Raspberry Pi Minecraft server
The first question people usually ask upon meeting me is, “Can you ride a pig?” I’ve never worked out if they mean in Minecraft or in real life. The second question is, “Can you run a Minecraft server on the Raspberry Pi?” The answer to both is, of course, “Yes”.
Edwin Jones (EdwinJ85 on the forums) explains how he made his.
You can get the original instructions by Jim Bruges here.
This does take some techincal nous — but you’ve had all day to install Raspberry Pi Minecraft and play, you should be experts. What I really liked about Edwin’s blog are his final comments. Whether you are hacking Minecraft or building a media server or sending them into near space or messing about in Scratch, this is why we do what we do:
You really have to admire the whole idea of the Raspberry Pi. They are brilliantly cheap, low power servers and whilst I may not have learned much about coding with them so far, I sure have learned a lot about the world outside of Windows, and just how much you can get out of very low priced hardware. The Pi represents a great deal of opportunity for all sorts of people with the ideas for all sorts of projects. I implore you to think of your own and give it a go, you won’t regret it.
And with that Manic Mineday has ended. Normal service will be resumed shortly. Goodnight.
41 comments
steven
I urge anyone wanting to setup a minecraft server to read the forum. The hard work has been done by others, you just need to follow some simple instructions.
clive — post author
Thanks Steven. Like most Raspberry Pi projects things don’t happen in a vacuum — lots of people have worked on this, sharing and building upon ideas and code. Edwin clearly references the guide that he used in his blog.
The lesson here is that Edwin was the only person to send us details about his Minecraft server (including lots of pictures!) when we asked for guest blogs ;)
edwinj85
That’s pretty much what I was going to say!
I think the saying goes “standing on the shoulders of giants” etc. I don’t think much gets done in the technology world without using the work of others at some point and I am very grateful to the work everybody else has done to make this happen.
Btw if anybody has issues with the server let me know, I haven’t tested it in a while and it’s only a 4 man server – I wasn’t expected to get published and I think it may have a heart attack with the extra attempts to connect.
TalkTalk broadband isn’t the most reliable of connections….
clive — post author
Being a giant is fine. But I’d rather be the little shouty bloke dancing up and down on his shoulders and twisting his ears to make him do my bidding :)
Jim bruges
I am honoured that he used my instructions
clive — post author
Thanks for writing them! I’ve put the link in the post itself too.
edwinj85
Thank you for writing them!
steven
Hi Clive, that is very true and credit to edwin and everyone who got us to where we are today.
Thanks to the great information that has been shared by the community I got my server working first time which is a rarity on my pi projects :-)
Dave407
Well, it may be easy, but I only get my server to run on the raspberry Pi. But everytime I try to connect (as a local player), I get the following error messages;
-connection lost: end of stream
– disconnected by server: outdated client
The error message depends on wich version of minecraft i’m trying to connect
Steven
This is the forum post I used http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=78&t=33678&p=291622&hilit=minecraft+server+miles+away#p291622
zproc
Since that thread and my forum post about Spigot I ran it with 5 players on my 512mb raspberry on a “light” map… some sort of “Sky Lands” / floating islands map I had downloaded, so there wasn’t a lot of chunks to display, but it was running well. I kept the view distance at 6 or 7 i think for this test… / but I used to lower the max build height to 64, even tho now it runs with another ‘floating island’ map type in creative mode and as it has very few ‘ground’ chunks so i pushed it to 256 so we’re able to build higher. It’s my third server, soon we’ll have more servers than players. :d // Tho there were some bugs with Spigot 1.6.x at first (it may run better since a few updates of the .JAR, haven’t played much since), I don’t think the dev of this version of Spigot reached a ‘Recommended Build’ yet, but is still a “development build”.
Jim bruges
Should you want to set up the same server as edwin the instructions he used are mine and are located here: http://picraftbukkit.webs.com/pi-minecraft-server-how-to
Brian
What build of Linux is it all running on?
edwinj85
Rasbian, but I would recommend using a rasbian server variant so you don’t get lots of stuff you dont need, like X server.
Arch etc may be more clean but they are more of a pain to set up. It depends how confident you are, but I still recommend rasbian.
Pierre
I successfully launched Spigot on my Pi this morning but unfortunately the server version is 1.5.1, which is outdated. I couldn’t find a client supporting the connection to this server version.
Where can I find Spigot supporting 1.6.2 version of the server? Or maybe just 1.5.2, so I can use it with the old version for Minecraft available on Minecraft website.
