guys, wonders when they had this, only to learn that they've had it for the longest time - since episode 15.
  • Both Teams Gents and Lads do this during Lava Wall, whenever they focus heavily on offense they turn around to find out that their fortifications are severely burning down but they didn't notice. Team Gents lost without them even knowing it at first.
  • Episode 93 has Ryan building a giant bridge right over where the rest of the group are working- something they only notice when he accidentally plummets to his death in front of them.
  Gavin: "Look at this thing! How did nobody notice he was making it?!"
  Michael: "Nobody cared!"
  • Both Michael and Geoff fail to notice that Ryan has yet to be knocked off when they kill each other at the end of King Gavin part 2.
  • In Fishing Rodeo and Jamboree V, Gavin finds an enormous glass structure underneath the Lake of Pimps. It turns out Jeremy put that there the first week he and Matt had been hired to do Let's Builds, which was over two years before this Let's Play was recorded, and nobody noticed it.
  • For much of the Sky Factory series, and sometimes in real life, Geoff is the personification of this trope, often completely oblivious to major things going on until they've finished.
• Final Exam Milestone Celebration: Episode 100 is a scavenger hunt testing the AH Crew's knowledge of Achievement City's history, with items and clues hidden amongst the various Let's Play and Things to Do in... episodes they have done in the past.
• The Fool: In Ya Dead, Ya Dead 2019, Alfredo ends up with the nickname "Mr. Magoo" because of all the times he bumbles into a situation only to to somehow manage to bumble himself back out of it and survive. He eventually manages to outlive all the others, not having died once while the others all used up their 2 lives.
• Foreshadowing: An unintentional example. In part 2 of the Galacticraft mod episodes, Michael gets tired of not having anything to do, so he asks Ryan to give him something to do, saying he wants something easy that he can still take credit for later. He gives "making a baby" as an example. Later on, from what we hear in other let's plays, part 3 of Galacticraft was interrupted and delayed because, during recording, Ryan - or more specifically, Ryan's wife - had a baby, and Ryan basically got up and left as soon as her labor started.
  • This one now plays double since Michael and Lindsay have now made a baby of their own.
    • Triple, now! In their revisit to the mod, they come across some new Golden Egg items that create baby versions of their characters.
  • Did you really expect Mad King Ryan Part 2 to not have something involving Edgar?
  Ryan: "Edgar isn't in there to be mean to Edgar; Edgar is in there to protect you. Let's make sure we never find out what that means, alright?"
  • Seemingly parodied at the end of King Gavin part 2. As Ryan places the last block of gold on his tower of pimps, depressing rain starts falling. Though this is a given, since it is Ryan after all. Eventually subverted, as Sky King Ryan ends up being nowhere as dark and gloomy as the rain might suggest.
• From Bad to Worse: After half the team gets stranded on the moon in episode 335, the rescue mission in 336 is stupidly incompetent. Ryan finds out the missing teleporter block they needed is in Geoff's inventory. Jack launches off in a rocket to bring them the block but crashes into the moon, destroying Michael and Jeremy's backup ships. Then Trevor and Geoff see that their side of the portal's active, and oblivious to the chaos going on, go through and strand themselves on the moon too. Then the teleporter gets finished, but Ryan realizes that it's not working because there's nobody left on the other end. Only Matt was able to save them, and he wasn't even playing in the beginning.
• Get Out!: Michael's Lame Pun Reaction to Gavin's "Gayve" joke^note Do you know what kind of cave a homosexual man lives in?
• Golden Snitch:
  • The final challenge in "Mad King Ryan II" becomes the only objective that matters.
  • Seeing a supercharged creeper has multiple times been declared this, although this has yet to happen (this occasionally runs into Fridge Logic, when the objective is to make something or find something). When a supercharged creeper was spotted, spawned from a chance cube in Sky Factory, the others declared that Jeremy won Minecraft for spawning it, and Gavin lost Minecraft for getting killed by it. Then they just got on with the episode.
• Gone Horribly Right: The idea of Ya Dead, Ya Dead was to spice the game up with the concept of permadeath. By the end of 2018 episode four, everyone's dead, with most of them having dies in episode three.
• Here We Go Again!: Ryan being crowned king for the THIRD time at the end of King Gavin part 2, complete with rainfall and an evil laugh as he places his final block upon his tower of pimps.
• The Hero: While he's still inept and trollish in Minecraft, Gavin has taken on himself to be The Hero for a few episodes. He led the team to the stronghold in Episode 25. In Episode 26, he and Ray helped to grow a melon. Lastly, in Episode 30, he led Geoff to the mushroom.
• Hero of Another Story: Starting with the Achievement Island episodes, Alfredo goes on a solo adventure in the Twilight Forest while the others build up the island. He does return to the island with the fruits of his adventure before returning to explore the Forest again, with occasional comments during his adventures confusing the others.
• History Repeats: In both the 2013 and 2018 Galacticraft series, the first moon mission is a complete disaster, resulting someone getting stuck on the Moon. Also, someone crashes into the Moon because they failed to slow down in time.
• Hold the Line: Whichever team is protecting the Tower of Pimps atop their death-fortress during the "Storm the Tower" episodes has to defend it for one hour. Both teams succeed.
• Honor Before Reason: What leads to Geoff losing to Michael in Episode 66. Geoff and Michael had previously agreed that whoever found a diamond (the only thing they needed to make a jukebox) would alert the other and they could fight to the death over it. Geoff is the one who finds it, and even though he has no armor and a weaker sword, he still makes the challenge, refusing to keep quiet and sneak away because of the agreement. Naturally, Michael successfully murders him, takes the diamond, and wins.
