Category: AquaNu

24Oct

Just Checking In

Posted in AquaNu, extra life | Leave a comment

Hey everyone, how you been? Is 2020 over yet? No? Well I guess I’m back anyway for a bit, not in any official capacity really, just seeing how things are going since I gave Facebook the old heave-ho 5 months ago.

I have to say (a bit ironically I confess) that everyone should consider a hiatus like this from social media, or at the very least Facebook. I know it sounds counter-productive for me to suggest, seeing as how all of you are on there by virtue of it being a rule for server access, but I’m honestly not sure I could’ve handled the last few months without the break. I commend all of you that are still trucking.

Speaking of “all of you”, I see we have some new faces around here, which is great and certainly proof enough to me that handing the reins off to BBC and Moo was a good decision. We can’t thank them enough for picking up the slack, and if nothing else this has demonstrated that it’s OK to put more control of SomeAwesome into the hands of the community. This server has needed fresh blood and fresh eyes for quite some time, we couldn’t be happier with the way it’s turned out.

So like I said above, I’m not really here to throw myself back into Minecraft in any official capacity, but wanted to give you a heads up on some things related to SA and the upcoming Extra Life event, which your team captain Amz has been handling beautifully as well. Thanks Amz!

CLICK THIS LINK TO SIGN UP FOR THE EXTRA LIFE SKYBLOCK CHALLENGE!

AquaNu Flash Drives

In an effort to help the SA team during Extra Life, we will be offering to send out a flash drive with AquaNu on it for a $20 donation made to the SAMC Team Profile during the event. This price includes the drive (which is 64gb now since AquaNu is so freaking big), some SA stickers, shipping, and also copies of the Rush Map and the completed Extra Life Challenge Map.

Once Extra Life is over, the drives will also be available for the same price in the SAMC store, so if you can’t afford one during the event, don’t worry, you’ll still be able to get one eventually.

Some team members are offering great bonuses for donations made to their profiles too so make sure to check out everyone on the team!

Extra Life Twitch Schedule

We will be broadcasting the challenge map on the Twitch channel several times throughout the 24 hours of the event, but between those check-ins we will be streaming a variety of other games as well, including Ark: Survival Evolved, Raft, Phasmophobia, Cuphead, Rocket League, Among Us and yes as per usual, my yearly wee-hours dip into Space Channel 5. More details on full game list and times will be released closer to the event.

What’s Next?

Ultimately, the goal is to dig in my heels over at SomeAwesome.com and focus on getting it off the ground, so my focus needs to be there for a while. In that regard, I will be “available” once again but I have no plans to micromanage what’s happening in the Minecraft group or on the server. I’m convinced that we’ve left it in good hands, and with any luck over at the main site we can each benefit from a rising tide to lift all boats. In the meantime however, I hope you’ll join our team this year for Extra Life, and I raise my cup in reverence to you fine folks.

See you soon!
~Serverus

11Apr

Easter 2020

Posted in AquaNu, Holidays | Leave a comment

It’s April already, and time for Easter! I know, I can’t believe it either. Between schooling-at-home and a total lack of routine I hardly know what day it is anymore.  Even though we’ve continued holidays on the server, I haven’t been posting about them on the site so let’s try to get back into a routine.

If you’ve never participated in an Egg hunt before let me explain how it works. Back when we started this event years ago, Minecraft didn’t have colored eggs, or even colored egg (head) blocks.  However, player head blocks were available so we hid those instead. Everyone seemed to enjoy their collection of player heads either for personal collections or for trading like Pokemon cards, the event has always been a fun success!

The admins have designated an area for the event and hidden the “eggs” all around the island for players to find. The command block will be open during our Monday night stream. In the meantime, the holiday area is open! Come visit the Easter Bunny and be sure to bring him carrots for trading (although there are some available).

And don’t forget to take your picture with the Easter Bunny! Post your screenshots in the group for our memory album!

