2025 Post NerdNu Fundraiser Update

Another year and another NerdNu Fundraiser is behind us! Nerd.nu was founded on the concept of fair play and the idea that when it comes to gaming, everyone should start with equal footing — and after sixteen years of operation, we haven't strayed from these important values. Many online gaming services allow users to pay for in-game perks or specialized access, but here at Nerd, we firmly believe that money should be given not for the in-game rewards it might bring, but as a way of showing your appreciation for and supporting the costs of the services we provide. As one of the oldest continuously-running Minecraft servers online, NerdNu prides itself on being funded entirely by donations from players, both former and current alike.

Our Appreciation

We'd like to give an extra-special thank you to:

• PPGOME, for finding and wrangling BattleArena, ArenaCTF, HubParkour, and many other plugins to fit our needs, and putting up with faz's constant "fixitfixitfixit" requests. He also custom-coded a new feature for the EasySigns plugin that made all of the "Pay Here" signs possible.

• Oxion_, for launching the servers Friday night and keeping them up all weekend!

• pez252, for finding and slaying a potentially game-breaking plugin interaction

• Deaygo, for his work on the nerd.nu donation site and in-game announcements.

• defiex, for her tireless advertising and getting the word out.

• marting11, for designing promotional images for CTF and all our minigames.

• Spook6, for making amazing promotional videos.

• Bardidley, who created the absolutely Gorge-ous CTF map.

• CARnivore_nds, for his input on the Flag Capture Zones.

• Andromeda4210, who set up the smash hit Mining minigame. He also gathered builders for our other games, such as:

• ghrey303, for bringing back (and carefully testing!) 7 of his parkour courses from previous revs.

• Za_Zaa, for building the beautiful ice boat track.

• iceberg76, for his Flop arena (and secret 8th parkour!).

• fluffhead555, who built our Thimble arena.

• All of the other staff who helped us test out the plugins in advance: Bluuefuzzy, buzzie71, CaptainWolfgang, cujobear, iNerd71, rukEEEa, TemporarilyAlive, ToddChavay, & many more (who’s names defi has likely missed, but we love you and appreciate you!)

And most importantly, all of YOU! Not just for your generous donations, but for continuing to play here and make this community what it is. The list of contributors can be found at http://nerd.nu/donate. If you wish to chip in, it's not too late; you may do so on the same page! Please note that any contributions at this time will go directly to NerdNu and will not be split with Child's Play.

Costs to NerdNu

Our goal at nerd.nu is to provide a high-quality multiplayer gaming experience embedded in a genuine, friendly community. However, hosting the servers needed to provide you with this experience is not cheap. We are currently spending $210 per month for a cost of $2,522 annually.

This includes the following costs:

• Forums: $80 per year

• Domain: $90 per year

• Email: $24 per year

• Servers: $2,328 per year

During the weekend of the 2025 Fundraiser we raised a total of $7,257.20! $3,347.13 stays with NerdNu and we donated $3,628.60 to Child's Play with Paypal taking $281.47 in fees. After the contribution to Child's Play on February 28, 2025 of $3,628.60, an additional donation of $420.69 was made which brought the grand total of funds raised to $7,677.89 as of March 9, 2025 which means we reached our 2025 Goal!

With the additional donation, our NerdNu coffers are now sitting at $5,665.29 which leaves us well funded for the next two years of costs. The additional balance is thanks to Pez & Merp who have been paying the expenses out-of-pocket over the past two years.

We are aware that the Donation Page is currently showing different numbers than above and we are working to correct the page to show the "post-fundraiser page". You are still able to donate, but please be aware that any donations made will go directly to NerdNu and not be split with Child's Play.

Your thoughts

Now that this year's fundraiser has come to a close, we'd like to hear your feedback. What did you like? What did you not like?

We would also like your help with next year's fundraiser! Historically, we've always given to Child's Play and always gone half & half with the donations. We've received requests from players that wish to donate only to NerdNu with their portions not being split between the server and charity. Please take a moment to look at the attached poll and give us your thoughts!