  • In episode 249, Gavin reveals that he was doing this in the Wool let's play in episodes 31 and 32, but it was hidden by the editing. Rather than getting screwed over by Michael and having no squid ink, Gavin had some squid ink already in his chest, but it would mean winning 25 minutes into the video (and thus make it too short for a Let's Play). He asks Geoff to let him know when it's okay to win, which is why he's so outraged when Geoff stabs him in the back and wins himself.
  • When Gavin and Geoff complete one of the challenges in Sky King Ryan almost simultaneously, but Gavin is judged to have won since Geoff panicked and switched his input, Gavin is more than willing to give his block to Geoff, since he doesn't have any yet.
• How Do I Shot Web?: Everyone spent some time getting used to PC controls when they used that version of Minecraft for a few episodes, struggling to do basic things that would have come as easily as breathing on the Xbox. The worst part was the crafting system: the recipes are shown in the Xbox 360 Edition, but actually placing everything onto the crafting grid by hand took them quite a while to get used to. For a long time, this led to a very odd role reversal where Gavin was the one in charge of the complicated things while Michael was relegated to getting food.
• Hub City:
  • "Achievement City". It houses their official homes and an Obsidian block (either a dirt or a sponge block for Ray) for whenever they win the Tower of Pimps. They've built several obstacle courses around Achievement City, so the rest of the map doesn't go to waste. Now that the map has expanded out far further in the Xbox One edition, the entire original map that Achievement City was built on could count as this for the rest of the world. However, particularly from the second half of 2017, the Achievement City map is getting so old and buggy that the Hunters have spent months creating a new hub area in the Sky Factory mod pack.
    • With the official death of Achievement City in 2018, episode 307 sees the Hunters set out to build a new hub city in the form of Achieveland.
    • 2021 saw the gang create a new home base on Achievement Island, with the island itself being a branch of a central hub on a shared company server with islands for Funhaus, RT Animation, and Squad Team Force.
• Hunting the Most Dangerous Game: Referenced in the title of the Most Dangerous Game episodes. King Ryan also refers to human-hunting when he begins Mad King Ryan by donning a full set of Diamond and giving everyone a 30 second head start.
• Idiot Ball: At least once an episode in Minecraft someone will pick this up and forget about a gameplay mechanic that they really ought to know. Gavin has one of these frequently due to his impressive acquired knowledge of the game and equally impressive tendency to forget it (or worse, deliberately ignore it). Geoff also has a tendency to get lost in the maps that he created or to forget whatever strategy he had planned in advance.
  • Geoff forgets that wood can be smelted into charcoal when he complains about a lack of coal during the King Ray episode, something so basic that even beginners learn it within a few hours of starting the game.
  • At least two prime examples in King Michael alone: When told to make a baby, Ryan was the only one who remembered the easily-obtained seeds can lure and breed chickens, while everyone else was trying to grow wheat with those same seeds. Later, their task was to bring him five types of food. Everyone struggled with thinking of five different foods in the game, and not one thought to utilize the abundant supply of cakes from Ray's house. Though the latter can be justified as everyone likely assumed (even if it wouldn't have been true if they asked) that, like with most let's plays, downtown Achievement City was off-limits.
• Impossible Task Instantly Accomplished: Things to Do in Minecraft: Thread the Needle was supposed to be a long Let's Play, with the Hunters attempting to traverse a number of rooms with increasing difficulty using ender pearls, culminating with a long throw that required the thrower to hit a single block a very long way away so that they fall onto the Tower of Pimps. Each death would send them back to the beginning. Once he'd gotten the hang of the first couple of rooms, Jack breezed through the last room and the long throw in one attempt.
• Incredibly Lame Pun: Jeremy becomes a master of this trope whenever they play on the PC version, where he frequently comes up with website related puns.
  • In particular, the 1.9.0 update Let's Play sees him launch a stinging counterattack when Gavin tries to join in:
    <Jerem6401> Want to swim in an ocean of orange soda? www.IDreamOfAFantaSea.com
    Gavin: You have a list, right?!
    (later)
    <Gavinofree> I'm 5'4 from boston - jeremeysucksdicks.com
    Gavin: Did I do it right?
    <Jerem6401> Want to look more like Gavin? www.NoseNoBoundaries.com
    Gavin: Ooof.
• Instant-Win Condition: After the "I Spy" lets play, the crew agrees that whoever finds and gets killed by a supercharged creeper automatically wins that competition. This would eventually happen to Gavin in Sky Factory Part 18, well over four years after I Spy was released. It's not a competition episode, and modded besides, so he doesn't win anything.
• Interface Screw: During the Mad King Ryan episode, one challenge involves a 1-v-1 tournament in which the contestants must play with the other's controllers. In Ryan's words, they need to kill themselves without killing themselves.
• Irony:
  • Back in Achievement City, Jack's house was designed to have him accidentally destroy it with a lava block, and yet his house was the only one that was usually unaffected by Plan G's activation.
  • Monopoly is generally reviled as a Let's Play, since it takes ages to finish, and both the main Monopoly Let's Play and its followup Dark Monopoly are met with groans. Dark Monopoly would end up being the last Let's Play filmed in Achievement City before the map file succumbed to old age.
• It Will Never Catch On: During Episode 2, Gavin drunkenly steals Ray's gold and stacks 4 blocks of it, calling it the "Tower of Pimps", which the others angrily dismiss as trolling. Little did they know that Achievement Hunter history would be made in that moment.
  Gavin: "Let's get this gold back because the Tower of Pimps was not successful."
• Karmic Death: At the beginning of Ya Dead Ya Dead 2018 part 3, Ryan shoots Gavin off a one-block wide bridge and he falls to his death. Near the end, he builds a tower to try and escape from Jeremy, seeking revenge, who shoots him off the tower and he falls to his death.
