Season 2 Launch and 1.20.4 Update!
Its here! Our brand new MineMania Server is officially launched tonight at 6pm! We have got bigger and better to cope with our numbers and have incorporated more ways to play, improved safeguarding and accessibility. If there are initial bugs bear with us as this has been a HUGE project over the last six months. But we did it! We hope our members enjoy it. We have lots of ways to play, to provide an inclusive , safe, multiplayer experience. We have game styles for group or solo play, adventuring, PvP, Dungeons and minigames and we regularaly update and add new things. We operate on 1.20.4 version of Minecraft. Take a tour… Hub Use /menu for game options and to navigate, use this menu anywhere in the server. This candy bright playground is the Hub of our server, use it as a meeting point to wait for your friends before diving into minigames, battling the dungeon inhabitants, or having a game of armour stand golf. SMP Use /menu and /info for game options. And /teleport for the teleport menu Our brand new SMP has a large protected town as Spawn for you to explore. It contains a market, NPCs, PvP arena, reward crates and more. Grab a boat or a horse and make your way into the world, or random teleport to destination unknown. You can set homes for private teleportation, or create Warps for public waypoint. Your first Warp is free but the rest will cost you … you might need to get a job! (No real money is ever used.) Creative A Creative world to play in. Build Events A Creative world with plots for personal creative building at our build challenges and events. This world is CLOSED unless we have a build challenge or event. Battlegrounds Imported from Season 1 server, join Battlegrounds for PvP, griefing and general mayhem. SkyBlock Start your own private island in this favourite game of many, and work together or alone to pile up your resources, build up your island and create your own empire. Dungeons Dare you enter the dungeon? Take the tutorial first. Then head back to enter the dungeons. Waves of mobs, devious puzzles and boss fights to challenge you and your friends! CraftyLand The awesome themepark from Eppimoo! Enjoy rollercoasters, Spleef, PvP arenas, exploration and more in a giant theme park! This is on an EPIC scale. ???? Everyone so often we will have a special guest world from an awesome creator for playing or exploring….Mystery world is closed until we open a new adventure.
Booking Open Now! And Season 2 Update
Great news! Sessions are starting back from Thursday 11th April! You can book your sessions now. Next week both the Tuesday and Thursday Socials are running. We are pausing the Serious Builders Only sessions while we work on session content and a new home for the sessions on our new server. Which brings me too… Season 2 of MineMania! Recently our current server has been lagging and we needed a lot more memory to keep up with what the children are doing on it. We have also been working on increased accessibility, improved safeguarding, griefing prevention, and a wider variety of ways to play both solo and as a group, to make it more fun, as well as new worlds for build challenges, more mini games, and sensory calming worlds. We have created a new server from the ground up with more capacity, build to spec with bespoke plugins and coding thanks to our wonderful development team. All being well, this Thursday will be the last day on the old server. Never fear, we will save downloads of our worlds for anyone who wants them – we can email the files over. The server will be down for 2-3 days while we change over. Don’t forget parents can join our Discord: there is a children’s channel for out of session text and voice chat (under parental supervision!), and a parents channel where you can see who is on the server at any time, and all chat messages in real time. Contact us for the link.
Minecraft Club is back from 13 Jan – end of March 2024!
