While it’s easy enough to share a Minecraft map with other local players on your network, it’s nice to be able to run a dedicated server so people can come and go without the original game host loading up Minecraft. Today we’re looking at how to run a simple local Minecraft server both with and without mods.
Why Run a Minecraft Server?One of the most frustrating elements of the Minecraft local multiplayer experience (both for the PC and the PE edition) is that the original game host has to be active to access previous creations. If there are two parents and two kids playing Minecraft in a household for example, and they spend a few hours one weekend working on a big structure hosted by Kid #2, then anytime anyone wants to work on that world/structure again they need Kid #2 to fire up their game and share it with everyone else by opening it to the LAN. Factor in that each world resides on each separate computer and suddenly it becomes a real hassle for more than one person to work on a given map.
A much more efficient way to go about doing things is to host a stand-alone server on the local network. This way players can come and go as they please without any one person needing to log in and share their world. Even better, you can host a Minecraft server on a machine that isn’t well suited for actually playing Minecraft (HTG has run modest Minecraft servers off little Raspberry Pi boxes without a problem).
Let’s take a look at how to setup a basic local Minecraft server both with and without mods.
Setting Up a Simple Vanilla Minecraft ServerThere are two ways to approach installing the simple vanilla Mojang-supplied Minecraft server. One method is very Windows-centric as you simply download an .EXE file and run it, with a convenient little graphical user window. That method doesn’t necessarily help OS X and Linux users however, so we’re going to use the .JAR based method which will help expand the process across all the platforms with only very minor tweaks necessary to shift between operating systems.
The first order of business is to download the official Minecraft server JAR file. As of this tutorial the version is 1.7.10. You can find it at the bottom of
the official Minecraft.net download page. Regardless of your operating system, you want the .JAR file.
After the file has finished downloading, move the .JAR file to a more permanent location. We placed the file in a /HTG Test Server/. You can place it anywhere you want but label it clearly, place it somewhere safe, and be aware that once you run the .JAR file all the server-related stuff will be downloaded/unpacked in folder the .JAR is located in, so don’t place it somewhere like a drive root or a home folder.
Execute the server for the first time by running the following command at the command prompt from the directory the .JAR file is located in, of course:
The above commands will execute the Minecraft server JAR file. The command runs Java, assigns 1GB of memory/1GB max, indicates the file is a JAR, names the JAR, and indicates no GUI is needed. You can adjust the assigned/max memory values upwards if you find you need to do so for particularly large worlds or servers with many players (say, during a LAN party), but we don’t recommend lowering the memory values.
If you need help installing Java on Linux, creating a shortcut for the launch process on OS X, or any other OS specific issue, we’d encourage you to check out the detailed guide to launching the server JAR file located on
the official Minecraft wiki.
The first time you run the server, you’ll see a message like the following:
This is perfectly normal. Look in the server directory for the EULA.txt file, open it, and edit the entry “eula=false” to “eula=true” to indicate your agreement with the Mojang server user agreement. Save and close the document. Run the server command again. You can run it with or without the “nogui” tag depending on your needs/desire. If you run it with the “nogui” tag, the server output and command interface will remain in the terminal window you launched the command in:
If you remove the “nogui” tag, a GUI window will open and provide a cleaner and easier to manage server experience:
The GUI interface shows you exactly what you would see in the terminal window in the large right-hand pane, as well as a stats window in the upper-left and a list of currently logged-in players in the lower-right. Unless you’re running the server on a resource strapped machine (or a headless device like a media server or Raspberry Pi) we recommend using the GUI.
During the second run of the server, after you accepted the EULA, additional files are downloaded and the default world is generated. The default world is located in /world/ and looks a whole lot like a regular old /.minecraft/saves/[someworldname]/ folder from regular Minecraft (in fact, it is). You can play on the randomly generated world or you can delete the contents of /world/ and replace it with the contents of a saved game from a standalone copy of Minecraft or a world save you’ve downloaded from the Internet.
Let’s join our freshly minted server and see how it looks. In order to join your game you need to be on the same LAN as the host computer and you need to know the IP address of the host computer.
With the IP address in hand, fire up Minecraft, click on Multiplayer from the main menu and add the new server or use the direct connect feature. If you need help with either of these options, see Connecting to Remote Servers section of the
Exploring Minecraft Multiplayer Servers lesson from our previous guide.
Here we are on the brand new server. Everything looks great and the world is loading smoothly. One thing you’ll note immediately is that the game is in survival mode. This is the server default, but we’ll show you how to change it in just a moment.
On the server side of things, you’ll see a stream of notices in the console window as things happen on it: players joining, players dying, player communications, and other notices. In addition you can use server commands both in the console window and if you are an OP or “operator” on the server. There are dozens of commands, many of them rather obscure and infrequently used. You can read
the entire command list on the Minecraft wiki, but we’ll highlight the ones most relevant to getting your server up and running in the table below.
Note: if you enter the command in the server console window you don’t need the leading “/” but you do if you enter it in the chat window as a player on the server.
These are the most immediately useful commands for running a small home server. There are additional commands that are useful if you open up your home server for public or semi-public use (such as /kick and /ban) but which are typically unnecessary for private home use.
Now that we’ve successfully launched our private home server, you might be wondering (especially after all the lessons devoted to them) how we can inject some awesome mods into our server. Next stop, server modding.
