Foxhole is a sandbox war MMO, officially released last year but available in early access since 2017. It features a persistent and massive war game in which thousands of players fight simultaneously for either of two factions seeking control of a huge map, but just like in a real conflict, the logistics, resources, and supply side of the army is as important, if not more so, than the soldiers firing guns and piloting vehicles The twist is that.

PCG's Morgan Park says Foxhole is an RPG "in the literal role-playing sense, not in the stat-crunching sense," and "like the best social games, great stories happen as they should." This past weekend saw one such storyline. It is a 48-hour battle on an isolated island called Silver, cut off from all logistics and supplies, against an overwhelming and endless invasion force.

What happened next was so extreme and astonishing, even by MMO standards, that it immediately spawned two new rallying cries for the players of this game: "Praise the Lord," referring to the mass of corpses that became so necessary and revered, and "Silver Stand," more self-evident.

Setting the Stage: The two factions of the Foxholes were called the Colonials and the Wardens, and in this case the Colonials controlled Silver Island, part of a larger region called the All Breakers Islands. The Wardens controlled the territorial waters around Silver Island, which included four large islands. This meant that the Colonial forces on Silver Island suffered doubly: they were cut off from their own supply lines and were limited to whatever equipment they had on the island. No respawns, no medical equipment to save wounded soldiers, no extra ammunition.

The marauding Wardens had it all, but there were bright spots in the layout of Silver Island. The only access point from the sea was a 50-meter-long beach, which allowed the defenders to stall incoming attackers. The first was the presence of four field hospitals, which could turn six severely wounded soldiers into six "shirts" (the Foxhole version of a respawn ticket); the second was the ability to create sandbags and barbed wire, which could be used to protect the defenders from the attackers, who would then be able to use them to defend themselves.

Then, as documented by Foxhole players, including TikTok's xRudyTudyx and the press Foxhole desk, the Warden's attack began with a withering blind fire (the defenders were firing in the dark because of the fog of war in Foxhole ), and troops landing on the beach quickly fled to "sand castles". This was a winding series of sandbags and barbed wire that gave the defending troops an advantageous position, and was destroyed and rebuilt, destroyed and rebuilt, over the next 48 hours.

But numbers mattered, and despite the defensive advantage, the Warden's attackers continued to press in, taking casualties. This had two unintended consequences. First, and most mundane, the beaches were littered with Warden corpses, looted to maintain the defenders' ammunition reserves. Second, the defenders, lacking medical supplies to treat the wounded, began to worship "the mountain." [The piles were outside the four field hospitals. Since all wounded soldiers would eventually die, the Colonial military players decided to take collective action. All wounded soldiers were expected to be mortally wounded and instead be added to the pile as "severely wounded soldiers." The field hospitals would use some of these severely wounded soldiers as a source of new soldiers and would provide a small respawn for the struggling defenders as the battle progressed. In the following quotation, the "corries" are the colonial troops on the defending side.

"I had a dying collie in my boat," said Warden Kilbaez. 'His last wish was to be brought back, so I did so and put him on the ground. After bringing the POW back, the first thing the collie and his men did was to fucking kill him. When they saw [the seriously wounded soldier], they shouted, 'For the mountains,' and sent someone to retrieve him. When the gremlin scooped the body off my barge, I didn't even tell the crew to return fire: I was just in awe." [ColonialInfamousInitiative18 says." We hold the island in faith to the pistol and the sacred pile."

As the battle unfolded over the next 48 hours, the defenders pushed back attacking ships again and again, retreated and regrouped, rebuilt "sand castles," looted from the enemy dead, and most importantly, kept the piles as high as possible.

The fighting went on for so long that at one point the servers were crashing. When the timer reached zero, the Colonial forces charged from their strong defensive positions toward the shocked attackers. When the timer reached zero, the Colonial forces charged from their strong defensive positions toward the shocked attackers.

The engagement was very protracted and unusual, even for Foxhall. One Warden Battle Barge commander said that the best moment of the battle was when the island garrison began waving at the ships. You can see the moment I gave the order to cease fire," says SaltyScallywag. 'I told the crew to wave back because I couldn't waste a precious moment waving.'

"It was a short break to remind them that we were all just players. Also, in the clip it looked like my crew fired at you for no reason. Corey fired at me and I gave the order to return fire, but my crew missed and hit you. Unfortunately, he was walked off the plank, so don't worry.

SaltyScallywag's barges survived the entire encounter, and he claimed to have destroyed 29 battle barges and stolen three during the battle (despite the odds, the Colonials sent many ships on suicide missions to try to bring supplies to the trapped Silver Island.)

Two days later, the inevitable finally happened. Though outgunned and outgunned, the last of the Colonial defenders fell. Even the dead defenders stayed behind to watch the last few remaining defenders fight to the bitter end until Silver Island fell into the hands of the Warden. Their stalwart resistance against impossible odds led to frequent comparisons to Warhammer 40K's planet Cadia, which was ruined by Chaos but defended to the end, and the Colonials repeated incessantly the simple and inaccurate battle roar:

"The server was broken before the guards. Silver Stand."

The battle was won by the Wardens. However, the Foxhole war continues on the newly reset servers with the release of the latest update.