• Karmic Jackpot: Of all people it's Michael who ends up landing this in episode 344. As it's a Christmas episode, in the spirit of goodwill he gives his second gold block to Jack, who at that point was the only player yet to win a challenge. In the following challenge, while he intentionally failed to adhere to one of the main rules of the challenge for the sole reason that he knew he wouldn't be able to complete it, what he ends up building instead - a chibi reindeer, rather than an exact reproduction of one that Matt had built - is unanimously described as awesome and is deemed worthy of a bonus gold block. And this is Michael we're talking about - this is the first thing that he's built by himself in over 300 episodes of Minecraft that he's happy with.
• Killed Mid-Sentence: At the end of Sky Factory, Geoff is telling chicken Millie about how they've finally found their new home...just as they're incinerated by the Draconium Reactor's explosion.
• Killed Off for Real: This is the premise of the "Ya Dead, Ya Dead" series - the six main hunters plus Lindsay, Trevor and Alfredo, playing on hardcore, and if their character dies, they're out of the Let's Play. By the end of the series, Lindsay, Gavin, Alfredo, Geoff, Jack, Ryan, Trevor, and Jeremy have all died due to various means, leaving Michael as the Sole Survivor...Until he dies of old age.
  • For those who are curious, Lindsay was mauled by a Zombie while checking her inventory, Gavin was shot off a high platform by Ryan and fell to his death, Alfredo was blown up by a Creeper, Geoff was defeated and killed by a Zombie, Jack was blown up and thrown into the air by a Creeper before dying on impact with the ground, Ryan got a bit of karma via getting shot off a platform by Jeremy, both Trevor and Jeremy fell to their death after falling through a waterfall, and Michael eventually dies of old age.
  • In YDYD's 2019 reboot, the rules are of course the same, minus Lindsay plus Matt... although the events of the first ten minutes and the extremely dumb deaths of Ryan and Jeremy trigger a reset and the creation of a "ten minute minimum" rule in which any deaths in the first ten minutes don't count. After just one episode so far, the death toll stands at Michael and Matt, both victims of tridents thrown by the drowned mobs.
  • Which was followed by Gavin and later Geoff, both from being shot by skeletons while ascending a waterfall. At the beginning of the second episode, it was decided to implement a system by which a player could be brought Back from the Dead, by completing a Tower of Pimps. The third episode saw the revival of Michael and then the death and immediate revival of Ryan. Episode four was worse, seeing the revival of Matt, but the first death of Jack and the super-deaths of Michael and Ryan. Episode 5 was kind of a breather, the only event being the revival of Jack, before episode 6 saw Jack die to another stealth creeper and spanned the period of time between Geoff getting resurrected and him dying again. Episode 7 was the last episode, featuring in succession the resurrection of Gavin, and then the deaths in order of Matt to a creeper, Gavin to a zombie, Jeremy to an enderman, and Trevor to himself, leaving Alfredo as the Sole Survivor.
• Lame Pun Reaction: Gavin once told a pun during an early episode. The rest of the crew reacted poorly.
  Gavin: "Do you know what kind of cave a homosexual man lives in?"
  Ray: "Here we go..."
  Geoff: "What?"
  Jack: "Go for it."
  Gavin: "A gayve."
  (Beat)
  Michael: "Get Out!. Just get out of the office."
  Ray: "Kill yourself."
  Jack: "Boo."
• Laser-Guided Karma: In the Shopping List episodes (52 and 53), Ryan traps Gavin underwater as Gavin was trying to make a hole under the ocean, causing him to drown and lose his stuff to Ryan. Eventually, it got to the point where all Ryan needed was an egg to bake a cake in order to win, and was sort of misleading the others to find a dungeon where he has still left some cocoa beans to make cookies. Instead, everyone but Ryan was finding chickens and eggs while Gavin eventually caught up, made his cake, and put it on his board to nab the win.
  • In episode 37, "Clouds", Gavin knocks Ray's controller out of his hands to prevent him from winning the match. Eventually Gavin inadvertently erects a Tower of Pimps in Ray's slot rather than his own, winning the match for Ray.
• Legacy Character: Edgar
  Ryan: "Look, you don't understand, Edgar is the one in the hole."
• Letting the Air out of the Band: At the start of Achieveland, everybody's pumped up about how they're going to go on an epic journey to find the site of their new Hub City. After the first night, they decide on a mountainous area within sight of the spawn (mostly because, like Gavin pointed out, if the new city was far away from the spawn, as soon as people died they'd never be able to find their way back).^note Indeed, Lindsay still gets lost after dying.
• Like an Old Married Couple:
  • Ryan and Gavin make up the (almost) inseparable Team Love n' Stuff, but are either constantly arguing, trying to kill each other, or trying to sabotage the other's tower. Can also be considered Vitriolic Best Buds.
  • Team Nice Dynamite has this problem, along with Team Lads. Pretty much any team that Gavin is a part of.
• Lighter and Softer: Sky King Ryan, despite still retaining the typical chaotic nature, is nowhere near as dark and fucked up as Ryan's previous reign as King.
• Loophole Abuse:
  • In Episode 60, Gavin is making his Iron Ingots within King Ryan's palace, as no one can be killed there. Geoff spots Gavin and points out that, while he can't kill him, there's nothing that says he can't take his Iron Ore. Which he does.
  • Played with extensively in the "King" challenges in Let's Play Minecraft. After Ryan and Ray scored the crown by making use of this (Loophole Abuse says that they were prohibited from using items from previous challenges on the current one), everyone has taken to asking the King extensive questions on what is and is not permitted, both to establish what they can get away with and to prevent others from abusing the rules.