On an additional note, we know everyone is going through so much lately. We hope all of our friends and neighbors are staying healthy and safe! We’re all in this together! If you’re having a hard time staying entertained with Minecraft, don’t forget to join our 7 Days to Die or Animal Crossing: New Horizons groups if you’re looking for new games to occupy your time.  They’ve been saving my sanity through all this isolation. Hopefully they’ll do the same for you!

05Apr

7 Years Ago Tomorrow

Posted in AquaNu, Game Nights, Servers, Some Awesome | Leave a comment

Our First Hunger Games

Ho Ho. Hey Hey. It’s Our Anniversa-ray

There are days when it doesn’t seem so long ago, hosting this server out of our house, on a dedicated Linux box in the living room, connected directly to the router so it would get the best connection possible to the outside world. Then the horse update came out and it potatoed that box to high heaven, forcing us to switch over to third-party hosting.

The rest is history.

Tomorrow we celebrate lucky number 7. I’m not sure 2020 is quite up to snuff for that label just yet, but what I think we CAN say we’ve been lucky to have is an excellent community, and we hope to have that for many more years to come. So thank you for that. We know this time is tumultuous for everyone, it’s nice to have fine folks like you all around to weather it with. Alright, let’s get into the nitty gritty.

Patreon Updates

I posted in the Facebook group about this but wanted to extrapolate on it here a bit just so everyone knows what they should expect. Basically, we’ve paused the pledge processing on Patreon for April and May, and will more than likely extend that through the summer months, if current models portend.

Rather than strip people of their perks, we’re doubling down on them, giving /fly to current Awesome Tier patrons, and bumping up all other current patrons to Awesome Tier, which means you will get an April lootbox, 10,000 points on SomeAwesome.com, superpickaxe, infinite fireballs (don’t hold one while you’re opening a chest), no-cost /repair including /repair all, full backpack rows, and some things I’m probably forgetting. I know, it’s too OP. That’s just how we’re rolling for now. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

On top of that, if you’ve ever been a patron in the past but had to cancel, we’re restoring you at whatever highest tier you had previously. All this will continue for the duration of this…craziness.

In an effort to mitigate the cost a little, I’ll be moving AquaNu over to what’s called a “Spot Request” on Amazon Web services. It allows us to cut costs by bidding on server capacity, which means there is a chance that we’ll occasionally get outbid and AquaNu will temporarily go offline, but I’ve gotten pretty good at balancing uptime against reasonable bid prices on the Rush Map, so it should be infrequent. I hope so anyway, I probably just jinxed myself. Either way we can save like $75 a month doing it so we’re giving it a go.

4/20 Steam Run Guy

We’re overdue for one anyway, but this will take place on Monday, April 20th, during the stream, with another one on Saturday, April 25th at 3pm EST. All players are welcome to both events, no signing up necessary, showing up will do just fine.

As per usual, both runs will be populated with over 60 Steam keys each, inside a play area riddled with goodies. Also a play area riddled with traps, mobs, maybe even an Akumo Maze, who knows? There will be plenty of floor cake to celebrate the anniversary ?

Superpickaxe and Fireballs will not be on that day. You had to know that was coming.

Easter Head Hunt

Celebrate Easter with us since you’re not doing it anywhere else! You are hereby invited to next Sunday, April 12th, at noon EST in the holiday area. We’ll also have one the following night for the Twitch stream. I guarantee you it will be better than Animal Crossing’s Easter Event ?

Quick Notes

  • Rush Map is updated to latest snapshot 20w14a
  • We’ve changed the FB group from Secret to Private
  • Command of the Whatever is /workbench and /enderchest
  • Lucky Blocks will be turned off tonight, so use what you’ve got
  • I farted. Sorry. I had tacos.

 

29Jul

SAMCity + August Updates

Posted in AquaNu | Leave a comment

I’M THE MAP!

A few days ago a handful of you guys were discussing the options behind getting some sort of map system drawn up. Truth be told, for a long time now I’ve had my eye on Dynmap as a fun little aside for us to play around with, but for many years it just wasn’t feasible with our hosting plan, or the timing just wasn’t right, or some other convenient obstacle for me to make an excuse out of. But with me already having to make a copy to test 1.14.4 and experimental WorldGuard builds, I took a page out of Ol’ Jack Burton’s playbook and said “What the Hell”.

