Now let me set the record straight before I begin. I do not play Minecraft but my 11 year old son and ALL of his friend do. He actually ponied up the $20 from his allowance to buy the beta version of the game. Honestly I do not believe in paying for beta which is why I do not run anything produced by Microsoft but that is a different story entirely.
One of the main advantages of paying for a legitimate license for this beta is that when the game is actually released if ever then he should get an automatic upgrade entitlement. Whether or not the developers take the Microsoft model of charging for upgrades or not however remains to be seen. In any even it is irrelevant to this discussion. The point of paying is to unlock the multiplayer feature because who really wants to play a game alone? It’s really hard to cheat as the banker when you play Monopoly all by yourself.
The main problem with playing on multiplayer systems is new players tend to become targets for just about every other player. My son only wants to play with his friends who are around the same age and skill level that he is. Fortunately Minecraft does have a server available which makes this possible. What’s even more interesting is that the server is available in a java implementation which mean just about any system running the latest version of java in addition if you lack the expertise of deploying the server on a TCP port 25565 and programming the appropriate network address translation (NAT) through your firewall you can use a virtual private network VPN. The documentation recommends using Himachi a VPN product released by LogmeIn.
Fortunately the Minecraft WIKI has a pretty good page detailing the steps necessary to set up MCS using the jar file provided. A couple of thoughts about the wiki page that I discovered while installing the the system. The first is that the user id you wish to run MCS as must have complete read & write permission on the entire directory where you launch mcs from. This is necessary or mcs will not launch properly. I also created my own startup script to make things a little easier. The following is a copy of the start_mcs script that I placed in /usr/local/bin.
#!/usr/bin/env /bin/bash
MCSPath=/Volumes/Data/media/minecraft/
MCSJar=minecraft_server.jar
cd ${MCSPath}
exec java -Xmx1G -Xms1G -jar ${MCSJar}
Notice in the above script that I left off the -nogui option and this is because when you first start mcs you should watch the server console to ensure that things are working properly. Honestly there is no reason that you can not just run with the gui on but some people like their servers to be fully daemonized. This means that unless you look for the process specifially you won’t see it because it will be running as a service in the background.
As you can see these two screen shots display the gui on my Mac OS X Server.
One of the advantages of running the mcs gui is that you have access to console commands. The above is a listing the help commands. I recommend keeping this available until you become familiar with what each command actually does and how to manipulate the results from the command line. For instance if you make a player an op and then wish to remove that advancement you can use the gui or you can edit ops.txt in the mcs startup directory.
Once you have the console up and running you can attempt to connect your client computers (i.e. friends and other players). Think of the console as your safety net to remind you that everything is working. This was how I discovered the permissions issue because I installed everything as one user but launched the server as another and well things just didn’t work. I corrected the permissions and ownership and well now the kids are playing. Well they would be if they cleaned their rooms but that entirely a different issue.
One final advantage to running your own game server is that if someone becomes abusive in the game you have the ability to bounce them. In addition you can limit the connections to only your child’s friends which given the state of things on the internet these days is probably a good thing. Happy gaming!
Related articles
- How do you get to creative mode in Minecraft (wiki.answers.com)
- Snowmen coming to Minecraft 1.9 (onsoftware.en.softonic.com)
- Minecraft All Day (vgamer101.wordpress.com)
- How do you make a Minecraft server (wiki.answers.com)
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