A Family Friendly Minecraft Server
Happy Valentine’s Day to everyone we love in Minecraft! We have a really fun themed holiday area for you to celebrate. Come check out, the Portal of Love!
Make your way through the maze of portals to visit GLaDOS inside the companion cube. While there pick up some holiday fun stuff, and your special edition holiday map!
Just another fun way for us to show you how much we love you all!
In a little less than 2 months, we will celebrate our 5th year running. We’ve had a lot of people come and go, an infinite amount of fun, and our fair share of drama 🙂
You can say many things about this group, but “boring” is not one of them.
We’ve stayed a fairly small circle of like-minded folks over the last few years, and while I love that, it’s safe to say that if we want to grow, we’ve got to do some housekeeping first. We have changes ranging all across the spectrum of human emotions to be made, so let’s just dig into it.
First, the happy news…
First and foremost, I want to thank everyone who helped with Beta testing. Your feedback has been extremely helpful. In fact the feature we just pushed out is based on the feedback I got from a lot of you.
One of the things I heard the most from people is that they would prefer to earn points by reviewing games they already had in their Steam library. This kind of went against the initial idea of only reviewing games that had keys available, but who am I to argue with the users! So with the latest release, you can connect your Steam account directly to your SA account and start earning points by reviewing games you’ve already spent a good chunk of time on.
Plus you automatically earn an extra 2000 points just by connecting your Steam account.
Furthermore, I’m working on a prototype section of the site just for people who play on the server. When I’m finished, you’ll be able to use your points to gain things in game, including:
On top of that, we’ll be offering command permissions, including /repair, /home and Treefeller, that you can redeem with points as well.
If you weren’t part of the initial testing group, that’s no problem at all. Starting today we’re opening up registration to whitelisted users only. If you’re interested in getting free Steam games of your choice, or you just want to get in-game goodies (hopefully starting in a week or two) then sign up here and make sure you fill in your Minecraft username in the appropriate field.
And now, the sad news…
We’ve had Main since the beginning. Even before the beginning, really. At first it was just our family LAN server world. But when we opened it up for the first time on April 6th, 2013, it became all of yours too. Many of us feel like we’ve got a lifetime of memories that exist only there.
To be honest, this call has been in the pipes for a long time. It never felt like the right time to do it. Technically it doesn’t feel like it now either, but we know we need to do it.
I’m hoping that this archiving (I don’t like to call it “shutting down”) of Main will be temporary. I honestly do. But it has to be done for a few reasons (more than just money)
OK yes one of the reasons is money, but I only bring it up first because I want you all to understand what I mean by that, and why it’s not the most important reason here.
For starters, we’ve been with Fragnet for 4 years now, and quite frankly we’ve outgrown them.
Literally, I mean. Our world size exceeds their limits at the rate plan we’re on. It’s 30GB.
Each server is $40 per month. It’s not that we can’t afford that, but the reality is, with the amount of players we have split between both servers, combined with the ambitions 😉 of those players, it makes more sense to put everyone on a single server that can deliver the kind of stability and flexibility that we need. And in order to do that, we have to move to Amazon Web Services.
Mind you, with AWS, we can do a lot more, and I won’t be breathing down your necks all the time like a tech-fueled raging deity. Mostly anyway.
The proof is kind of in the pudding here. The more we split players across both servers, the less people are playing together. It’s easier to attract and retain new players with the combined headcount. So my hope is that, once we hit a decent rate of concurrent players, we can reopen Main, also on an AWS server.
Let me be clear here that I’m not pointing fingers. If anything, the fault is on this side of the table. We put a lot of things on the back burner because Life Happens and all, but we could have made a better effort to provide a more consistent schedule of events for you guys, and that’s on us. Again, the hope is to kickstart things back up with Some Awesome and inextricably link it to the success of the Minecraft server. But it has to be done in a way that we don’t sacrifice the high quality of the player base we’ve all grown used to. Therein lies the challenge. So it goes.
