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There aren’t many games that have managed to both survive and thrive based purely on community created content, but Minecraft is a shining of example indie development and how to do it right.
There are Minecraft servers full of wild and wonderful lands, recreations of classic games and even homages to blockbuster films. But what if you want to set up your own server to share your block-based creativity with the world?
It’s not actually that hard, at least on a Windows box and it’s free. The most important thing you need is the latest version of Java, oh and the internet of course. Download the server file, put it in a suitable directory (probably best to put it in its own folder) and fire it up.
You can tweak the server settings if you need more RAM or something like that through a little text editing. It helps if you’ve got a static IP too, so that players can actually find and connect to your server, but if you’ve got that far you probably already know that. Thankfully there’s a pretty good walk through on the Minecraft wiki, so if you’re serious about it, check that out.
Now, who’s up for a little Giz UK Minecraft experience then? Talent is probably required (so don’t look at me), but I’m sure there’s someone in our midst that has the skills to create something cool for us to all wonder around. Props if anyone comes up with one.
o.O The dude that did the ‘to-scale’ USS Enterprise needs to let us roam it!
This is a call out to EddyCJ, Glenbot3000, tanveer2k11 and Tacos.
Your talents are required!
Amazing, my random question has began to flourish.
EddyCJ offered to host the server so hopefully he notices this. I would offer to run the server myself but I can just about run a tiny server for a couple of people without massive lag, really need to upgrade my computer.
Would people want survival or creative though, or just leave these choices up to whoever runs the server?
I recently upgraded my rig (Phenom II X6 (2.6), 8GB HyperX DDR3) so I’d be more than willing to host something in the interim between getting something sorted properly? I go on holiday tomorrow so I could lend the whole thing for the week, if I can get it set up before my flight. Someone get in touch ASAP, my e-mail is glenbot3000@gmail.com so just drop us a message if you’re interested in helping out.
Oh, btw, I’m limited to 10MB/s bandwidth, but it should be fine with a few players on.
I’m here now! Showing an interest in hosting, I need an idea of numbers though.
I’m still interested.
Do you want ip, test the waters?
Sorry about been late, but sure I can try the server out.
Do you have an email you don’t mind releasing to the interwebs?
Sadly I don’t, sorry.
How to transmit my IP without the world knowing…
Made one because might aswell get this Giz Server idea rolling and then hopefully can get someone to post about it on the front page for more to see.
totallynotmyrealemailgiz@gmail.com
Hey, whilst it is easy to set up a server for you and some mates, making a public server can be very taxing. One of the main issues is having sufficient bandwidth to host. Our server which averages around 10-30 members 24/7 eats up around 4-6 terabytes in uploads a month. Most domestic broadband packages can’t handle this amount of uploading.
However you should be able to host a 3-6 person server with no issue on domestic broadband on 1-2mbps. Just note on larger servers the cost of hosting dramatically increases.
Other issues are that Minecraft can be very resource intensive, and is poorly optimised. So don’t expect great performance on a toaster, your best bet is to have plenty of excess ram.
The map size can get pretty big, so you may want to think about putting a border in to limit the size of the map. And on that note that brings us to plugins.
At the moment the Bukkit mod provides great support for addons to enable a easier hosting of a public server. If you are making a server public, expect to get attacked in every sense. So fire spread protection plugins, Anti cheat/speed hacks, Log block for checking griefs*.
Most servers work on a Blacklist/whitelist. Where build powers are not granted until a person is authenticated by the server admins. This prevents people joining, instantly griefing and never comming back.
* Griefs/Griefing, This is where someone purposely breaks items and creations in order to annoy.
At the moment, this is all I can think of putting down in writing but if you have any questions, do say.
Thanks for the detailed response. I wanted to post something like this by my head is too full of rage from not being able to play Star Wars this morning.
I would love a whitelist based gizuk minecraft server. The servers I have played on keep getting reset, it’s depressing. I don’t like too many additional mods though – whitelist and sensible admins should be enough.
Ah well the mcserverlist found here http://mcserverlist.net/ has a list of 25000 servers. It has recently become more stable and doesn’t have as many “boosters” as it used to. Anything in the top 10-25 pages should be stable enough to be a good server.
Now Minecraft Maps and resets. Our server has been around since Alpha mode started so roughly 30th June. Now we have gone through at least 10 maps since then, and countless other temporary maps. If you are interested, I will explain some of the reasons why.
In the earlier Alpha and Beta stages, minecraft was (still is) unstable. It was easy for the terrain code to become corrupt and generate chunk errors, which would mean the map couldn’t be loaded. One of the reasons Minecraft corrupted so easily was that a high strain on the server (say ddos attack) would cause minecraft to incorrectly save and corrupt the maps.
Mojang fixed this by having the map generate new terrain using a new biome (map) code. This would mean the map would no longer crash on loading, but was still corrupted.
One of the main issues would be that the rapid changes from Alpha to Beta would cause the biome code to keep changing. This generated ugly terrain and made new items that were common on new maps, rare in old maps. And so, many opted to leave their creations in favour to mess with the new updates. There are still some servers which haven’t updated for a long while.
Another issue is space, Minecraft maps grow in size, and some of our maps reached around 6-10GB, This became very expensive to host and very resource intensive. If for example you teleported from one side of the map to the other, you would load every single chunk in between the two points. For reference, a chunk is 16×16 blocks, with a height of 128 blocks. Considering these maps reached 20-40000 blocks in width. Each chunk has 32768 blocks, and the player loads 441 chunks at any one time.
You can now see how resource intensive minecraft is to host.
The one thing with corruption though, we have been struck by it so many times. So in order to counteract it, we have the map saved every hour to a internal source. Then every 24 hours it is packed up and backed up to another server independent of the minecraft server. To date, we have found this to be the best way of ensuring map longevity. Our last map lasted a year, our current has been around since 1.8.
Hopefully this will give some insight into the life span of minecraft maps. And whilst I would love to plug our server, I won’t.
But yeah, the mcserverlist has improved dramatically. Just keep in mind that you should be willing to lose your creations, heartbreaking I know, but it does happen often in minecraft. It is data, and data is easily corrupted.
On a side note, our current map has 25,088,000,000 blocks in it. With an average of 15 players, that means 216,760,320 blocks are being uploaded every few seconds/minutes (depending on the movement of players)
Couldn’t agree more, see my post below.
I rented one from Multiplay for a few months, it was relatively easy to set up and they automatically update Bukkit as and when it is available. Never had any problems at all, ran like a dream. Also based in UK so ping is very low.
They charge you based on player slots; I paid £5.25/month for 4 players as not many of us played. 24 players is £21/month, but you could see how much interest you get and tailor the number of slots accordingly.
Does this mean I need to reopen my server?
If you are willing to host a GizUK MC server.
I totally just noticed this, must have slid under my radar. At the moment I run a plain, simple server on my home computer with 10-20 slots, and as explained, this will struggle with any more than 20. I’ve been meaning to build a server, and upgrade the broadband. With enough interest, this may catalyze me into action! For now, does anyone want my home ip address? I’ll hook up Hamachi, Bukkit etc when enough interest gets going.