  • Prior to Sky King Ryan, Ryan blocked off access to the end portal with obsidian, then during the episode itself tasked everybody to be the first to enter three different dimensions. Jack wins the challenge by going in under the end portal, which was only blocked with soul sand.
• Macguffin: The Tower of Pimps is used as this in some episodes as the objective to find and assemble in a particular spot as opposed to just being the prize for winning. It's mostly arbitrary as the challenge could be completed by substituting any other set of blocks in. It's useful as an objective since a 1x5 stack doesn't take too long to mine then rebuild, but its rather difficult to do while under attack, and it can be broken up into either four or five pieces so that the pieces have to be found separately or can be given to the Let's Players (one apiece) to fight over.
• Made of Iron: In Episode 54 (Potions part 2), Ray was very strangely this for a short period of time, since he survived getting wailed on by Michael with a diamond sword for a dozen or more hits despite having only iron armor (an impossible feat).
• Milestone Celebration: The centennial (100th) episodes count as this, each one featuring a challenge to decide the winner of the past hundred.
  • Episode 100 was a treasure hunt with clues leading between previous Let's Play builds and ending at the Altar of Pimps. The winner, who also gets the Altar of Pimps, is Jack Pattillo.
  • Episode 200 uses the same format as 100, but changes it up by each player having the clues in a different order, as well as having to collect items to build a monument at the end. The winner this time around is Jack again.
  • Episode 300 brings back the King format after over 170 episodes without it, in the form of Sky King Ryan, changing up the challenges by using the Sky Factory mod-pack being played through at the time. The winner is once again Jack, making him not only the next King, but also the winner of all three centennial episodes to date, as well as the current overall winner of Minecraft by definition.
• Mood Whiplash: The ending to episode 151, "Brown Out". The rest of the Achievement Hunters give Ray a goodbye as he leaves the Achievement City map one last time by going through the Do not enter!!! tunnel. Once the "BrownMan has left the game." text disappeared, Geoff puts on a gold helmet and a diamond pickaxe, turns around to the rest of the crew (who also had gold helmets and diamond pickaxes equipped) and they begin to demolish Ray's dirt house.
• My Death Is Just the Beginning: Gavin's death in "YDYD Part 3" from 2018 quickly sends the episode spiraling out of control as Jeremy breaks down and kills Ryan as revenge, and convinces Trevor to commit suicide with him. Plus, Geoff dies because he was distracted by frame lag and is attacked by a baby zombie after building a memorial to Gavin. Jack and Alfredo's deaths were unrelated, but they were killed by Creepers, which was Gavin's skin.
• Nintendo Hard: "Storm the Tower" was so intricately designed by Matt Bragg and Jeremy Dooley to be unassailable that neither the Lads or the Gents could capture the Tower of Pimps from the other team within their given hours. The Lads did get one gold block successfully mined and erected, while the Gents managed to mine the blocks multiple times before getting killed by the Lads. However, when the latter team finally managed to get off the tower with two blocks, Geoff cheated and time was up anyway.
• No OSHA Compliance: Achievement City stands out as being horribly unsafe due to having craptons of TNT beneath the surface, which combined with no monster-deterrents has resulted in a Creeper blowing everything up more than a few times.
  • The 3-part "Geoff's House" Let's Play went so far as to feature a death counter for all the times any of them fell off the ladder to the top of Geoff's house.
• Obvious Rule Patch: Episode 79 (King Michael) had the king specify that all items had to be destroyed at the end of each challenge so that they couldn't be used again. To compensate the basic items needed for each challenge were provided to level the playing field. The reason for this was Michael being rather unimpressed by Ray and Ryan's use of Loophole Abuse in the previous "King" challenges, so he made this impossible right from the start.
  • In part 1 of their Top Chef game, Ryan and Ray quickly broke the in-game economy by selling quick and easy to make water bottles for an excellent profit. Geoff lowered the price dramatically (from 1 water bottle for 2 points to 2 water bottles for 1 point) a few minutes later.
  • The 2019 reboot of YDYD sees the introduction of a ten minute grace period at the start of the series, after Ryan and Jeremy both managed to die almost immediately.
• Off the Rails: After 20 episodes of slow, but steady progress through the galaxy, the second Galaticraft series firmly goes into this territory once Ryan unlocks nuclear missiles and becomes obsessed with hunting down and nuking Matt's horse, which he had painstakingly hidden. The rest of the series is dedicated to Ryan's obsessive quest, Matt's determination to foil him, and the rest of the team struggling to survive a world where Ryan has access to nuclear weapons.
• Oh, Crap!: When Michael and Geoff find out that nobody killed Ryan before they both killed each other in the final challenge of King Gavin part 2.
  • Also when everybody finds out the hard way in one of the Fishing Jamborees that Ryan's been playing around with some mods for PC Minecraft.
• Oh, No... Not Again!: Frequently the reaction of Hunters to revamped Let's Plays that they didn't like the first time around.
  Ryan: *reacting to Dark Monopoly* No! No! No! No! No!
  Gavin: *reacting to Creeper Soccer X* Noooooo! I don't want to play it again!
• Old Shame: A few of the less-well-thought-out Lets Plays have become this, especially the original Creeper Soccer and Twelve Towers (repeatedly referred to by Geoff and Gavin as the ugliest thing they've ever built).
• Once More, with Clarity: At the end of episode 61 (King Ryan), showing how Ryan returned Edgar to the hole.
• Out-Gambitted: Michael finally freed Edgar from his prison beneath Ryan's house, hoping to see a great reaction. Unfortunately, Ryan figured it out earlier than intended...
  Ryan: What's up, Edgar?
