Can i build a server to play MC with friends?

VortexGamesYT · May 15

Me and some friends have decided to try to build a server if possible instead of paying monthly. Is it possible to do that if one of us in AZ and Cali? If so how and what should i be looking into? I tried finding videos but the are not too helpful in understanding how this works? If anyone can help explain, give some advice, or share a video it'll help a lot.

AndrewAsd · May 15

I'd give aternos a try. It's free, although not very fast. As for hosting your own there's plenty of tutorials, it's fairly basic. You download the server.jar, maybe do some configuration to adjust things like seeds, view distance, permissions and so on. Then you go on your router and set-up port forwarding such that your friends can connect to your server.

I'd recommend using PaperMC for the server, it's supposed to be fast and efficient, and it has extensive documentation.

https://docs.papermc.io/paper/getting-started/

manikyath · May 15

hardware wise, a server is just a computer.

one detail to note is that for hosting minecraft, single core performance is the name of the game. dont spend extra on getting *much many cores*. some stuff is offloaded on separate threads, so 2-3 cores is nice, but any more really isnt necessary. also, if you stick to a handful of people and vanilla minecraft, allocating 4GB RAM to your server is plenty, ignore anyone who tells you allocating more ram will make your server more faster.

if we're talking "a few friends" aka no more than maybe a douzen or so, a home connection fast enough to download steam games should be plenty to host a minecraft server.

as for software side of things, sort of depends on what you're after.. if you're just doing some minecrafting, paperMC is probably the way to go. if you're the "technical minecraft" sort of crowd ideally you use the vanilla server with fabric and some performance mods.

and if you're building a box specificly for running a minecraft server, i'd just stick some ubuntu derivative on it.

anothertealtiger · May 15

I think an important aspect of this is expectations! Running your own Minecraft server isn't actually too crazy-- you could easily run it off an old or spare PC you or your friends may have laying around. But if that computer happens to be not all that powerful to begin with, you'll have to deal with some performance issues that you otherwise won't get from a monthly hosted server. I mainly bring this up because my friend wanted me to run a super deeply modded server for him on our server, and I only gave it 4GB of RAM and... that was apparently not remotely enough haha. But that's specifically because his modpack was packed

This isn't to discourage you at all- selfhosting has been ultra mega fun for me and my friends but if you want it to run well just make sure you're running it on hardware that can do it!

That said, after you've gotten the hardware it's pretty straight forward to simply *run* an MC server. You just mostly start the software (tons of choices, like AndrewAsd and manikyath alluded to) on a machine, make sure you and your friends can access it and.... yah actually that's it haha. Networking can be a huge pain but I mean... ya got the folks here if you run into any issues.

VortexGamesYT · May 16

Okay thanks ill look more into this now that i have a baseline im pretty good at researching id say and ill definitely come back if i run into problems. I need a decent server because i plan on using a lot of mods and usually we have around 6 people playing on a very modded server. Thanks again ill definitely take note to all the advice.