Minecraft Middle Earth

Minecraft Middle Earth

Minecraft Middle Earth, also known under the acronym ‘MCME’, was the direct result of my interest in servers and Minecraft.

In 2010 I discovered a videogame called Minecraft that allowed creating virtual worlds with the help of blocks, much like the Lego that most of us know from our childhoods. I started out as a moderator on the tweakers.net Minecraft server, which at that time was ran by Grum.

Because Tweakers is a very technology oriented community and because I always had an interest in IT and computers, I quickly grew interested in servers and the software people use to run these Minecraft servers.

Around September I ordered my first dedicated server. It came with Fedora, a Redhat based Linux distribution. Since I had no prior knowledge using Linux, it wasn’t easy to start but I quickly developed the necessary basic skills to operate the server. Since the server was very overqualified for the usual Minecraft server amongst friends, I started looking for a challenge – which I eventually found on a Minecraft forum. A handful of people got together there with an interest in recreating the world of Middle Earth (from Lord of The Rings) with Minecraft. The official launch of the server was around October 2010.

As of today I still do the technical aspects of operating the server. The servers are purposed for a very wide variety of things which I can’t possible all list, but some of them are:

• Forum software (install, upgrade, modifications)
  
• Data query scripts used for API calls
• Maintaining server (updates, configuration, disk usage, capacity, …)
• Software and security policies in place (Firewalling, user account control, …)
• File and web server (used for hosting images, videos and files)
• User support
  
• …much more!

The community has been a huge success, with many fans and people dedicating their talents and time towards the project.

The community has been featured many times in magazines and newspapers such as Kotaku, Destructoid, Techland Times, Der Spiegel, …

We also received an honorable mention in the Guiness Book for Minecraft 2016 for the largest built fantasy realm.
MCME has also been used for academical work, with people writing essays on the collaborative nature of the community and its way to achieve results and finish the building projects with people on the internet.