Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am reviewing the history of the Minecraft server my family started for us and a couple friends. Let’s get started!
It all started when we left a larger community when its figurehead started appealing towards a different audience and the culture shifted a little too far for comfort. My sister assembled a series of datapacks from the Hermitcraft server that would give a Vanilla feel to the game while adding a few fun things, resulting in the “Creepers and Cream” pack.
Using a few old parts, I spent a few intense weeks working on Micro Core Linux, trying to optimize every last drop of performance out of the aged CPU. In that time, the biggest takeaway I had was learning the root directory, /. In the end, Java did not want to work for me, so I capitulated and used a ready made distro, MineOS.
MineOS is a Linux distribution that was built to host Minecraft. All overhead is trimmed down, and the firewall is sealed tight, only opening ports absolutely vital for operation: Port 22 for SSH, Port 25565 as the default Minecraft port, Port 8443 for HTTPS access to the WebUI. While I wasn’t too sure about this WebUI and how much it would cut into the precious resources of the host machine, I will say it has been worth it.
One of the early optimizations was adding G1GC to the Java arguments. On the default Java garbage collection, Minecraft would just keep carving out more and more RAM and try to clean it out all at once — literally the worst case possible for a game where things are constantly being loaded and unloaded all the time. I added all the RAM I had and still had laying around and I still had a predictable big crash after a couple weeks of nonstop play.
Things were largely smooth after that. I set up automatic daily restore points and weekly archives. We ended up investing in a 1TB drive when the archives filled it up and the server declined to continue running. My laptop’s Windows drive was formatted in the crossfire.
Over time, our community grew. We aren’t a huge server, but we have a few regulars. The limiting factor I cannot control is the CPU. It has four cores, but get just two people on there in different parts of the map and it maxes out the activity for a single core, and the server starts skipping ticks every so often. It’s still very playable, but I’d like to not see that message, if possible. There are three other threads, but Minecraft servers are still unable to use more than one core at a time. So that is our limiting factor…
At least it was, until people started having random connection issues. It looks like our ISP has seen fit to make things easier for the general public, which is fine, as long as you don’t alienate your power users. Long story short, they’ve moved things around and made their online protection more aggressive, labeling at least one of our players’ IP addresses as malicious. We told it to allow access, and it only gave him a month. I tried looking into port forwarding, and it was elsewhere in a place I couldn’t find. Tech support was no help because the line dropped during a hold and nobody ever called back.
In the face of these challenges outside our control, we are now considering moving to a hosting service. We don’t know which one yet, or when we will move over, but in the meantime, I’m trying to open a creative world on the same machine. The first server rarely uses more than 4GB of RAM anymore, and there are still three other cores, though I will be saving at least one for normal operations and miscellaneous overhead.
Final Question: If you play Minecraft, what version did you start playing on?