This server started out with Ani and I.
A young(ish) couple living the modern gaming-life
Because we wanted to play together, but not hosting on our own machines, so we could also play independently. We then decided to perhaps let a few others on here to see if we like multiplayer in this game. The Forums are full of reports on how toxic this mp-environment is supposed to be… But you know people… and the internet… Your mileage might vary.
We’ve had a great two days, then the weekend came and we got totally raided, gutted and left in pieces. So we passworded it and made that password only available on a request basis. This worked OK, but the server went downhill whenever we hit the day 200 mark. Nobody came.
We then decided to make a steam group and post the password there. It went a bit better. Still left a lot to be desired for.
After looking for some nice mod to help us out in terms of keeping the peace, I fell in love with the Botman. It’s still in very active development and there’s days where it makes more trouble than I’d like, but still, I strongly believe it is the best tool out there at this time.
This allows us to integrate a lot of community features, like set villages, PvP zones, base-boundaries and a lot of other interesting stuff. Some teleportation (that still feels wrong to me though).
After being hit hard by some professional hacker, with paid hacks and everything, we have decided to instate a whitelist on the server for a while, so they can’t return. Players now have to join our Discord Channel to get whitelisted. It worked so well that we have decided to stick with it. We have stopped doing that:
This is now a bit outdated. We are using our own server-bot now, with a different set of features than the Botman. We run a whitelist with the bot itself, so it can manage players remotely. A new New Bot is in the works as well, I’ve learned too many things writing the old New Bot 🙂 Anyhow, Botman is history for us. With the all new and fresh python3 version of this bot, we are now ready to face the future!! It’s quite a versatile framework, even if i say so myself.
After growing and growing, with lots of new players, we had to take steps to keep this thing going.
We have severely upgraded the server, thanks to our faithful donators, and now host the bot ourselves as well. This Hexacore, 12GB RAM dedicated server is of course a tiny bit more expensive (but worth it!). So we now weigh in at $80 every month @ 24 player slots. There should be some room for more, but at this time we have to find ways to handle the massive influx of new players, around 300 new ones find their way each week. Raising the player-limit once more is not feasible at this time 🙂
That server went pretty fine, all in all. It did however went to its knees with 20+ players for some reason. The server should’ve been able to take it! Probably overbooked.
So we NOW rent a full root-server at a company that is hosting gameserver-resellers.
Weighing in at 64GB RAM and boasting an i7700 Ryzen 3600 and NVMe Storage, we are fine in that department now. It is slightly cheaper @ about $60 plus taxes, had a horrendous setup-fee though, so it balances out in the end ^^
This new server is still running fine, I’m already on the lookout for a new one. Will need much more donations for that though, those servers all have huge setup fees.
We are actively streamlining the procedures and rules to be able to provide a smooth gaming experience for all.
A donation will not guarantee more slots and it will not lead to preferred treatment. This is not a community driven server. It is and will stay anis and mine – no matter how much anyone donated. We do however have the community in mind in all our decisions.
Since the bot we are hosting provides us with some neat features, we are making use of it’s reserved slot system.
Admins and Mods have the right to a reserved slot. These can not be bought and will not be available for donators per default.
Donators do have some perks, for example the ability to protect a second base, shorter teleport cool-downs and a lax reserved slot. Lax in terms of, you have to share it with all other donators. So if 24 donators already play at the time, you can’t log in! And if an admin or mod decides to poke their head in, even a donator will be kicked. Mods and admins are just that important to keep the peace 🙂
Using our own bot now, this section has to change accordingly. For now we have some basic amenities, nothing more. Home commands, locations, teleporting, lobby and password system, crude hacker detection. Oh yes, a real time web-interface with visual representation of all the bots managed elements. Did i mention the dynamic whitelist? Have a look at the chrani-bots website
Donating will not automatically raise your in-game status, I will need your player-name to manually add you to the list of donors. Please state your player-name in the PayPal transaction so I can set you up!
So if you feel our work on this is worth something and you want to support us with the server cost: Hit ecv up on Ko-fi. We now have a Patreon Page if you want to help out on a regular basis. We don’t have a Patreon Page any longer, because Patreon support sucks bad and they don’t deserve a single cent of processing fees! We now have a Ko-fi page, which is heavenly, takes no fees and has no ads and is just perfect.
Again, you will not receive special treatment for donating per default *g*
Any surplus will be used for future months, if we get way too much, I don’t know, I’ll stop the donation drive I suppose; Unless you have other Ideas. If we decide to give this game up, we will use the remainder of the money to keep the server going until it is used up.
Thank you for being such great guys, I’m already sad the world is so freaking big. Made a few friends on here and met even more interesting people I’d soooooo love to meet 🙂 Oh well, perhaps the donations will go into the thousands of dollars so I can hop on a plane and come visit you ^^
Hit ecv up on PayPal or visit our Patreon Page if you want to help out on a regular basis.