So here we are, it isn’t much yet, the process is a little clunky (I’m open to suggestions if any of you have used Dynmap before) and it seems to take an awfully long time when I can tell it’s working at all (the plugin is still heavily in development for 1.14) but it’s pretty cute and it has a lot of useful features and it LOOKS LIKE SIMCITY so I kind of had to roll with it. I’ll keep you posted as when I feel it’s really in the stages for public consumption.

WE NEED TESTERS!

Speaking of public consumption, we’ve got that copy up over at test.smaws.me and we need testers to check out plugin compatibility, especially for WorldGuard. So if you have a property or two that’s deep in the WG biz-nass, we need your feedback!

Other plugins we will need some detective work on are the following:

  • BottledExp
  • MoarBows (that Void Bow in particular)
  • Backpacks
  • Item Recycler
  • FlightPlus

That’s right, the new TimedFly is called FlightPlus and it is better than ever! Use /flight to bring up the menu to purchase time in chunks of 3 or 8 hours. While we’re looking to just test out the basic flight functionality at the moment, we’ll have more announcements to make with this little plugin later on.

FAR LANDS COMMAND BLOCK

If you’re still looking for new digs on a second claim, you’re now in luck with a quick teleport out to 300k, 300k to speed up your research and development time. Can be found on the Community CB floor in the Command Tower, please try to venture out a bit from the teleport destination point so you’re not cramming up against anyone else please!

PATREON CHANGES FOR AUGUST

We’re making some slight changes to Patreon based mostly on what we’ve found are less-than-sustainable rewards (which is a fancy way of saying I’m lazy) but the changes are mostly just good for you so let’s just jump into it.

  • Tier points are now 300 (Standard), 2000 (Silver), 5000 (Gold) and 10000 (Awesome) which are all increases over the previous amount (except Standard) because I hate doing math and adding points to your totals makes me break out the calculator sometimes, not because I can’t do the addition in my head but because after doing this for 20 people my mind is done with math for the day ?
  • Command Zone is now available for all Patrons (previously was Silver and up)
  • The newsletter that we never seem to send (because people rightfully complained that patrons got critical news before they did) is being replaced by Patron Posts. From now on, if I need to pass on information related to your tier or higher, it will be done in tier-locked posts on the Patreon page.
  • Player Heads will be removed except for Awesome Tier. This was just too difficult to keep up with.

Aside from this, everything else stays mostly the same, although we’ve added a lot of great benefits to most of the tiers since we started. We’ll be creating a reference page for this in the Facebook group soon so you can keep track of all the goodies you are eligible for.

As per usual, you’ve got a couple days left if you need to change your Patreon pledge or you want to upgrade your tier for August. We’ve got a previous secret beta coming back into play for next month and there are only 3 spots left for Awesome Tier available so get yours while you can!

OTHER THINGS!

Here’s some other things that you may not care about, that’s why they’re at the end of the article!

  • Command of the Week is Marriage Master (starting tonight on restart)
  • Steam Run video highlight reel is in the making
  • Kumo’s Redeemer (from the Steam Run Kumo Maze) is now available in the Serverus Shack!
  • Each player has been given $100,000 on the test server so go ahead and get your Brewster’s Millions on!

14Feb

Happy Valentine’s Day

Posted in AquaNu, Features, Holidays | 1 Comment

Happy love day everyone! We’ve got such a wonderful group and family here among us, we just wanted to show you all how much we love you. Come visit our very special LOVE inspired holiday area, built by our beloved blackbird_cloud. Take a ride down our river of love, just watch out for Cupid’s arrows 😉

Visit our holiday villager for some holiday souvenirs (don’t forget your bottles of XP).

Take a moment to leave a love note for your special someone on our Dedication Wall.

Just our little way to show you how much we love and appreciate all of you! Thank you for all the years of support and encouragement. We love our Minecraft family!