Hacker News Reader

Comment by academia_hack | Hacker News Reader

This is awesome! I'm still afraid that one of my friends will go on a Minecraft binge (or idle in a farm) and drive up the costs beyond the $13/month or so I pay for VPS hosting but I think this approach would objectively be quite a bit cheaper for the casual vanilla SMP server I run for a dozen or so folks. Anyone know how to estimate the "worst case" monthly cost for this config?

Edit: Just saw that the GitHub includes a link to an AWS calculator. Looks like a month of continuous usage caps out at $40-ish. Not too bad since my realistic worst case is probably more like 8/hrs per day rather than the full 24.

View on HN

If you're worried about idling in farms just auto-kick after 1 hour of AFK or w/e.

Why idle in farms? Can’t you just put down a chunk loader or something?

It's been a while since I played minecraft, so I don't know what a chunk loader is.

When I played, if nobody was in the vicinity of the chunks with your farm in it it would unload and of course then the farm would not produce, so people would AFK in their farm to keep the chunks loaded.

Some Minecraft mods add items that force the game to keep certain chunks loaded. From the casual "Can't you just" I assume the parent meant those. It is however also possible, but much more complicated, to force the game to keep chunks loaded in Vanilla Minecraft. [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dx5Wd28AKxQ (the video is a couple years old so the current implementation might be different, but I think the basic principles are still the same).

ilmango dropped a new chunk loader a few weeks back - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8z7q_pwjL4

Looks pretty easy to build.

That would have much the same cost effect if the server were kept up for it, and wouldn't be effective if the server were taken down.

If it's a mob farm, a chunk loader won't work on its own, I think?

Private minecraft servers as a service doesn't exist yet ?

> Private minecraft servers as a service doesn't exist yet ?

They do but, afaik, there's no "spin up and down" ones that charge you for usage; they're all "$X per month" fixed cost.

(Although looking at the costs these days, they're not that much higher than this would cost you for even a medium-sized world.)

There is https://exaroton.com/:en/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com