The Tunnel
Season 3The Tunnel was a puzzle created by 
DaMarine and 
MCfineplayer for Season 3. Designed around uncovering the mystery of a tunnel that existed outside of time and space, the puzzle was implemented using datapacks and served as a spiritual sequel to “The Disc” puzzle in Season 2, once again requiring collaboration by the Slabserver community in order to solve.
Development
On September 23rd 2017, reddit user /u/ebennet365 posted in a /r/minecraft thread titled “Black concrete is amazing for creating the illusion of emptiness.”. In this thread, they described an idea:
In some games when you go to the edge of a map out of bounds the map textures will just stop.why not do this in minecraft maps.
And attached an example image. DaMarine was inspired by their post and later described his thought process in that moment:
“I’ll never remember what, in that moment, made me know I had to load up Minecraft and recreate this tunnel, but I did. I had to imagine what was behind the door. My imagination didn’t take me very far, as the new corridor looked too similar to the first. I later realised it was perfect. This became a simple idea - two connected tunnels: one of the present, one of the future, and the future becomes the present every time you left and re-entered. From this concept I started developing an adventure map to eventually release to the Minecraft community.”
Despite DaMarine enjoying the early stages of development, the concept didn’t develop particularly far, as the scope of the project rapidly grew due to the increasing number of branching paths in the adventure map. The project was revisited on several occasions, but didn’t make any further progress, and was indefinitely shelved at the time.
Around a month before Season 3 was announced, DaMarine began to seek out ideas for another community puzzle, and found themselves led back to the idea of The Tunnel, drawn by their love for the slow realisation of what the player was seeing, and it feeling like the perfect mystery that the Etho community could explore together.
Sequel
On the 23rd of August 2024, DaMarine announced that a third and final puzzle had been secretly in development for Season 4 since March 2020. The third puzzle concludes the unofficial trilogy of community puzzles, and released on April 4th, 2025, its name finally revealed as “The Passage”.