I’m not sure how many of you know about Minecraft but for those of you that don’t I thoroughly recommend you check it out. Especially those of you who are into old skool graphics and gameplay.
For those of you who already know about it, did you know it only costs £8 to buy? that’s €9.95 ish! Well worth it seeing that if you wait until the BETA is out, you have to pay £20. So get in while you can. As an incentive to buy, the Minecraft alpha server was released today, so you can get your own servers up and running and help contribute to the community by submitting bug reports and feedback. It’s an alpha, so it is pretty buggy in places but it’s also still a hell of a lot of fun.
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Now that you have gone out and downloaded the server, you will probably be wondering how to run it. For those of you running Windows, you will just want to download the Minecraft Server program from here (must be registered and have purchased Minecraft) and then all you have to do is run it. Easy as…
For those of you on Mac OSX, it should also be pretty easy. Download the Minecraft_Server.jar file again from here, pop open a terminal window (Applications > Utilities > Terminal) and type:
java -Xmx1024M -Xms1024M -jar minecraft_server.jar nogui
Note that the 1024M in the above command is the amount of RAM you want to allocate to the server. The more RAM you have, the bigger the level will be but it will also be more demanding on your server. So you can replace it with 512M, 2048M etc – whatever you think your server can take.
Finally, for those of us that use Linux on our servers we can use the same command as above. However you will want to make sure that Java is available from the command line and that your version is up to date. First of all type:
java -version
It should echo back something along the lines of:
pyro@UB-Serv:~$ java -version
java version “1.6.0_18″
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (IcedTea6 1.8) (6b18-1.8-4ubuntu3)
OpenJDK Client VM (build 16.0-b13, mixed mode, sharing)
What you want to make sure is that your Java version is 1.6… which is the most up to date version. Once you have confirmed that, run the command exactly as shown for Mac OSX. If, however, you get an error or you don’t have Java installed, don’t panic. Run:
apt-get install openjdk-6-jre-headless
Which will download and install the Java framework. Then you can run the server.
A useful feature I use on Linux is the nohup command. If you do:
nohup java -Xmx1024M -Xms1024M -jar minecraft_server.jar nogui
It will run the server in the background but log all output to nohup.out, so you can check over the server logs.
Well I hope that has helped out some of you, and really do check out the game. It’s awesome, even just the Single Player!
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