• Overly Preprepared Gag: In general, many of the early Things To Do In Minecraft were pranks or traps that Gavin set up for Geoff, which required quite a bit of preparation and knowledge of Redstone for anything more complicated than a pressure plate land mine. As for specific gags that have made it into Let's Plays...
  • Geoff and Gavin worked together on Minecraft for upwards of twenty hours to pull a standard lava trap on Jack. They both think it was Worth It.
  • In addition, there was also their "failsafe" plan: the hundreds of TNT blocks underneath Achievement City and the nondescript button used to detonate them.
  • Episodes 6 and 7 were supposed to be a combination of this and a Batman Gambit in that Geoff made the entire competition specifically so he could pull a Kaizo Trap on Jack, but Jack became a Spanner in the Works by mining somewhere that Geoff wasn't expecting. Geoff still won thanks to Michael's trolling, but he considered it a hollow victory.
  • Gavin and Geoff booby trap Ray's house in Minecraft so that it fills up with cakes. It was totally Worth It.
  • The creation of Dark Achievement City was so long that the Let's Build of it was split into three separate parts (and that's with some heavy editing) for a very small reaction.
  • Gavin and Geoff strike again by making an entire AH-themed Monopoly board (including the third time they made the huge AH logo) just to hear Ray's You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me! reaction. They've almost turned Overly Preprepared Gag into an art form at this point.
• Politeness Judo: On Galacticraft part 4, the guys are having a space buggy race across the moon, with Ryan just about to win and Geoff close in second. Then, literally seconds before Ryan crosses the finish line, Geoff shouts for everyone to stop. It works, since everyone thinks something's wrong with the game/their capture, and Geoff passes Ryan for the victory.
• Previously on…: Episode 61 has one of these, reminding the audience that Michael freed Edgar from his cage in the previous segment. Doubles as Spoiler Opening, since this tips people off that this particular act will be of importance later on.
• Pun: In Episode 13, Gavin at one point puts a sign on a tree that had "Bad News" written on it, then says "This tree has bad news all over it." Geoff responds, "That's... fucking lame."
• Punctuated Pounding: Gavin does this in Episode 32, after Geoff beats him for the Tower of Pimps because everyone ganged up on him.
  • This was actually for another reason entirely - see Honor Before Reason above.
• Pyromaniac: Gavin is a menace with a bucket of lava.
  • In the very first episode, after everyone works together to build a house, Gavin sets it on fire.
  • In the Grifball episode, Gavin spends the first fifteen minutes of video time running around lighting the arena on fire. This is the edited version, Michael claims it was more like five hours. Half of the arena's exterior is gone by the end of the video.
  • Every time Jack wins the Tower Of Pimps, Gavin sets his house on fire in Achievement City.
• A Rare Sentence: Everyone agrees that this is one: (It Makes Sense in Context)
  Michael: "There's a creeper fist-fighting with a penguin inside Buckingham Palace right now!"
• Rage Quit: While there have been a few instances of just one person rage quitting, Episode 96 had the distinction of a lot of players quitting, mostly because of lava. Ryan's the first to quit after falling into lava. Gavin follows suit when Ray slaps a piece of bedrock onto his tower and since the rules say he has to put all the pieces up in order, Gavin decides to give up.
• Replacement Goldfish: Edgar.
• Running Gag: Gavin loves burning down Jack's Minecraft house whenever he wins the Tower of Pimps. It's not helped by the fact Jack's house is made of wood and was originally designed with a lava trap in the ceiling. (Gone so far that after one of his more recent victories Jack looks at his house and asks why it's not on fire yet.)
  • Michael very frequently has trouble operating doors in Minecraft, usually by pressing a button then not being able to walk through the iron door before it closes on him several times in a row (to his consternation).
    • Sort of related, but he has gotten awfully good at hitting the WRONG switch/button to leave Geoff's house recently.
  • Whenever anyone mentions "coal" or "flint" in passing during an episode, someone else always has to ask "Flynt Coal?" in reference to a running joke starting when someone mashed the two words together and everyone agreed it sounded like a secret agent's name.
  • Gavin referring to Creepers as his family or his people, since he has a Creeper skin in Minecraft. The others have started doing this too, such as "Gavin, your parents are here to pick you up for school!" when finding two Creepers staring the group down.
  • Ever since the events of Cloud Down, Ray constantly attempting to replace his dirt block Tower of Pimps podium with a piece of sponge, much to Gavin's ire.
  • During Let's Builds, Gavin and Geoff will frequently ask each other if they would hypothetically do X for a large sum of money as part of their ongoing Seinfeldian Conversation.
  • "It's not raining. It's not the second day yet."
  • "Anybody find any rare occurrences yet?"
  • Ryan and Michael, in particular, repeatedly referencing Red vs. Blue to irritate Geoff.
  Ryan: I dunno, man. I worry about it sometimes.
  Michael: Keeps you up at night?
  Geoff: Hey! Knock it off.
  Michael: What? I just asked a question... [mumbling] Do you ever wonder why we're here?
  • During King Gavin, there's running gag of people falling down the Super Dump Hole by accident when they're trying to get to the throne room after dying. This almost includes the King himself at one point.
  • During "Brown Out", everyone keeps saying that Ray is dying/dead with Ray crying out "I'm not dying!"
  • In the Sky Factory series, Gavin sneezing. He usually sneezes at least once every episode he appears in, with the editors putting a funny video cut whenever it happens.
  • In the Galacticraft series, Trevor's glass bridge in front of NASA Headquarters gets blown up or somehow damaged and/or someone falls into the moat almost Once an Episode.
