We’ve been doing a fair bit of work on the website, and there’s finally enough to warrant a post!
🏠 A homepage we’ve outgrown
Our website has been a labour of love for years, but we kept adding features without really making room for them. The homepage section built for three links had grown to twelve, and we still had important pages buried in the sidebar.
We’ve redone the navigation so you can find things more easily, brought news and upcoming events onto the homepage, and added a couple of little Minecraft characters to keep you entertained while you’re there.
💬 A new home for the forum
The forum was our first home on the web. Even after most of the conversation moved to Discord, our modded Minecraft YouTube feed kept bringing people in, and we still used it for the occasional poll.
It was also one of the last pieces of our original setup: a big virtual machine on our own hardware, in one region, with a disaster recovery plan that… could have been better. 😅
We’ve now migrated it to our own custom forum, running on the same cloud-based, serverless setup as the rest of our website.
The existing posts have been brought across, and we’ve worked to preserve the familiar styling and features. A few things to know:
- New address: craftdownunder.co/forum
- Sign in with your Tesseract account.
- Old links still work and redirect to the corresponding new pages.
- The modded Minecraft YouTube feed is still running, with new posts appearing automatically.
Looking familiar is only the start. The old XenForo forum was expensive to maintain and develop for, which made it hard to justify doing much with it. Having our own code gives us far more freedom to improve it and properly connect it with the rest of CDU.
🗳️ The modpack voter has moved
Our replacement for the old Strawpoll votes started as a prototype. Somehow, it’s now been running polls for about 13 months!
You’ll now find it at craftdownunder.co/packvote.
The features are the same, and we’ve kept the interface close to what you’re used to, with some performance improvements and a bit of tidying up.
⛏️ There’s more happening in-game
Alongside the throttling system, we’ve been working on things like:
- Plot rentals, coming very soon: players and staff will be able to mark out plots within their claims and rent them to other players.
- Faster logins: recent changes have cut login times by around 50%.
- Better staff tools: ongoing improvements to make moderation and helping players easier.
Another experiment we’ve been running is targeted performance patches for individual modpacks. We’ve trialled these on Prominence 2 over the last couple of weeks, as well as Project Infinity and SoulRend, fixing issues in mods with the whole pack in mind.
These work alongside our broader lag mitigation features and public performance mods, and have already made a real difference. It’s something we’ll keep experimenting with and expanding.
Some updates are fun to show off. Others take just as much work, but you’ll mostly notice them when things load faster or cause fewer headaches.
💚 Thanks for making this possible
Craft Down Under isn’t run for profit. Building this community has been a passion of mine and the people contributing to it since 2022.
Development is our biggest expense by far. Everyone who plays here, buys a rank or donates helps us keep building, fixing and trying new things.
If you like what we’re doing and want to support more of it, consider upgrading your rank or making a donation. It really does help.
Have a look around, let us know if anything’s broken or hard to find, and thanks for being part of CDU. ❤️