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Does anyone know much about minecraft on PC. My eldest is currently playing on his PC and is keen to play multiplayer with his mates. I'm a bit unsure on the best way to do this; setting up a server looks a lot of hassle for someone who knows nothing about computers. I presume the easiest way is to find some other on line servers?
Online servers - generally free, and he can play with mates, but other players can be a nuisance.
You can pay for a private minecraft server for him and his mates, doesn't have to be hosted on your PC, there are a few services offering it if you Google. Not sure how much it costs, it's not a vast amount though.
First off they all need their own xbox accounts and know each others gamer tags and be friends with each other in xbox land. Depending on their age you may need to create an adult account as well and attach them to it (i've got instructions for this somewhere as you need to tweak the settings carefully to allow them to play with others). If you already have a microsoft, skype, onedrive etc. account then you can use this. This is by far the trickiest bit to set up.
Then if they are all online at the same time then one of them can just invite the others onto one of their worlds. When the owner leaves though, the the others get kicked out.
The next step would be to use a server which is online all the time so people can jump onto it whenever they want. The easiest and safest way to do this is to pay a monthly fee for one of the minecraft realms. There used to be 2 levels depending on how many players were allowed to join at once (i think it was 3 and 10). My kids have one that they have spent hours building with their cousins in Canada (they're getting very good at working out 3 time zones so they can all be on at once!). One person owns the realm and invites others to join. As it's located on the minecraft servers anyone can play on it at any time and it's all backed up online.
Alternatively you can go on one of the hundreds of other servers (some of which are free) that others have set up but you really need to do some research into what they are like, if they are kid friendly, hacker proof, games, just for exploring etc. I let ours go on the Hive which is a games server so they can play games like hide and seek and treasure wars either with random people on the internet or they can party up with their friends.
To communicate they can use the in built chat which is text only. However, recently i've been setting up a google Meet voice call (it seemed to work the best as it would sit behind all the other windows on the tablet) so that they can all talk to each other. If they are anything like ours then you just need to make sure that they are on the other side of the house with all the doors closed! It's been a great way for them to interact with their friends during lock down.
Finally, i would recommend finding out where the files are stored for their worlds and backing them up to a USB stick occasionally. They can spend hours and hours building worlds and it would be gutting for them to lose everything if something happened to the PC/tablet.
Thanks for the help.
Didn't realise they could just invite players to their world; will go back and check that out. (Seemed a bad point compared to the x box version)
I have managed to figure out joining a free one online; taken from the list at Minecraft.Net.
I will see if that keeps him entertained for a while; if not I will check out the cost of an online server. Like the Google meet idea, he won't use text (lazy).
I am rapidly having to get up to speed with IT now the kids are getting involved!
Just done this for my 10 year old girl.
Set up an account with Aternos, and create a server (Basically follow the instructions, its easy).
When you want to play start the server, I created a browser bookmark to the page, she just has to press start and wait a couple of minutes.
Then on Minecraft its something like Join Online, or play online from the options page, type in the domain name of their server (Which is [username].aternos.org - its right there on the main screen when you start).
Wait to join and you're in. You can have up to 20 players.
Upsides:
- Free
- 20 players
- Doesn't take long to sort
Downsides:
- You have to start it manually. To save on. their server resources your server will shut down after everyone is no longer online. So you have to arrange times to play.
- It can take ages to start at peak times (5+ mins)
- Not the fastest can cause some laggy play (but generally not terrible)
- One more thing for you to get the dreaded 'Daaaaaaad' over.
If she gets into playing online I will probably invest £5 a month or something into a dedicated always on server.
Be aware though that I don't think you can mix Java and Bedrock editions in the same server, so some friends may get left out.