• Scenery Gorn: In Minecraft YDYD 2018, after Michael leaves behind their old settlement, there's a montage of it slowly being reclaimed by nature. The forest expands, vines creep over everything, the house and the Tower of Pimps fall apart, trees and flowers grow in Jack's farms, and Alfredo's TNT finally explodes.
• Schmuck Bait: Geoff and Gavin made a statue once in Minecraft and claimed that hitting the button in the back opened a door to goodies, when in fact it would set off TNT all the way to bedrock. No one fell for this in the slightest, though, since it was a statue of a Creeper.
• Second Prize: In "Episode 183 - Black Friday", Geoff hosts a bonus round to win the inaugural (but slightly less coveted) Block of Pimps.
• Seinfeldian Conversation: Common when there's nothing in particular to commentate on and the guys are just talking, like at the start of challenges as they collect wood and stone for tools. The conversations that are deemed funny enough remain intact after editing.
• Serial Escalation: Ryan's ongoing efforts to kill Matt's horse in Galacticraft 2019, starting out with rockets, going up through nukes and into cheating by using a console command to summon an explosion at Matt's location repeatedly.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: In part 15 of Sky Factory, Jeremy starts experimenting with blood magic. Eleven parts later, he discovers that he can't actually do the awesome things the mod promises, because the devs of that mod haven't actually put them in Sky Factory yet.
• Shoot the Shaggy Dog: As Ryan revealed, he designates any cow in the hole as "Edgar", meaning no matter how many times Achievement Hunter frees "Edgar", Ryan will always just lure another cow in the hole. We see nothing to suggest that Edgar will ever be free, unless someone forces Ryan to do so.
  • Ryan winning at the end of King Gavin part 2 by doing nothing.
• Sole Survivor: Given the format, Ya Dead Ya Dead is almost guaranteed to end up this way. The first season features Michael as the last man standing, while the second season ends with Alfredo.
• Sound-Effect Bleep: Even with the amount of language they use that doesn't get cut, they sometimes have to resort to this to cover up really bad words or in the instance they have to edit out someone's personal information/messages. The written version of this occurs during the Hunger Games episode.
  Jack: (reading sign) "'...to win be the last survivor and return to claim the Tower of *CENSORED*' ... huh, I guess you can't say 'pimps' on a sign in Minecraft."
• Springtime for Hitler: Episode 91 is just a competition to see who can die the most ways. Sounds simple enough to run around failing as much as possible... except that Gavin and Jack spent a good while trying to get killed by a Ghast and kept screwing it up (in other words, failing at failing). ^note They were trying to get the specific killfeed message "X was fireballed by a Ghast" which requires dying to the fireball itself; dying to the area-of-effect explosion gets "X blew up" and dying to the resulting fire gets "X burned to death" or "X went up in flames".
• Stable Time Loop: During "Thunderdome", a weird bug occurred in which a duplicate of Ray appeared, who became dubbed by the others as Ghost Ray. 62 episodes later in "Enter the Negatower Part 2", Ray inexplicably becomes invisible, leading the others to realize that he had now become Ghost Ray. Gavin suggests that Ray should see if this trope is in effect by going to see if their past selves are playing Thunderdome.
• Stockholm Syndrome: After being freed, all Edgar wanted to do was return to his former prison. Maybe he really WAS there of his own free will...
• Stopped Numbering Sequels: Or really, Stopped Numbering Episodes. After publishing Let's Play Minecraft episode 365 (enough episodes to watch in order once daily for an entire common year), episode 366 onward have been published without a number attached to their titles.
• Storming the Castle: In episode 17, Gavin, Michael, Jack and Ray attempt to do so to Geoff in his Sky Fortress, who has the Tower of Pimps. They failed a LOT.
  • A "Storm The Tower" Let's Play had the Lads and Gents take turns defending and attacking an enormous trap-laden tower to steal the Tower of Pimps from the other side. It ended up being so unassailable that both teams failed to do so after an hour, though Team Lads steal and place one block and the Gents stole the whole tower but died before placing it.
• Strange Minds Think Alike: Between Jeremy, Geoff and Ryan at the end of "Mr. J." As Gavin is nearing the top of a pole from which he intends to jump off onto a group of slime blocks (which act as trampolines), Jeremy and Geoff silently and spontaneously cooperate to cover the slime blocks with other blocks while Gavin's on his way down, resulting in a Gavin pancake. Once there's a break in the laughing, Ryan pipes up that he was in such a hurry to get back to them to do the exact same thing.
• Stuff Blowing Up: Ryan becomes missile-obsessed in Galacticraft 2019, mostly to troll Matt. Most of the time he just kills himself by standing too close to the explosion. It's also the way that series ends, with so many antimatter and red matter missiles fired that the server can't handle it.
• Superweapon Surprise: Subverted. Team Lads planned to do this with a TNT Cannon in Lava Wall as a finisher move, even though Team Gents knew it was probably coming since both sides had the components for one and Gavin knew how to make one. Despite the cannon taking damage he managed to rig a makeshift one in the end. He tells Ray to press his button too early and the whole thing literally blew up in their faces. Michael and Ray were not amused. It doesn't matter in the end, however.
• Take That, Audience!: Several jabs are made at the YouTube audience's expense, especially by Ray. At several points Geoff and Gavin will purposefully do sub-optimal things like make a redstone circuit more complicated than it needs to be just to irritate people who complain about such things.
• Team Pet: Edgar, in Ryan's opinion. The others aren't so sure that pet is the right word...
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Episode 92 accidentally made this happen. The challenge is to manufacture then kill an Iron Golem, which has 100 hearts of health compared to a player's 10 and hits like a truck normally. As a result the challengers keep coming up with increasingly elaborate plans to kill their golem safely (as getting killed results in disqualification) like encasing them then using lava or tons of arrows. Everything turns out to be for naught when they figure out that player-spawned golems will never retaliate against them while game-spawned ones do.