I tried latest stable CraftBukkit (which is running server version 1.5.2), it is usable but it has some annoying lags.
Thanks
Jim bruges
I will edit the link, if you go to the spigot website and click download a link to 1.6 is available
Natsirtt
Well, running a Minecraft server on a Pi sure is an interesting concept for those who would like to have a cheap Minecraft server to play with few friends, but I wasn’t able to be logged on Jim Bruges’ server more than a like one minute. And while I was in the game, I could’nt collect resources and I even fell out of the world for no reason.
So while I like the idea, I’m not sure a Pi can handle it.
But I’ll try on mine anyway, cause it really could be a good alternative to virtual LAN when it is a server ment to play with friends :)
Jim bruges
unfortunately, my server had some issues with a plugin. nothing to do with the pi but an outdated plugin. Sorry to hear that. it should be fixed now
Natsirtt
Oh, sorry for the quick conclusion ;)
A least this is reassuring because, like I said, such a server is really interesting for cheap multiplayer world :)
Thank you for the information !
Natsirtt
Yeah, pretty cool now ! :)
I’ll definitely set up one on my own Pi, since for now I have no time to do anything else with it.
Thanks for the hosting, that’s a good idea to show people what a Pi is capable of ! ;)
Rich
If you create your own server on the raspberrypi as per the instructions can you run the Minecraft PI client with all the gaming features without paying for the game??
Jim bruges
no, they are two different applications, you cannot log into normal minecraft servers in minecraft pi. It is built on the mobile version of minecraft not the desktop one.
edwinj85
Went on to check the pi MC server hadn’t crashed due to the load of earlier events, turns out internet random(s) from POLAND were on it and everything is working fine! That’s the furthest I’ve known somebody be able to connect from! Had a chat with one called Boromil, seemed like a top chap.
Yet again I am impressed with the Pi’s hardware ability to handle a lot more than any sane person would expect it could.
Jim bruges
generally, distance doesn’t matter with the pi, I regularly get visitors from the USA, Australia, all over Europe (mainly eastern !?!?) and occasionally from japan coming to my server in wiltshire!
AndrewS
Isn’t the Internet amazing? ;-)
twchambers
What is the average load of this server like on the pi? I’m wondering whether I can run it alongside my file server or whether I should dedicate a pi to running it.
edwinj85
This pretty much maxes out a Pi, especially if you want 4 players (it can’t really handle more than 4).
I would dedicate an entire pi for this task and one with 512mb ram at that so you can give java as much as possible.
Morot221
http://dev.bukkit.org/bukkit-plugins/nospawnchunks/
install this whit spigot and it will run for month without memory leaks
zproc
I heard of this plugin in the forum a while ago (i might have tried it out with bukkit before using Spigot), but I thought it wouldn’t be compatible with Spigot as Spigot if I remember well has already a bunch a chunk management optimizations.. are they really compatible?
edwinj85
I use it on my spigot install just fine :)
zproc
Thanks ! I will try it out then.
John
I tried setting this up earlier and it really works great. EdwinJ85, I really hope you keep this kind of stuff going. I’m eager to learn more!
MichaelW
I get this error message when I try to connect. Any solutions?
21:57:35 [INFO] Disconnecting /192.168.2.10:58065: Protocol error
21:57:35 [INFO] /192.168.2.10:58065 lost connection
mon.arc
Sounds like a port forwarding/IP issue. Make sure you forwarded port 25565 to your Pi’s IP address on your router settings.
Damon
i know you can use Python with Minecraft Pi Edition, but can I use it with this server setup? cause that could yield some fun and useful results :)
tim
this is pretty awesome, not that bad to setup at all.
james john
how do you get on to survival?
we have this at school
if you could tell me that would be great! :]
ashley
Hi all,
have set up a Minecraft server on my 512 Pi.
Runs really well apart from having to remotely run (using putty on pc) ,`sudo /opt/jdk1.8.0/bin/java -Xms256M -Xmx496M -jar /home/pi/spigot.jar nogui`
before i can logon to my server.
Have to do this every time i leave the game through client.
BTW using a cracked client for now for test purposes .
Any idea how to keep Minecraft live so can play/connect without having to restart spigot jar all time.
Logon is local/LAN
Yours,
Ashley
S
Same question as Ashley.
Kat
Is it possable to install the full version of minecraft?
Jason
Regarding running the server without having to manually start Java each time, write a bash script that does this for you and add it to the init scripts. Make the bash script a loop that restarts Java each time it ends, but have it look for a “quit” file so you can halt the loop easily.