Fundraiser Poll & questionnaire

Share & follow

For any inquiries, please contact one of the head admins: Andromeda4210, defiex, fazaden, & pez252

Instagram website YouTube Bluesky Discord

Posted by defiex on March 9, 2025 in Head Admin News

2021 Fundraiser Skyscraper Build!

It's that time of year again: Summer (or Winter, depending on where you are) is drawing to a close, the temperature is falling (or rising), and nighttime is stretching a few minutes longer (or shorter) every day. That's right, it's time to prepare for Nerd.Nu's 2021 Annual Semi-Charity Fundraiser! Just like last year, we'll be splitting the proceeds 50-50 (all Paypal fees being paid by us, of course) with Child's Play, a charity which donates toys and video games to children in hospitals around the world.

Full details will be forthcoming, but here's what you need to know for now:

• The event will take place in early December

• All other Nerd.Nu servers will be shut down that weekend

• And most importantly, we're looking for build contributions from you, the community!

We're being tight on details involving the theme for now, but the setting will be a vast, ruined city. And what good is a city without buildings? Starting right now, a world has been opened on the Creative server where you can claim a plot and help add your own personal touch! On the Creative server, type /warp skyscraper and you'll be taken to a world with large plots. Simply stand in an open plot and type /nerdplot claim to get started.

• All plots are 55x55 blocks, including the border. You can't dig down past the dirt at y=63, but you can build all the way up to the sky limit!

• Each player may only claim one plot for now, but you can add other members or owners to your plot's region.

• WorldEdit is enabled for the owners of a plot.

• Your skyscraper can be much smaller than 55x55, and you're allowed to make more than one building per plot. If you make separate, unconnected buildings, they may not be placed together on the final Fundraiser map.

• All city buildings are welcome! You're not limited to skyscrapers, you can also make parks, theaters, fountains, apartment buildings, etc.

• While there is no required theme or color scheme, if you'd like a little guidance, think Futuristic.

• Since this will be a ruined city, all builds will start the event in a mostly destroyed state (though if things go well, they definitely won't end the event that way ;D) . If you have room in your plot to make an identical copy of your building, you are welcome to make a broken-down version of your build, but otherwise the staff will take care of it.

• Interior decoration is completely optional, as most of the buildings in the event will not be fully explorable.

• The Skyscraper world will be open for 6 weeks, and will close shortly after Speed Build on Saturday, October 30th.

Posted by fazaden on Sept. 18, 2021 in Head Admin News

The snapshots server will be returning soon with 1.18 snapshots.

TL;DR There's a snapshots worlds download from Dec 2020, and we're planning on giving you the snapshots server back with a blank canvas as soon as the 1.18 snapshots arrive in the launcher and we consider them stable.

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It has been over 6 months since the snapshots "chaos" server has run. It has been a long wait, and I think it's proper to explain why.

Snapshots was initially conceived as a low-stability "no promises" pure vanilla server, with no final map download to be offered. However, you the players built nice things and got quite attached to the world, so we committed to offering a final download and resolved to try to keep continuity of the world, if at all possible.

The new nether generation in 1.16 led us to consider how best to integrate new terrain generation. pez252 looked into minimising the world size by discarding chunks with only a few minutes of load time using mcaselector. But then Mojang threw us for a loop and started changing the overworld terrain generation in 1.17 snapshots. If we had run the server on those snapshots, we probably would have locked the world out of future updates, because Mojang made no guarantees about compatibility.

We also considered the effect of upgrading the current overworld to incorporate the new caves and cliffs. We concluded that the new terrain generation would produce very unsightly discontinuities (flat walls at chunk boundaries) and that we should reset the world completely when the Caves and Cliffs Update terrain generation arrives.

As you may be aware, in the last day, a new experimental 1.18 snapshot was published by Mojang. It is not yet available in the launcher. You have to download it via the link they provide. It looks awesome, but it's still somewhat tentative, so we're going to hold off on running snapshots with it until it has settled a little bit. We think that when Mojang are confident enough to offer it in the launcher it will be about ready to offer it to you. That might depend on what Mojang does about the performance. We know that 1.17 currently needs a lot more RAM than 1.16. We expect further increases on server resources in 1.18, since the world will be 50% taller.

For now, please avail yourself of the final download from last year, snapshots-1.16-2020-12-11.tar.gz (10 GB, good luck with that!). The seed we used to generate that world was "WeGotBees".

