Joyful's latest video about our project brought a 10x wave of new players. We're a small, volunteer team running a fully unscripted "civilization" server: there are no premade teams, no scripting, and absolutely no gameplay perks for money. To keep the experience fair and stable as we scale from ~100 to 1,000 players, we need to add 1-2 more machines like our current primary server. Below is an image of our discord server member count after Joyful released his video:

This is our Discord server user-count over time.... you can see the problem.

The event is now oversubscribed with 1700 users! This is awesome, but also scary because we don't have the hardware to support that and we don't want to disappoint people.

Up until now, the physical servers have been generously donated to us. However, in order to scale up from 100 players to 1000 players we need your help!

Servers can be quite expensive and we're currently spending $150/month on one. Our current primary sever "Cursor" has the following specs:

CPU: AMD EPYC 4244P, 6c/12t · 3.8 GHz (base) / 5.1 GHz (boost)

RAM: 32GB DDR5-5200

Storage: 2×960 GB NVMe

During the most recent playtest we had ~1000 players attempt to join. As a result we now have this very humorous image of the server being at 500% CPU usage. Because of our dedication to you players, we are able to bend the laws of physics to make these events happen.

If we could purchase 1-2 more of these servers, we would be able to (actually) support 1000 players with very stable performance. Currently, one of these servers is able to support approximately 350 concurrent players with our optimizations, therefore having a second will almost certainly be enough capacity to host our events with more players.

Our pledge:

We'd rather scale slower than compromise fairness.

What happens with your support

1. Provision servers matching "Cursor" (same class, same monthly cost).

2. Stabilize peak events with ~1,000 concurrent capacity (3 servers).

3. Publish a short update when new capacity goes.

If donations exceed the goal, we’ll put the surplus back into the community by funding prizes for content creators and prizes for people writing research reports on the data outputted from our experiment. If we fall short, we’ll scale capacity proportionally and still publish what was deployed.

How you can help

Donate any amount: every bit reduces queue pain and lag for everyone.

Share this page with anyone who enjoyed Joyful's breakdowns or who wants to see a truly player-driven civilization run at scale.