Building a Minecraft Server
Nathan Taylor is here to help you become the coolest parent/aunt/uncle there is.
Last month we talked somewhat generically about setting up private game servers for you and your friends and family. This month we thought we might put it into practice, and walk through the process of setting up a private Minecraft server where you and your kids and their friends can play together, unbothered by the great unwashed public.
Prepping the network
Over the past three months we have published short guides on individual aspects of preparing your home network for running a game server, so we won’t repeat those lessons in full here. But briefly, follow these steps:
1 SETTING UP DDNS
Full guide: TechLife January 2020 Home Networking column.
This step is optional, but setting up DDNS for your home network will make it much easier for players outside of your home network to connect. Instead of having to keep track of a continually updating IP address, they can connect to your network using a fixed URL – something like joesminecraftserver.ddns.net.
We’d recommend heading to no-ip ( noip.com), which offers free DDNS, and signing up to create your own personal URL. You’ll then have to either log into the administration console of your router and find the DDNS settings (assuming it supports no-ip); or install the no-ip agent software on the PC you plan to run the Minecraft server on.
Note that with no-ip free URLs expire in 30 days, so you’ll have to log back in every month to recreate the URL.
2 FIXING THE LOCAL IP ADDRESS OF THE SERVER
Full guide: TechLife February 2020 Home Networking column.
The second task is technically optional as well, but creating a fixed local IP address for your Minecraft server will mean that you don’t have to change the port forwarding and Minecraft client settings every time you reboot your server. It gives the router a fixed target for port forwarding and local clients a fixed IP to connect to.
In Windows, go to Settings > Network & Internet and click on Change connection properties. Click on the network name, find IP settings and click edit to change them to Manual. Then enter the details:
• The IP address is the IP address that will be permanently assigned this server. The first three numbers have to be the same as your gateway/router address, and the fourth has to be different and between 0 and 255. So, if your router’s IP address was 192.168.0.1, then you could set the IP address to 192.168.0.10.
• The subnet prefix length should be 24. (On older Windows versions, this would be called a subnet mask and be 255.255.255.0.)
• The Gateway is the private IP address of your router, the one you use to log into the router admin console (commonly 192.168.0.1, 192.168.1.1 or 10.1.1.1).
• You can use Google’s DNS at 8.8.8.8 (primary) and 8.8.4.4 (secondary).
3 FORWARDING THE PORT
Full guide: TechLife March 2020 Privacy and Security column (or portforward.com).
Finally, you’ll have to forward the port on your router so that people connecting to your server from outside your home network will not be rejected by your router’s firewall.
In your router’s administration console, find the port forwarding settings, usually around the firewall settings or under the ‘apps and gaming’ header. Then create a new rule that forwards TCP port 25565 to the local IP address of the server computer (established in step 2 above). After that, you should be good to go.
The server software
Now for the Minecraft server software itself. On Windows, follow these steps:
1 GETTING JAVA
Before we do anything, we need to install Java on the server, since the Minecraft server runs on top of it. Head to: java.com/ en/download/manual.jsp
Download and install the latest version of Java for your device.
2 INSTALLING THE SERVER
Now for the server software itself. Head to: www.minecraft. net/en-us/download/server
Click on the download link, which will download a file called server.jar to your computer. Create a new Minecraft directory to save it to.
Don’t just click on it to run it however. Instead, in Windows, type notepad in the search bar to launch the text editor Notepad. Then enter a single line of text in the document: java -Xmx1024M -Xms1024M -jar server.jar
Now save it as minecraftlauncher.bat in the same directory as you saved the server.jar file. This is very important: it must have a .bat extension, while Notepad will default to .txt. So when you save it you have to switch ‘Save as type’ to All Files and enter the full file name with extension in the ‘File name’ field.
This will be your launcher for the server, allowing you to run it just by double clicking on the
.bat file.
3 RUNNING AND FINAL SETUP
Now, to launch it, double click on minecraftlauncher.bat. What will happen next is a little anticlimactic – a DOS Command window will briefly appear and then disappear. Don’t worry – that’s what’s supposed to happen. You’ll see that in the directory several now files have been created: eula.txt, server. properties and a logs directory.
In order to progress, you need to open up eula.txt in Notepad. In the text of that document you’ll see a line: eula=false
Edit the document, changing the ‘false’ to ‘true’.
Save the document. This indicates you’ve read the end-user license agreement.
The server won’t run until you do this.
Now run minecraftlauncher. bat again. This time the GUI will appear. It will take a few moments to prepare the spawn area, but then it will be up and running, ready for players to connect. When you close this Window, the Minecraft server will shut down, so if you want to keep the server running while using the server PC just minimise it.
Now there’s quite a bit more here to twiddle with. The server. properties file contains all the settings for the server. If you open it in Notepad, you’ll see a host of settings – the game mode, whether to spawn monsters, how many players to allow and so on. In addition, more files will have been created in the directory for white and blacklists of players (banned-ips.json, banned-players. json, whitelist.json) as well as for players to be designated as operators (ops.json, which you might want to add your username to), which can all be edited in Notepad or by using operator commands in game.
We don’t have the space here to cover them all, but we can suggest starting at the official Minecraft Wiki server settings page ( minecraft.gamepedia.com/ Server.properties). You can also find information on adding data and resource packs, as well as copying custom worlds into your world folder. The server creates a vanilla world by default, but you really can customise the experience if you want to.
Connecting
With the server up and running, all you need to do now is connect. Fire up the Minecraft client on any device, then go to, depending on your version, Multiplayer or Play->Servers. Choose to add a new server.
Then you enter the details of your server. Give it a name. Then enter the address, which is either the DDNS URL you created above, or, if you’re on the same local network as the server, the local IP address of the server (eg. 192.168.0.6). The port should be 25565.
And hopefully, if the port is forwarded and the server running, it should connect, dropping the player into the private Minecraft world of your server. Enjoy!