Hey! Chris from Minefold here. Why would HN readers love this? Well Feed the Beast is basically a programmable environment for Minecraft. It includes a mod called "Computer Craft"[1] which is <i>ridiculously</i> cool. As an extra bonus we've open sourced the funpack[2] that we use internally to run this mod configuration. Read into that what you will :)<p>[1]: <a href="http://www.computercraft.info" rel="nofollow">http://www.computercraft.info</a>
[2]: <a href="https://github.com/minefold/funpack-feed-the-beast-direwolf20" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/minefold/funpack-feed-the-beast-direwolf2...</a>
I used Minefold the other day and their trial experience was excellent. Even if you're just playing single player, having a server for a complicated mod pack like FTB is perfect, because you're offloading a lot of the world generation and various 'chunks' that you might want to keep loaded to a separate machine, freeing up the CPU to render your local environment.<p>I also recommend Direwolf20's excellent Let's Play series, where he's currently playing one of the FTB mod packs (curated by him): <a href="http://www.youtube.com/direwolf20" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/direwolf20</a>
This service is fantastic, and I've been using exactly this for about a week now with the Direwolf20 pack. I didn't really expect this going in (should have!), but my FPS shot up by offloading to a server. Easy invite of friends and family to play on your server. Amazingly reasonable prices.<p>They seem to spin up the servers from cold when somebody connects, which for FTB can take a bit of time. I don't know that I'd pay any more money for faster startup, but it is something I consider before starting MC.<p>A few minor problems that were completely a result of moving from my local Minecraft to minefold:<p>1) It took forever to upload my map. Nothing slow on their end, but when you have a map that's over 100MB, residential connections start to get sad. A time remaining on upload would be nice.<p>2) After the initial upload, the server wouldn't start. Minefold doesn't provide any logs (that I could find, at least) to help diagnose this. I ended up having to pull out a number of things related to Mo' Creatures, a third party mod not included in FTB.<p>Compounding this, Mystcraft got an update in the modpack at exactly the time I was uploading, so versions were mismatched between my local save files and the server's modpack version. I ended up needing to use an NBT editor to remove all kinds of references to dimensions that for whatever reason didn't play nice.<p>Having the server output logs available and having the ability to edit individual files in the save would have simplified this step.<p>3) I had gotten used to having Rei's Minimap display entity radar, but the modpack's SMP version doesn't support setting the MOTD the way it needs to be set to enable that. An easy way to install and configure additional mods on Minefold would be great here.<p>Huge supporter of these guys, they've turned playing Minecraft alone with fans blazing into a ridiculously easy social endeavor with slower fans.
If anyone enjoyed minecraft but doesn't play anymore, I've been trying out feed the beast this year and found it reinvigorated minecraft for me.<p>A couple of questions for Minefold:<p>1) How does the hourly pricing scheme work with things like chunkloaders?<p>2) Where are the servers located? I'm from Sydney so if it's not in Australia it's unlikely I'm going to move off my mac mini if they have to be hosted offshore.<p>EDIT: Clarifications.
Wow, love that YC is backing a game server startup. 1 suggestion, add in support for your slightly older brother coinbase and let me rent a tf2 or dayz server with bitcoin..... trust me. :)
This is only tangentially related to the article, but maybe someone can explain this YC alum trend to me. Why is it that the home link (and in many cases the logo as well) of blog.company.com link to the base blog.company.com.<p>I would assume the primary purpose of a company blog, technical or otherwise is to drive traffic to your main site. Without a clear link, i feel this is ill served.<p>What am i missing?
I think that a lot of gameserver admins recognize that for most of the day, their server runs empty, unless you're one of the top whatever percentage populated servers in your respective game. I'd be interested in seeing some statistics as to exactly how much people save from using a "pay-as-you-play" model from minefold.<p>nice site btw :P
I'm gonna check this out as soon as they support FTB Mindcrack. The added complexity from Gregtech really makes the game a lot richer, despite the problems I have with that mod.