A couple months ago, we had a griefer. This was no ordinary griefer either, this was a hacking griefer taking advantage of a security flaw in 1.12.1. He was on Main. It was not great.
By some stroke of luck, one of his TNT towers was triggered and thus we were alerted to it. Because of the size of the worlds, I’m only given a single backup that rotates out once a day. In other words, I only have 24 hours of crisis management at my disposal. I try to download backups every once in a while too but they’re huge so it’s not ideal. Anyway, the point is we caught it, banned him, saw where he went, reversed the damage and made everything alright again, but we got lucky.
With AWS I can automate backups without worrying about size limitations, so that’s good, but more to the point is that it takes us twice as much effort to police both servers. Since Nunu is where the majority of the people play, we often forget to poke our heads in on Main to see if anything is up. Taking Main down for now helps us solve that problem for now too.
I’m not taking it down tomorrow or anything, so don’t panic. The plan is to have one last day with it on April 6th, 2018, and then we say our goodbyes, if just for now.
In the meantime, please take pictures. If you have pictures of old times, those would be great too, please dig those up. On the anniversary, we’ll be having a huge DefenderCraft event over on Main (details forthcoming), and afterwords we’ll be streaming a slideshow of everyone’s images while we hang out in the Discord channel and talk about old times.
If we’re going to send Main off properly, I’d appreciate if we can do it together.
Any questions feel free to post in the group or message me privately on Facebook if you prefer.
Thanks,
~Serverus
The costumes are put away and the turkey has been eaten so that means it’s time for one of our favorite holidays on the server, Christmas! It’s actually time for a lot of winter holidays, and we have treats for all!
Join us on Dec 12th as we light the menorah for the first night of Hanukkah. Remember to get your holiday gift for each day.
Have a blessed Yule on Dec 21st as we celebrate the winter solstice together.
Kwanzaa begins on Dec 26th where we will begin lighting the candles of the kinara in celebration of family and the first harvests.
We’re not even done! Join us in our first snowman building contest! Pick a plot and get creative! Builds will be voted on by fellow players and announced after Christmas.
But the big holiday on the server has always been Christmas and we have a lot going on!
Stop by the fireplace to hang your Christmas stocking. Grab one from one of the command blocks in red or green and name it using the anvils provided. Using an item frame hang them up around the fireplace and on Christmas day you will be able to trade your stocking in for a special wish item which could be anything including an extra backpack row, a set of command blocks, or a set of power tools.
Don’t forget to stop by and have your picture taken with Santa!
Be sure to sign up for Secret Santa! Drop your name into the hopper and receive an entry for another member who you get to spoil with holiday cheer!
While you’re there, take a special trip into Christmas town, a beautiful town full of Christmas spirit! Originally this was a build on Main made by a few players who were in the holiday spirit, but the Minecraft biome update changed their once festive winter wonderland into rainy disappointment. Obviously their spirits were crushed and it never got to live up to it’s potential. We’re happy to say we have recreated it on NuNu and with the help of original creator qkat19 there are even some new additions! Come see Santa’s workshop, the ice castle, have a snowball fight, and so much more!
Back at the holiday area be sure to visit Santa and his elf for some Christmas goodies, and as with all the holidays this season, don’t forget to pick up your special edition holiday maps and banners!
It’s a good time of year to let you all know how much we love and appreciate you and all you do for the server. From your beautiful builds, to your friendly greetings, and neighborly attitudes, it is always a pleasure seeing you on and knowing all the wonderful friendships that have been made here. Happy holidays everyone!
When we left Gaming Mommies nearly 2 years ago, it was a tough time, brought forth under less-than-ideal circumstances. It was a time filled with a lot of unpleasant feelings, piled on top of a determination that we could build our own online presence, even if we didn’t really know what the purpose of that presence was yet.
