Hey, friends!

If you’ve been following me for more than a year, you might remember this ol’ shenanigan last year: Brain in Hand, my esteemed employer, hosts an annual Minecraft marathon for deserving local charities.

WELL, IT’S THAT TIME AGAIN

I’m not gonna go on about Brain in Hand again – Google us, or take a look at the post from last year, if you’re interested – but I will plug this year’s Minecraftathon because it’s a worthy cause.

Basically, we’re gonna be playing Minecraft for 24 hours to raise money for SOCOPS, who are a small charity local to us and who work with the whole family unit around children who need some extra support because they have an autism spectrum condition. The work that we do at BiH is designed to help people who have a few more difficulties than the rest of us, including autism but also covering a whole range of other diagnoses and problems; we know that the whole family can be affected, and that having the right support in place can make the difference and let the family stay together, so this is really important stuff.

Our marathon will run from 10AM UK time on Friday 5th April until 10AM the next day.

Sounds cool! So how can I help?

If you like the sound of that and you wanna help out, here are some things you can do:

• Share or donate to our GoFundMe page!
• Share or join our Facebook event!
• Follow @BiHvsMinecraft on Twitter for updates!

And – and this is the good bit, really – you can also join in and play! We’ll have our server up for probably a bit longer than the 24 hours required for the Marathon, and it’ll be open to all. This year we’re going for a watery, marine, maritime, undersea, oceanic, vaguely wet theme: so lots of water, lots of ocean, that kind of thing. We’ll all be in creative mode, so we’ll be letting our imaginations run wild and creating the bestest sea-themed-ish things we possibly can.

Ooooooh. How do join in?!

To join us, you’ll need to install the original Minecraft “Java Edition” on Windows, Mac or Linux (no other “edition” of the game on any platform can join, unfortunately; even the Windows 10 Edition). If you don’t already have it, you can get it from the official Minecraft website, although it currently costs £17.95 to purchase. If you’re not sure, you can try logging in to your Mojang account.

Once downloaded and installed, you’ll need to set it up to play the same version that our server is running, and then join the server! So here’s how to do that:

1. In the Minecraft Launcher, click ‘Launch options’ (up near the top), then ‘Add new’ at the top of the list that appears. (It’ll just say ‘latest release’ if you’ve never added any others.)
2. Now change the ‘Version’ to ‘Release 1.12.2’ and click ‘Save’. If you click ‘News’ at the top now, you can use the up arrow next to the big green ‘Play’ button at the bottom to select your new version, and click ‘Play’ to start the game! It could take a few minutes to download, so be patient.
3. Once you’ve opened up the game, you should be in the main menu. Now select ‘Multiplayer’, then click on ‘Add Server’.
4. In the window that opens, enter the following details:
   • Server Name: Brain in Hand (or, actually, you can put whatever you want as long as you can recognise it!)
   • Server address: minecraft.braininhand.co.uk
5. Now click ‘Done’, select the server from the list and click ‘Join Server’, and you’re in!

Anybody will be able to join our server, so we ask everyone to be considerate of others and not harass anyone. If anyone’s being not very nice to others, they’ll get a warning. We hope not to have to ban anyone, but we can and will ban anyone if they cause too much trouble or continue to deliberately upset others. Everybody deserves to have fun, so please just don’t ruin anyone else’s fun.

And if I can’t play or donate but would like to see what you’re getting up to?

Well, sharing would still be extremely gratefully appreciated, so please do spread the word! If lurking and watching to see what we end up creating is more your thing, though, the whole thing will be streamed at https://www.twitch.tv/braininhand – and I expect we’ll probably do some sort of recap thingy afterwards too, so I’ll share that when we get to it.

Thanks for reading, and anything at all that you’d like to do to support us will be met with grand overtures of gratitude from me. Don’t feel pressured, though – investment of money, time, or effort is not something I expect to receive or feel entitled to from anyone, so thanks just for reading if that’s all you wanna do.

Keep being awesome, friends.