• Throwing the Fight: Gavin is actually good at Minecraft, but he often intentionally plays badly or causes trouble for the others for entertainment value.
• Toilet Humor: These guys are certainly not above good old fashioned potty humor. As for permanent structures in Achievement City, there's a gigantic statue of a pig and a sheep which can dispense brown wool from their rear ends on command, the huge statue of Jack has a large wood extension from his crotch area that can dispense either water or lava, and finally use of pistons lowered certain patches of dirt in a field, spelling out the word "FART" from above.
• Too Dumb to Live: Invoked along with Death Seeker in Episode 91 (Darwin Awards). Since the objective is to die in as many ways as possible, everyone ran around intentionally getting murdered the entire time.
  • YDYD in general tends to invoke everyone picking up the Idiot Ball at least once, despite them having played Minecraft for over six years when the first attempt starts. It's been pointed out that they have spent most of those six years dicking around, so they're completely unprepared for hardcore mode.
  • Both Gavin and Geoff in YDYD 2018 part 3. Gavin, who at the time was standing on a one-block-wide bridge, assists Ryan with his arrow aim, and is completely taken by surprise when Ryan hits him and knocks him off to his death. Later, Geoff is attacked by a Vern, and his method of fighting it seems to be hit it - be surprised it isn't dead - get hit - run away - get hit - hit it - and so on. He does this enough times that the Vern kills him.
  • Ryan and Jeremy suddenly display this in the first, aborted attempt at Ya Dead, Ya Dead 2019. Before ten minutes of the video are up, Ryan completely ignores Michael's warning about mobs in the mining cave and dies to one, and less than a minute later Jeremy attempts to dive to a sunken treasure while still damaged from a previous mob attack and drowns on his way back to the surface.
  • Ryan again in episode four of the same, deciding to open up the door to a bunch of zombies in the middle of the night to experience farm while he was in the middle of nowhere.
  • Geoff in episode six. Barely half an hour after his resurrection, he decides to try and clear out a lava pool in the cave system beneath the house, without any water and only using blocks, and all while forgetting to eat. He catches on fire once, nearly burning to death. The second time, he runs around screaming "put me out" before super-dying once again.
  • Trevor in episode seven. With just him and Alfredo remaining, Trevor panics and attempts to barricade himself inside the house with TNT. The only problem is, there was a wooden pressure plate just inside the doorway... which was being weighed down by the door he'd just broken. The dynamite immediately activates and he has nowhere to run to.
• Too Many Cooks Spoil the Soup: Mentioned at the beginning of Sky Factory 4. Given that the whole point of the modpack is that at the very beginning the only landmass is a single tree, the Hunters learned their lesson from the previous Sky Factory series, and start with only four of them (Ryan, Jack, Gavin and Jeremy), with the intention of bringing in Michael, Geoff and the others once they're not going to be tripping over each other every few seconds.
• Tournament Arc: Since episode 8, the guys have been competing for the chance to get the Tower of Pimps (i.e. a stack of four golden blocks). Initially, they would just split up and mine until they found gold, which they would then craft into blocks and stack them up. From episode 10 onwards, they've built entire obstacle courses for the guys to compete in, and the winner gets that gold block tower as bragging rights. While this arc has been going on for nearly 200 episodes, there have been many breaks to either play team vs. team challenges or to explore a new mod/update.
• Trash the Set: While certainly not planned, Achievement City has certainly fallen to this a few times thanks to "Plan G". Sometimes the place gets trashed even without someone pressing the button, like in episode 54, when a Creeper explodes near Gavin and sets off the dynamite hidden underneath. Then Gavin replaces the water in Jack's tower with lava and his house burns down. The end of the episode has the entire crew just staring at the destruction.
  • Eventually, Geoff gets so tired of having to deal with the aftermath of Plan G that he permanently disables it, taking out all of the TNT and turning it into a museum of sorts. However, he doesn't take any of the TNT out of the Team Nice Dynamite Victory Room, so...
  • In later episodes this starts leaning towards drama rather than comedy when things blow up while autosave is on, leading such situations as where in the primary file for Achievement City everything's been blown up, while in the backup Geoff's indoor pool has been activated.
  • Some Let's Plays end up going this way too, mostly where explosions are concerned (see Did Not Think This Through above).
  • Sky Factory ends this way, with the detonation of the Draconium Reactor.
  • Galacticraft 2019 also ends this way, as after Ryan makes a gaffe and nukes NASA with an antimatter missile, he and the others spam antimatter and red matter missiles everywhere, turning the playing area into a collection of craters half of which expose the void underneath the world, and eventually crashing the server. Not only did they trash the set, they knocked down the studio.
• Unexpected Character: Occasionally, somebody else from Rooster Teeth will wander in during recording. For example, during Mega Dig, Jon Risinger briefly took over for Gavin, and late on in Sky Factory, Gus gets summoned to officiate the 'wedding' of Michael and Gavin.
• Unstable Equilibrium: Discussed as it happens in Ray's then Michael's favor during the Thunderdome episode. The winner of each one-on-one fight gets their pick of a random chest, so anyone who found something useful like a sword or armor would inevitably win the next fight and get to pick from more chests. Mitigated somewhat by Hard mode eventually wearing down their hunger bars, but it still took several rounds of being punched to death before they were finally taken down.
  • Inverted in Capture the Tower, where both team's spawns were placed right near their towers, making it so that anyone who was killed could just re-arm then go to their tower with very little time lost, making it very difficult for either side to hold onto an advantage. This is why the relatively easy task of seizing the enemy's two gold blocks then stacking them on their own tower took so long and why Lava Wall and other team vs. team arenas had long walkways between spawn and the battlefield to act as a respawn timer.
