I’ve got to restrain myself here, lest I pop a blood vessel, but Minefold.com is about as amazing a construct as Minecraft itself.

*pop*

Pete of Dragonchasers fame uncovered this and posted it to G+. I host a small server in my home for my daughter and her friends to play on, and it works well because we can re-build or trash the world as we see fit. We’re running Bukkit, and I’ve tried some mods but for the most part they’re content to just build their own little world. But the machine is ancient, and doesn’t run all that well. Plus keeping up with Bukkit updates when the client updates results in a flurry of “is the server updated yet” pestering. I looked into hosting, but the cost was either astronomical, or the procedures were very convoluted for hosting on something like Amazon’s EC platform.

So enter Minefold, the best idea I never thought of. It uses Amazon’s system, and has a fully functional world management front end. You sign up (using your Minecraft username so it recognizes you as the account holder) and can create a new world or upload your own (MCEdit fans). You can run it peaceful or with enemies, on survival or creative. Once it’s live, you can invite friends and play on a nice, hosted Minecraft world.

“Hold the phone!” you say, if people actually still said that. “How can this be? And why I am talking to a blog?” Well, here’s the catch(s).

  1. All accounts have one world, so make it count.
  2. A free account can play for 10 hours per month. So make those count.
  3. You can be a “pro” member for $5 per month, billed in three different, three month increments (three, six, or twelve months).
  4. Pro members can play for unlimited time, and can be members of unlimited worlds.
  5. Each pro member pays only for himself. You don’t need to collect money from leeches to pay for your hosting.

Once you’re a member of any stripe, you can petition a world to become a member. How do you find worlds? With their handy-dandy MF’n ass-kickin’ world browser, that’s how! If you’re in a creative funk, you can even find a super sweet world (might I suggest…) and clone it to your account. Aquila is just begging for iConomy…

…but the downside is that they’re using the Notchian server – so there’s no plugins at this time. They claim that they will be supporting Bukkit, and with the Bukkit development going over to Mojang, I would expect this to open up a lot of possibilities in the future. The only other downside (although it’s like complaining that your caviar is too…caviar-y) is that I’ll need to pay $30 for my account, and for my daughter. But that’s $10 per month, technically…I spend more on a single MMO, so my bitching is purely academic.

I stopped working with Minecraft a while ago, but having this opportunity to create a world and to have other people in it for a low, low fee is really a no-brainer. Even for the ultra-casual, a free account can mean that someone can jump in and test out the service and any worlds of friends to see if they want to commit to a full subscription. I think this is a great deal, and I hope things pan out for Minefold.