On most servers you build a house. On this one you build a civilisation.

The world has already ended once.

July 12, 2111. The Reckoning War. The ultimatum expired at dawn; by lunchtime the city of Morningstar was gone. Two systems had spent a century proving they could not share a planet, and in one afternoon they stopped trying.

Three hundred years later you wake up under the ruins - in a shelter, with a phone in your pocket, a currency that still means something, and a world ninety thousand blocks across that has to be put back together.

That is FCT: Deep Rock Ember. A civilisation with a hole in it, and you are one of the people expected to fill it.

Six companies own the wasteland.

Huaxia Heavy Industries built everything still standing. Dragon Core wrote the protocols that keep the beacons alive. Lingjing Network is the reason scattered shelters still call themselves one people. Ares Armaments never accepted that the war ended. Cyborg Dynamics will replace anything you lost, for a price you will be paying for a long time. Olympus Media owns the signal - and whoever owns the signal owns the story.

Nobody hands you a quest to save the world. You pick a corporation, you pick a debt, and the economy decides what you can afford to become.

I built this alone.

I'm afunnyrat. Three years ago it was a plugin I wrote to see whether it would work. It worked, so I kept going. One person, one laptop, no studio, no investors, no publisher. Every system, every texture, every animation frame here came out of hours borrowed from everything else in my life.

The world is built, and it runs. What it does not do is pay for itself.

What $10,000 buys

A world this size has a monthly bill, not a one-time one.

• 40% - Infrastructure: hosting, DDoS protection, backups, bandwidth

• 30% - Development: new terrain, quests, vehicles, NPCs

• 20% - Animation: Deep Rock Ember, the ten-episode series about the year it ended

• 10% - Community: events, tournaments, outreach

I publish what was spent and what got built. If I cannot show where the money went, I do not deserve the next dollar.

What you get - and what you do not

Donations unlock the server's Charity Permission levels. None of them give combat power: no damage boosts, no better gear, no PvP edge. They are conveniences - permanent night vision, flight in the lobby, more beds, lower tax, higher market limits. The kind of thing that makes a very large world less tiring to live in.

Every level can also be earned without paying. Nothing here is pay-to-win.

Come look at it first

• Server: mc.fcthq.com

• Everything else I make: fcthq.com

• Discord: discord.gg/sfhfyqd8DW

• YouTube: @a_funny_rat

Three years ago I wanted to know whether a Minecraft server could hold a world you actually live in.

It became a server. The server needed an economy, so I wrote one. The economy needed somewhere to live, so I built the phone. The story underneath it outgrew the game, so now it is being animated.

None of that was planned. All of it is one person's spare time.

$10,000 is one more year of that. If you read this far, thank you - whether you give or not.

- afunnyrat, Protocolist #7349

Dragon Core Technology