• Vandalism Backfire: Over episodes 217 to 219, the other hunters decide that it's Ryan's turn to have his house vandalized, and enact some Laser-Guided Karma over Edgar's imprisonment by moving his house into a hole of its own. In episode 220, Ryan gives his opinion on the 'vandalism':
  Ryan: "So, while I was gone, I tricked some idiots into giving me a super sweet awesome base, they think they played a prank on me, that's how I got out of paying them!"
• We Need a Distraction: During both "Lava Wall" and "Lava Wall X", a culmination of failures on the Lads' side causes Michael to explode verbally at Gavin, causing Team Gents to laugh incessantly for a bit. Suddenly, when they regain their composure, they realize they lost while they were laughing. The first time was accidental, though the second time around Team Lads claimed it was intentional.
• Wham Line:
  • Episode 61 (King Ryan) has several in a row, all during The Reveal that Ryan has foiled Michael's plan to free Edgar.
    • First, upon arrival at Achievement City:
    Ryan: What's up, Edgar?
    Michael: How's Edgar doing?
    Ryan: He's fine.
    • Immediately after, the perpetrator is revealed:
    Michael: You son of a bitch, Ryan. You son of a bitch.
    Ryan: (evil laugh)
    Gavin: WHAT?!
    Michael: That's bullshit. There's no way that's actually Edgar.
    Gavin: WHAT?!?!
    Michael: No way. No way you got him back in there. There's no way! You BASTARD! He's missing!
    Ray: Will we free, uh...
    Gavin: What are you saying? We didn't get a reaction at all?
    Michael: I set Edgar free in the middle of the video and Ryan went and recaptured him!
    Ray: NOOOOOOOO! Dammit!
    Michael: You sick BASTARD!
    • About 30 seconds later, the screen then cuts to one hour earlier, when Ryan had quietly repaired his house, rebuilt the hole, and lured in a cow.
    Gavin: I'm so mad we didn't get Ryan's reaction from it. He, so you saw that he was gone and then silently repaired it?
    Ryan: Yep.
    Gavin: God dammit!
    • Finally, Ryan destroys Michael's final objection:
    Ryan: I went and fuckin' grew wheat, and led a cow back in.
    Michael: But wait, but wait, wait... did you get Edgar back?
    Ryan: I dunno.
    Michael: You got a random cow, so, as far as we know, he's free in the wild.
    Geoff: He doesn't give a fuck which cow it is.
    Michael: No, of course it matters! That was the original Edgar.
    Ryan: Look, you don't understand: Edgar is the one in the hole.
    • Cue everyone commenting on how Ryan is a "disturbing person."
  • A comedic version from "Dark Petting Zoo", which doubles as a Brick Joke:
  Ray: You said the Creeper was friendly!^note Said Creeper being the Friendly Creepy sitting by the Nether portal on the surface.
  • Immediately after Ray successfully wins his fourth gold block in Episode 90 and the others are celebrating his victory, Ryan drops this bombshell.
  Ryan: Except... that...
  Jack: Wait wait wait, your king is saying something.
  Ryan: Your king has an announcement. Uh... As it turns out... uh... those gold blocks are kind of falsey. You have a final task you must complete before any winner is declared. The winner of this task, wins. Everything to this point was merely prelude.
  • From the final challenge of King Gavin part 2:
  Gavin: (squealing like a little girl as Michael and Geoff fall to their deaths.) Ryan wins!
  Michael: No one shot Ryan!!? Ryan wins!!!
• What Does This Button Do?: The punchline of "Plan G" in episode 3 (the debut of Achievement City).
• When It All Began: The first 7 minutes and 9 seconds of the 100th episode is a flashback to May 27 and 29 of 2012, back to when Geoff and Gavin built Achievement City and planned out A) their prank on Jack and B) Plan G.
  • Episode 151 flashes back to Geoff, Gavin, Jack and Michael first picking Ray up from the airport when he first started working for the company. It's supposed to be a heartwarming example of this trope, but is completely Inverted when the conversation devolves into one of Geoff's would you rather questions: Would you rather suck a dick or take it up the butt?
• Who's Laughing Now?: In the Lava Wall episode, Team Gents (well, mostly Geoff) laughs like a bunch of hyenas on crack when Gavin's idiocy causes Team Lad's TNT Cannon to utterly fail. Then abruptly Team Gents realized they lost while they weren't watching their tower, to which Team Lads promptly returned the favor.
• X Must Not Win: While he has his own stupidity and dickish tendencies to blame most of the time, Gavin can't seem to win the Tower of Pimps even when he does bring his A-game. The main reason seems to be everyone else immediately putting aside their differences to stop Gavin since to them, the only thing worse than losing is having Gavin win.
  Jack (and several others): "Gavin not winning is almost better than winning."
  • In Galacticraft 2019, this is Ryan's mentality towards Matt, and particularly Matt's horse Sugarcube, to the point where after his own nukes cause the end of the series, and Matt's horse is safe in a pocket dimension, he crashes the server just to win.
• You're Insane!: The crew as a whole delivers this to Ryan after discovering he considers any cow trapped under his house to be "Edgar", meaning he'll eternally trap him, and he'll never be free.
• Zerg Rush: The incessant amount of Silverfish Stone in Mega Dig caused several Silverfish-induced deaths. The mobs aren't particularly dangerous on their own, but when they cause other Silverfish to swarm, they quickly overwhelm.

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I got the Tower! (stacking) ONE - TWO - THREE - FOURRRRRR!!!