Just a quick update to say we’re running 1.10.2 now. The issue with signs being blanked on this version has been fixed.

We’ve brought back mcMMO for 1.9 to the survival server, with one small change: To activate any mcMMO ability, you will now need to sneak and right-click (whereas previously, you would have only right-clicked). You don’t need to sneak while you use the ability, just to activate it.

This was changed so as not to interfere with new 1.9 right-click abilities, and will also mean less chat spam for accidental right-clicks. For more information about mcMMO, visit their wiki page here.

Banner sourced from https://www.spigotmc.org/resources/mcmmo.2445/

We’ve all been hard at work getting the server ready for 1.9, and it’s finally here!

You will be able to enjoy all the two-handed fist-waggling and methodical sword-swinging your heart desires this Saturday Night (9/4/16) at 7PM GMT+10, when we update the server to Minecraft 1.9.2!

As you may have heard, we will not be resetting the Overworld, but we will be resetting the End to take advantage of all the new 1.9 features – and, to celebrate, we’ll be slaying the Ender Dragon as a group!

We’ll need to briefly shut down the server to set everything up first (you can hang out with us on IRC while it’s down); this should only take a few minutes.

So this Saturday night, craft yourself a shield, head to /warp dragonFight, and let’s slay some Ender Dragon! With both hands!

Last weekend, I spent 48 hours rebuilding and moving all the backend infrastructure around.  All that happened was a very short outage while we finished moving everything around between instances, but what this MEANS is that now things are faster, better, and more reliable!

If you’re not a nerd, feel free to ignore the rest of this post. However, for the nerds, this is what we’ve done:

• We now have a multi-master database cluster, with a load balancer and floating IP address to ensure that we have zero database downtime
• We’ve split out all our worlds into separate instances. This means if a server needs a reboot, we can reboot the entire instance that the world is on, without having any effect on any other worlds!
• Dedicated t2.medium instance that runs map rendering.  This means we can start rendering the OTHER worlds on maps.mcau.org
• The ability to easily and automatically create and destroy servers and worlds on demand.
• Other cool nerdy things (ansible! redis! memcache!)

What this means for you is that things will be faster, better, and more reliable. What this means for US is that we’ll be able to do cooler things, easier, and faster!