Thanks to Sandwell MBC’s funding ‘Creating a Playable Sandwell’, Creative Active Lives CIC are able to run their Inclusive Family Fun Club until the end of March 2024! This means that our Saturday morning in-person LAN club can also continue! We are thrilled as we have so much fun every Saturday. You can come and use one of our laptops, or bring your own! You can build and PvP with other children if you want to (you can turn off PvP if you don’t want to do that), go on raids and mass mob battles, play in CraftyLand Theme Park, and take part in build challenges. We also have a range of adaptive controllers for PC, and an eye gaze tracker which works with Special Effect’s open source code to allow children with different mobility needs to join in the fun and games. As well as Minecraft Club, lots of other family activities are happening – circus skills, crafts, beading, Lego, board games, Nerf games, Laser Tag, the floor is lava, go karts and lots more! Sessions are FREE of charge thanks for funding from Creating a Playable Sandwell. When: From 13th Jan, every Saturday 1030am-1230pm Where: Rowley Learning Campus Hub, Curral Road, Rowley Regis B65 9AN
New Christmas World, The Candy Cane Express
christmas world is here! We would like to introduce you to Friend to MineMania, the master artist and awesome good egg FunTazer! She has given our server an amazing Christmas gift. FunTazer creates the most incredible, artistic interactive builds. This year, she created a HUGE Candy Cane Express railway that takes you through a compilation of her Christmas builds. And she has so kindly allowed MineMania to bring this to our server for the festive period. She might even join us at some point to say hello and answer any questions you might have! You can join our server as normal and instead of navigating to SMP, navigate to CandyCaneExpress. You can find more of FunTazer’s work on her profile at Planet Minecraft here: https://www.planetminecraft.com/member/funtazer/ And make sure you check out her YouTube Channel, like AND susbcribe to be notified of new builds AND FREE DOWNLOADS of some awesome maps and builds! You can find her channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@minecraftfuntazerbuilds9347 Here are some screenshots from my trip on the Candy Cane Express and exploring the map. We have made this an adventure map, so you can interact but not break or build. This does not convey the sheer scale AT ALL. The amount of work in this is phenomenal. I can’t wait for the group to see it! We will have this world in our server until the 7th January and then we are back to normal!
NEW Master Builder sessions with The Wizard Keen!
We are so excited to welcome The Wizard Keen to our server to deliver TEN Master Builder sessions to our members! With master builder and Minecraft Map producer the Wizard Keen, minecraft producer to Stampy Longnose and King Charles! In his own words: I have always loved making online videos and started my own youtube channel to make tutorials and stories using Minecraft and other video games. That’s where I met Stampy and we collaborated on his Minecraft Education show Wonder Quest – I played the bumbling yet fiercely intelligent Wizard Keen. I have done many talks about Minecraft being used in Museums and education and the power of play to engage people in new ideas and learning. My wife Victoria Bennett and I have also written many essays and a book about Minecraft. Minecraft is a creative place to make your ideas come to life. I love the medium of Minecraft and to be able to tell a story with blocks! I have been both a Minecraft producer and a Map builder. A Minecraft producer is someone who has the original idea and brings a group of builders and command_block specialists together to create a complete Minecraft map. A producer deals with the financing of the project and direction and vision of it. Maps often start on paper, scribbled around the kitchen table or dreamed up while walking the hills. My other role is that of a builder creator when after sketching out an idea, I start work on building the map from scratch. I use a range of techniques and tools, it’s not all hand-built! Maths and art combine to make these maps so enjoyable! Members only, but membership is FREE and so are the sessions. Booking Open Now in the Members Area! Apply for membership here. MineMania is a private, safeguarded Minecraft server exclusively for children and young people up to age 25 with Autism, ADHD, PDA, and any neurodiversity or SEND.
New Session Alert!
NEW SESSION ALERT! Check out this incredible Minecraft Project for The Crown Estate. Players can build and run their own offshore wind farms! The legendary map producer The Wizard Keen produced this, and can legit be called Minecrafter to King Charles. He’s also replicated the Tate Modern, a journey though the inside of the human body, incredible replicas of landmarks, and worked with the OG Stampy on maps and the WonderQuest series. He is a map producer, world class professional minecrafter and builder and all round awesome human being. And he’s delivering TEN hour long building sessions for MineMania over the winter season. I can’t wait. Booking will be open next week, members only as always for safeguarding – but membership is free and the sessions are free, and for children and young people with SEND aged 7 -25. https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/av/66994355
FREE Online Minecraft Clubs starting 4th October!
