After some head scratching and discussions, we’ve re-opened donations!  I’ve been trying to not take your money without a good reason as to why I’m taking it, and apart from the 30-odd-hours I spent writing all the new backend stuff for Donations, we’ve also got a brand new cluster of servers.

Yes, I’ve been spending your money on Minecraft. I know you expect me to blow it all on Blackjack and Hookers, but it turns out, computers are EXPENSIVE.

Admittedly, we now do own a massively large amount of computing power.  About 200 CPU cores, and 700GB of RAM, spread out over 25 HP Blades.  This is all good, but this has now exposed my next issue – we don’t have enough fast storage!

So my next purchase is going to be 18 500G-ish SSDs, and 3 servers to put them in, to act as our new Swift storage cluster.  Oh, did I mention we’re also now running on OpenStack?

Yeah, we’re nerding it all up here.  Anyway. Enjoy! And feel free to hit that Donations link up there and throw a few dollars our way 😎

Edit: Some folks are having trouble connecting with mcau.org. If you are one of these folks try lobby.mcau.org instead.

It’s finally here – the 1.8 Map is launching TONIGHT!! What time tonight? 6:30pm AEST (server time).

What time is that for you? Glad you asked!

We’ve also updated the web map so you can get a sneak preview. http://maps.mcau.org/

See you tonight at 6:30PM!!!

A poll has recently been started on the survival server about whether or not there should be a new map for the 1.8 Minecraft release. Here is a post outlining important information and how to vote on this poll.

How to vote

• Run the command: /Poll Vote newmap
  This will display a list of options which you can vote for.
• Run the command: /Poll Vote newmap [Number]
  Please ensure [Number] is the number next to the item in the list you saw using the first command.

Points to remember

• There is currently no release date for 1.8
  As per usual.
  
• The current map has been up since the start of December 2013
  Wow, 8 months!
• There may be a possibility for builds to be copied across to a new map
  This will only occur if the build is of a very high quality (Slightly higher than D+) and you fill out this form correctly.
• Old maps are still visible from within the server.
  They are however in read-only mode.

There have been many questions from players in regards to the perks received by Donors. What’s going to happen? Well we have some answers.

Nothing.

There will be no changes to the donator perks at this stage. We may make some changes to Honeybadger due to the crafting changes in 1.8 but nothing related to anything else.

If you have questions please see your friendly in-game staff member or pop on to IRC.

We have our own personal postal service right here in MCAU. It is totally separate from standard in-game mail. You can send items safely to another player even if they are offline!

Click here for more information about it!