AVOIDING THE MINEFIELDS

As we’ve discussed, Minecraft Pi is very similar to the Pocket edition of Minecraft, which can be played on handheld devices such as Android phones and iPhones. It can’t interact with people using the official Minecraft client. According to reports on the Mojang website, it appears the client hasn’t been updated in a while, but if you simply want to make simple structures and learn to code, without the extra features of the full Minecraft client, it’s ideal.

Although we’ve seen it’s possible to get the full version of Minecraft 1.8.9 running on a Raspberry Pi 3 (see the boxout, above), the method isn’t officially supported by Mojang. This means that you’re likely to see reduced performance compared to a regular desktop machine, including glitches and crashes some of the time.

The experimental graphics driver that has to be enabled on the Raspberry Pi to use the full version of Minecraft stops the official Minecraft Pi client from working, but you can disable it again by running sudo raspi-config and then rebooting the machine.

Neither version of Minecraft plays particularly well if you’re accessing the Pi over VNC, so it’s best to play it directly.

If you wish to play the full version of Minecraft, you do need to purchase an account from Mojang (currently priced at US$26.95). If you now have the bug and want to take it further, read on for details of how to set up your own Minecraft server on the Pi, and build your own digital world block by block.

MINECRAFT SERVER

We’ve so far discussed how to play Minecraft directly on the Pi, partly for fun and partly as an introduction to programing with Python. This part of the tutorial concerns installing the Minecraft server software on the Raspberry Pi 3. This enables others running the Minecraft client on their computers to connect to your own online world and play free from thieves and ‘griefers’.

Minecraft runs in Java, which is pre-installed in the latest version of Raspbian, meaning it’s easier than ever to set up a server. The server has fairly low requirements, but for best performance, we recommend using