Great news! We are back with online Minecraft Social sessions. NEW for children not in school – Tuesday morning Build With Me sessions start on 17th October. A relaxed build in company play session, where we will build bases, arenas, structures and more. Build alone but with company, or build with friends as a group project. We will be in Creative World and SMP so we can let our imagination run wild and practice fantastic builds in Creative and then use our skills in SMP to build our bases, parkour courses, game arenas. Thursday Social Build & Play sessions return on 4th October (yes,the first one is on Wednesday, all the others on on Thursdays.). These take place in SMP with occasional forays to Bed Wars and Creative and World of Calm. The sessions are free but you must be a member before you can book your place. Apply to join here
Gaming Fun Day for Children with SEND
Our first Gaming Fun Day! Last Sunday we hosted our first, but definitely not our last, FREE Gaming Fun Day for children with SEND, their friends and families, as part of the Mayor’s Celebration Weekend. It was a huge success! We can’t wait to do it again. We took our pop up Minecraft LAN Gaming set up, assistive set of joystick and buttons, all of our workshops and entertainment equipment, and invited some hand picked inclusive activity providers along to Rowley Learning Campus, where we welcome 73 children to our fun day! We had: Minecraft LAN Gaming Mario Kart Virtual Reality Gaming Black Country Brick Show Lego workshops Sensory Room Giant Bubble shows Circus Skills workshops Board Games Crafts Dungeons and Dragons role playing for beginners Fire Engine visit Hula hooping Comfy Book Corner Coffee and cake mobile bar Archery Smoothie Bike
Funding Success!
Funding success! We are thrilled to announce we were awarded funding from the Heart of England Community Foundation to support the start up and first year costs of our server! We are so grateful and this has already made such a difference. This has allowed us to have this fantastic new website designed by the wonderful Eighty3design, funded the first year of server hosting costs while we try and develop the server and what we offer to allow it be financially self-sustainable, bring in The Wizard Keen of Wonderquest to work with our groups, and support promotional costs. Thank you so much to the Heart of England Community Foundation for believing in our server and the power of Minecraft, and of Community, to change lives. With the breathing space and support that this funding allows us, we will increase the number of our online sessions, and plan an in person celebration event to bring us all together next year!
Online Safety
safeguarding Online Safety is often the biggest concern when your child wants to play online. When I’m approached by a parent who is unsure about their child playing online with other children, I make sure they know all the safeguarding procedures I have put in place. I thought I’d put them in a blog post for anyone who is on the website and wondering if this is safe for their child. Safeguarding is at the forefront of what we do. Parent involvement and communication is a vital part of this. That’s why we love to connect with parents on the phone, via email or social media so that we all know who we are talking to. Rachel Conlisk is Designated Safeguarding Lead, and completed Level 2 Safeguarding Training in 2022 and Level 3 DSL Training in 2023. We do not allow anyone to join the server unless we have manually approved them. For this, the parent needs to apply to join on behalf of the child, we verify age and identity, and then we send joining details out. Once the child adds the server, they cannot enter our worlds until we manually add their Minecraft user name to the approved players list, adding a further level of safeguarding. Our server is always open, so you might wonder who your child could be playing with. One of our young players came up with a solution and hand coded a program and uploaded to our website. They are amazing. So – if you want to know who your child is online on our Server with at any time, you can see which user names are playing and which world they are playing in. Visit http://status.minemania.co/ We have an automatic log of all ‘text-chat’ communication within the Minecraft server worlds and log of the gameplay stored on the server, so we can retrieve any conversations or game interactions at any time if any parent or child has any issues or concerns. Although there won’t be an adult Admin online on the server 24/7, we can be contacted via email hello@minemania.co or via our Facebook Page. We recommend to parents/carers that your child plays in the room with you in earshot and you can see what we are doing as well. We also like it that if parents are in the background during our scheduled sessions, we can all get to know each other as well! We have made some lovely friendships this way. We have game rules and a code of conduct (displayed on entry to our game world and on the website) that all players must abide by, or they can be temporarily or even permanently ejected from the server. Our volunteers who are over 18 are DBS checked and undergo the NSPCC Online Tutor Safeguarding Course. Any external tutors will hold a DBS check. We encourage our players who have reached a certain level of experience to level up to becoming volunteer Admins and Developers on the server. This builds self confidence and leadership and is great experience with opportunities for more learning and upskilling. So you may encounter Admins who are under 18 as well as adult Admins. Admin roles would only be offered after consulting parents/carers. Our booking form is only accessible to members who are registered and who we email the password to. Our forum that parents and children are welcome to use to communicate is also password protected. You can find all of our safeguarding policies on our parent company website at https://creativeactivelives.org.uk/policies/