-totemo

Posted by defiex on July 14, 2021 in Head Admin News

2020 Fundraiser Wrap-Up Post

The main events of the 2020 Nerd.Nu Semi-Charity Skyblock Fundraiser have come to a close! The Creative and PvE Servers are up once again. Both have been updated, and are now running on 1.16.4! The Event server is also still running for now, so those of you who missed out will still get a chance to claim an island and experience Skyblock. While the main events are over, you may still collect the Scavenger Hunt items and /modreq to win 8CC. All Spawn traders are still open as well. E.nerd.nu will remain open for at least 2 weeks - think of this as a potential trial run for something more long-term.

Donation Totals

We'd like to thank everyone once again for their outstanding generosity, especially during this particular year. At the time of this writing, the donation total on Nerd.Nu/donate is now $4323.30! That is by far the highest total in recent memory! As advertised, we will be donating a full 50% to Child's Play, which at the time of this writing is a whopping $2161.65!. All PayPal fees will be coming come out of Nerd.Nu's share, making the community's total $1980.53. We are absolutely blown away by your kindness! After this year's drive, we have enough funding to pay for server costs through December 2021 and beyond!

Update 12-27-2020: The Child's Play donation has been made!

Thanks

In addition to all of you who've donated your time and money over the weekend, we'd also like to thank the staff who've helped make this event possible: Firstly, major credit to totemo, who suggested we do Skyblock in the first place, and worked hard to get the server up and running (and keep it that way.) Big thanks also go out to Deaygo, for maintaining our Donate page, and implementing the donation announcements you saw on the server and on Discord during the weekend. Lastly on the tech team, we'd like to give a shout out to Challenger2, whose NerdPlot plugin made island-claiming possible, and who helped run Saturday Night Spleef. In addition, please thank pez252 for creating Spawn Island, the bulk traders, and all of the individual player islands; defiex for her wonderful tweets, announcements, and her work on the warp sign wall; fazaden for working out the trades and their ratios, setting up the Trading Hall, FFA Spleef, and PvP arenas, and coordinating the minigames and events during the fundraiser; Bluuefuzzy for building Thimble, the park, and the beautiful Trading Hall's tree; buzzie71 for building the fantastic 1v1 Spleef arena; King_of_queso for his road design; assasymphoni and zburdsal for their landscaping; and everyone else on the mod team who added their little touches to Spawn.

Now, for the moment you've been waiting for: the Contest winners!

Island Superlatives

The community votes are in! Here are the results for Individual islands:

Prettiest: Penergy

Spookiest: zburdsal

Most Useful: dogo1005MC

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And here are the Group island winners:

Prettiest: Rose

Spookiest: Daloria

Most Useful: Solace

(For judging purposes, an Individual island has only 1 owner, and no region members. A Group Island has more than one person on the same region.)

Cobble-Collection Contest

After the close of regulation Event time, the Head Admin team diligently went from island to island, and counted up every last Cobblestone, RC, CC, and PC in your starter chests, and we can now reveal the results! Overall, the community managed to collect and store currency equivalent to 39,962,484 blocks of cobble! Here are the top three collectors, in both the Group and Individual categories:

Richest Islands - Individual:

1. Oxion, with 5,242,880

2. UncleTito1, with 767,461

3. dogo1005MC, with 198,464

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Richest Islands - Group:

1. Solace, with 14,568,576

2. Rose, with 12,866,427

3. Stormmblade's Island, with 2,130,304

Misc. Statistics

• 355,264 Cobblestone Blocks broken by hand

• 122 Islands claimed

• 3 Thimble matches won by ghrey303

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Over 276,909 mobs killed in the Overworld, including:

• 75,414 skeletons

• 75,291 zombies

• 75,048 creepers

• 44,045 spiders

• 1,713 chickens

• 1,588 cows

• 1,071 pigs

• 761 witches

• 686 phantoms

• 347 endermen

• 213 slimes

• 187 sheep

• 104 magma slimes

• 96 rabbits

• 86 mooshrooms

• 75 wither skellies

• 69 drowned

• 50 bees

• 31 snowmen

• 15 withers

• 12 blazes

• 3 wolves

• 3 polar bears

• 1 fox

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Over 6,440 kills happened in the Nether, including:

• 2,594 magma slimes

• 1,914 wither skeletons

• 898 blazes

• 867 zombie pigmen

• 152 ghasts

• 6 chickens

• 4 pigs

• 3 foxes

• 1 phantom

• 1 unfortunate panda

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Thank you all for playing, and enjoy the rest of your year!

Posted by fazaden on Dec. 14, 2020 in Head Admin News