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Comment by erbo | Hacker News Reader

How about playing with your kids? I have a private Minecraft server set up where I, my fiancee, our godsons, and their mother all collaborate. We use a custom-assembled modpack with a lot of different options; my fiancee has been learning to breed trees and bees (Forestry mod), while I've got a nuclear reactor going (IndustrialCraft 2 mod) and am starting to design a rail system (RailCraft mod), and one of our godsons has been building fancy houses, furnished with add-ons from BiblioCraft and MrCrayfish's Furniture Mod.

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I'd love to hear where you are hosting that server. I currently have a tekkify [1] private server running with some additional mods such as Forestry and currently the world folder is about 700MB. For a while I've used an openvz vps but the load was too high and I pulled it to our local network on an old machine I had laying around. (For those wondering, openvz is a no go for modpacks unless you have a very expensive plan.) The load went from 2 to 5 which is terrible. I've been thinking about getting a dedicated machine at kimsufi [2] as hosting locally in our home network isn't so great really with low upstream speeds. For a vanilla world however (no mods except bukkit) you could run it on a openvz host though. To even lower the load more you could tweak the view-distance or even add a bukkit-plugin which limits the amount of entities that spawn.

[1]: http://tekkify.com/mods [2]: http://www.kimsufi.co.uk

I've got a Spider server on Creeperhost, which I use for myself. At the moment I'm running the Direwolf20 pack with an insane amount of automation going on, all chunkloaded in the few chunks around my base. I've gotten to the point where I'm starting to have problems with CPU load, but if I spread my stuff out and turned off things I don't need anymore it'd be fine. (Eg: I don't think I really need more than the 120 million cobblestone I've collected, or the million logs, or 125k+ carrots and potatoes.)

The server is cheap enough, and if I wasn't so nuts it could handle a small number of players easily.

Honestly I don't know I can host Minecraft for free, maybe I can set up a server to try it out and see how it goes. What's minecraft's business model if the server is free?

Sort of backwards to what you might expect: they give away the server and sell the client. (Which makes sense, since the client can also be used to play standalone.)

The client costs $26.95; you can buy it online with a credit card, or buy prepaid game license cards in some stores. You authenticate with Mojang's central server when you play the game. Actual game servers are usually configured to reject client connections if the user isn't authenticated. (You can turn that option off, but you get a big warning message in the server logs when you do.)

The same login for "vanilla" Minecraft also works with modded versions, such as those accessed through the Technic Launcher (http://www.technicpack.net).

They sell copies of the games? I don't play minecraft but AFAIK they don't host any servers themselves, its all community driven servers.

OK. Thanks. Just checked with my kids and I was told they're no longer interested in mindcraft and think it's "boring". They're doing those html5-games-for-fun and got addicted into chess these days.

Have they tried modded versions? You can add mods to Minecraft for almost limitless capabilities.

Would love to setup a server to play with my daughters too. Could you point me to some resources on how to do it?

Consider going with a specialized managed hosting service for minecraft; they're fairly affordable and tend to scale in price based on amount of RAM the machine has. For reference, example of hosting companies are beastnode, creeperhost, and 'redstone host'.

While I myself can appreciate maintaining a linux VPS and installing things from scratch (erm, that's precisely how I do minecraft hosting), managed hosting 'just works' without a maintenance overhead, and there are easy to use web control panels for plugin installation and configuration.

Most servers that kids like to play on aren't standard - they are 3rd party modifications (ex: bukkit). Such 3rd party servers have plugins that make the gameplay more usable. Example of some useful plugins are essentials, worldedit, worldguard. The headaches you will typically get is upgrading the server (after a minecraft update) and installing plugins. The hosting services mentioned above make it incredibly easy.

Here's a quick tutorial from DigitalOcean: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-...

My server is actually at my home, so my godsons and their mother use a VPN to log into it. It's easier to have it hosted on a cloud service like DO. (If you're just accessing it at home, you don't have to bother with the VPN part.)

Thank you very much - 5 minutes and it's already running!

It's fairly easy, feel free to email me if you have questions. Though I've noticed a modpack wich fancy things really adds to the experience (playing with my younger brother and sister) as in vanilla you're fairly limited when it comes to decoration and ways-to-go. Hosting a modpack trough technicpack [1] is basically loading the modpack and afterwards moving the folder to the server and running it over there.

[1]: http://www.technicpack.net/modpack/list

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