Introduction

Background Information

While Minecraft's multiplayer can be a fun shared experience, sometimes you just want to have that experience with yourself and a small group of friends. Now while there are options like Minecraft Realms, these options are on a monthly subscription and can get quite expensive.

But there is a much cheaper alternative, which is to make your own dedicated Minecraft Server. The best part is that you don't necessarily need to spend a whole lot of money on hardware unless you plan on hosting hundreds of players.

What you will need

While you can run a Minecraft Server on almost any computer, that can run Java, I will be using an 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 and a 32GB microSD card with Ubuntu flashed to it.

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    • To start your server make sure the device you are using has the latest software update. This ensures the device has the latest security patches.

    • This process will vary depending on the OS you are using, but for Ubuntu use the following command: sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

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    • To run the Minecraft server you will need the latest Java Development Kit. For Linux you will just run the following command: sudo apt install default-jdk

    • While this command will work on both Linux and Mac operating systems, the process does change when using Windows. The instructions for a Windows installation can be found here.

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    • Download the latest .jar file from the Mojang website here onto the device acting as your server.

    • It is recommended that you keep the file in its own directory when you download it

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    • In your command line, navigate to the directory that has your .jar file and run the following command...

    • java -Xmx3000M -Xms3000M -jar server.jar nogui

    • 3000 is the amount of ram that we are dedicating to our server and is measured in Megabytes. You can also remove nogui if you want to use the GUI interface.

    • You may get a warning that says you didn't accept EULA. To fix this issue open the eula.txt file and set the eula variable to true

Conclusion

Congratulations! You now have your own private Minecraft server.

While this tutorial should give you a good foundation for making a server, some other good practices should be observed.

Firstly, it is recommended that you learn how to backup your server, as to not lose any progress that would have been made. A tutorial for that can be found here, but it is recommend you learn how to configure your device to a RAID 1 configuration. This way if your main storage fails you will have a copy on a spare storage drive.

Otherwise, you now have a private server that you and your friends can play on.

Jacob Mehnert

Member since: 18/10/21

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