Out of that slag came Some Awesome. For many reasons that I won’t go into here, we quickly realized that it wasn’t going to work, and we shelved the main site. Suffice it to say, you can’t build something positive on the backs of anger and grief. And so it goes.
We knew there was something special there though. So for the last year, I’ve been steadily refining the concept for the site, and then building it. I’m proud to say that we’re now very close to release, but we need your help.
The simplest way to explain the new site, is as a place where one can go to earn free games by writing game reviews. Authors start with 10,000 points, and can use those points to redeem games (games cost anywhere from 100 to several thousand points) via Steam key. After they play those games, they come back to site to review them, and those reviews earn them more points they can use to redeem more games.
The site is built around a system that automates the majority of this process, outside a simple moderation route that I currently run myself, to make sure you aren’t just writing the word poop 100 times and trying to publish it 😉 We have no intention to alter tone or beat you over the head with an Oxford comma. We just need to make sure basic guidelines are met.
You can read more about How It Works on the site itself.
What I need right now is testers. Specifically, people to test the redemption/review loop, point out inconsistencies, and just try to break the site in general. We’re calling this phase a Closed Beta, and the plan is to launch Open Beta on the New Year’s Day, at which point, anyone who has published a review will receive 2 invites to send to people they know who might be interested.
You can fill out the form at the end of this article to sign up for authorship, and I’ll be taking people in groups of 3 at a time, in order to allow myself enough focus for any issues arising from each group. In other words, if you’re not immediately contacted after signing up, please don’t take it personally. It’s just easier for me to manage this way.
Many of you have expressed a desire to donate to the server, and this is a good way to do so. In return, you get some free games, and once the site takes off, it results in more players for the server, since we’ll be regularly cross-promoting. Really it’s a win-win for everyone here.
I’ll be picking the first group on December 1st, which is the first day of Closed Beta, but please feel free to submit your signup below as soon as you want. I’ll pick a new group every Friday to add to the existing authors.
I’ve worked very hard on this for the last year and I really believe in it. I hope you can help me out and have a little fun along the way too. 🙂
Thanks,
 ~Serverus
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Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
To show you how thankful we are for all of you be sure to stop by the holiday area this weekend to pick up some souvenirs from our Pilgrim. She’ll be serving a holiday feast and a couple extra collectibles. Â
Also, be sure to grab your holiday collectors map courtesy of our Crazy Map ladies.
…and you Thanksgiving banners.
Have a happy holiday everyone! After you stuff your faces with an awesome holiday meal, and then blow all your savings on Black Friday, don’t forget to join us Saturday, November 25th for our latest Steam Run. Nothing curses buyers remorse better than getting free stuff! There will be plenty of ores, game keys, gift cards, and in-game items up for grabs!
It’s high past time for another Steam Run don’t ya think? After you’ve stuffed yourself silly for Thanksgiving and then emptied your wallet on Black Friday, we think it would do you good to sit back, relax, and feverishly break blocks looking for chests with free games in them. Right? Good times.
Steam Run January 2017
Once again, we have slated over 60 games to find in a custom built zone (no wandering out of the prize area inadvertently anymore) as well as our standard loot: elytra, shulker boxes, power tools and the rest of the good stuff. Maybe this year I’ll actually note down the coords so I can have a definitive answer for you as to whether all the games have been found. 😉 And for the first time, we’ll be having this little picnic on Nunu.
We’ll be using this opportunity (since the Steam Run is a popular event) to make a couple of major announcements as well, so if you want to know what the future of Some Awesome has in store for it, be in the Discord voice channel when we play (or at least be watching on Twitch since we’ll be streaming it too).
We’ll be starting at 7pm EST as this seems like a good enough time for everyone to join, from the west coast to our UK people and everyone in between. If you’re on at that time, be prepared to participate, since we’ll be teleporting everyone on the server in one fell swoop (no need for a meeting place) right before the start.
If you have any questions, feel free to throw them in the thread where we post the link to this article.
See you guys soon!
~Serverus