Hey!
This is a rather different post than the sorts of things we do on this blog. A lot of times we talk about new games, new things coming to Minecraft. We never thought we would actually do a serious blog post… However, we cannot deny that over the past few months of building this we have been very lucky to pull some decent viewership on our blog, reaching 50,000-100,000+ people an article in some cases, and so staying silent didn’t feel right.
Podcrash also operates a lot of gaming communities, and as countries prepare for more and more isolation and containment we want to do our best to provide a safe space for you and friends to play games and communicate without putting yourself or others around you at risk. We have therefore started upgrading our services, and opening new opportunities for you to continue playing.
Online Servers
Podcrash gamemodes are still relatively popular, we see around 1000 downloads a day on old and new maps for Java edition Minecraft. We know that as more and more people become isolated it will become harder to spend time with friends and family. We are opening our game servers to everyone, and encourage you to hop online to our free java server to play a rotation of Cops and Robbers maps, if you want to change it for another map, jump in our discord and one of our team will come help swap it over. You can get the server IP from our discord
If you don’t want to play on our servers, or don’t fancy playing Cops and Robbers, we recommend checking out StickyPiston Hosting’s trial service that offers a collection of some of the best maps new and old (including ours) you can view all available maps here
Podcrash+
We are aware that both Mineplex and Hypixel are preparing for larger than normal traffic surges throughout the coming days and weeks, and we are aware that a lot of players enjoy using Podcrash+ to add to their game experience on those servers. Podcrash+ is a free mod and our servers that authenticate the user and help provide a lot of the functionality you use and enjoy on the mod is provided completely for free by us. We are unfortunately preparing for the worse and we expect that during this period our servers will face some severe performance issues at peak times.
In an attempt to help this, we are building emergency protocols into our workflow, as of today we are increasing the player limit our server can handle at any one point, although this will come at the cost of a loss of some features and service for our Discord bot, so if you notice a player struggling with a question, please help our teams and help them by finding the answer. If you aren’t sure then direct them to staff.
Podcrash Status will also be monitoring all services at a 1-minute interval and if it notices any issues our development teams will be notified to step in and attempt to mitigate the issues before it becomes severe. Alongside this we are building more internal monitoring tools and looking into how we can optimize our server performance with short term fixes before the full relaunch later this year.
If you need help, think there are issues or want to keep updated with Podcrash+ make sure to join their discord
What can I do to help?
The truth is, we are a community of young people, and, barring any underlying health issues, we are classed as one of the lowest at-risk groups, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be careful, listen to your local authorities advice and make sensible decisions and choices with that information. As gamers, there are a bunch of causes you can join in on at no cost to you, for example, Folding@Home is an international network that you can link your gaming PC up to, and help provide some processing power to a global network available to organisations currently trying to find answers to the COVID-19 virus. GPU’s are particularly good at doing this, who said gaming never helped! If you want to read more about how Folding@Home works, and what they are doing, you can find it on Reddit and if you want to get started straight away then you can download Folding@Home from their website
From everyone at Podcrash, we wish you and your families the best, and we hope you stay safe in these trying times.
