Hullo to those of you already sucked into that psychologists wet dream known as "Minecraft" or "pleasure through monotony" (as I like to refer to it). Hello also to those of you that wish to view our dirty habit and aim your stinkbombs of scorn at us, firing wildly from afar! Welcome one, welcome all!

Ok so ... I'm addicted ... and we have currently got our wonderful Leborn hosting our Sneaky Monkey Utopia server. This is pure awesomeness.

However the server can only really be accessed when Leborn brings it online (this makes cold turkey happen in me, don't know about anyone else). I feel its unfair to demand Leborn keep this server online 24/7 just so at 5am I can drunkenly marvel at my 1M cubed architectural monstrosities of the day and reluctantly drag myself away from my cubist paradise.

I offer the alternative.

I can host.

My PC is on 24/7.

It gets turned off where there is a power cut/system fail/important update/coffee incident ... um ... and that's it pretty much.

Now the issues are, should you wish to take me up on this offer:

1. How can I make sure my PC is secure if I'm opening ports? I'm willing to do this but only if my security can be maintained so I'm unsure about what processes are involved here.

2. This would mean us either starting a new world server or finding some way of exporting our current world to me and installing it on my PC to run as a server. I have no idea how we might go about that.


I'm only posting this so that officially we can all get our good ideas down in text for us all to knock around

gah i spent £8 on a 227k .exe

and its actuslly quite good D:

well im laggy on this server, so im all up for it.

after 4 hours straight, where i wandered off in a random direction, found a huge mine, spent 20 mins walking back then dragging aki off into the wilderness, with the intention of going back into my super discovery, we also stumbled across aki's lost mine of wonderment, then trekked all the way to my mine and spent over a hour exploring it......


needless to say i'm hooked :/

day 2.....

got up, logged on minecraft (i think i have a problem).......


aki i h8 u!!!!!

while playing lotro, i saw a tree and immediately tried emoting punch repeatedly in a vain attempt to get some raw materials.....

i'll get u for this aki!

K, just so you can associate more stuff with MC > http://kotaku.com/5714879/marshmallowcraft

How did they tear themselves away from the game long enough to make those?!

well if needed i have a server running out of my house so i can host it if need just let me know. Right now im just hosting movies off that server

Wow how much my pad has changed since this screenshot!

Wow Kermit! That's really kind of you. We'll let you know if things go awry this end

Ok HOSTING on mine is a no go Lag-o-riffic. Time to start reviewing the solutions

im running a 50 mg connecting. Let me know what you need hosted and we can give mine a go. worst case it doesnt work

The problem seems to be CPU usage more than anything else, I tried hosting on my old web server which has a great connection, RAM and HDD space but it absolutely slaughtered the CPU, seeing if I can upgrade it as I've been meaning to for ages anyway, will take a while as I've got a couple of TB of data to transfer though so something else in the mean time would be good unless someone has a better option.

Kermit, my green AK toting chum, I think its time we took you up on your exceptionally kind offer.

Firstly, have you played Minecraft yet?

If not I must warn you not to. It's horribly addictive and yet, in essence, totally pointless and a waste of life-force. I've not been this addicted to something since 9 years ago when I actually considered rehab (back then I managed without it... I'm not sure I could this time lol).

So really the first thing we should do is do a bit of a test server to check everything runs smooth. If successful we can transfer our current world data to you and the universe will be zen once more.

Heres a bunch o links in case you don't know already :
Minecraft home page
Downloads, the server software is at the bottom. I believe you can run a server without paying for the game (if I'm wrong somebody kick me in the crotch).
A youtube vid on how to setup a Minecraft server. This vid got me through it

Should this work and you be willing to host I'm sure, should there be any fee's incurred, many of us would be glad to chip in (within reason lol, I could feel a request for a new server echoing about the cosmos as soon as I wrote that lol)

Once you have your server installed and running just let us know and post us a link to your external IP. We should be able to connect using that.

Then testing shall begin in earnest

Many many thanks

ok ill set it up this morning and we can give it a shot. no garuntees but will try. my servers a i7 so it shoulkd be good. ok how many play this as im not going to allow 20 to connect i was think 4 or 5 at a time. so i need a number

Well I'm moderately sure we've had more than that on - more like 6 or 7 at times.

There is of course the other solution of looking for a hosting provider (which I was actually thinking about doing when we were having issues getting connected to Leborn's).

From a technical standpoint minecrack servers are quite expensive, because of the filthy java etc., memory and cpu requirements are comparatively high.

Unless somethings changed they, don't natively support multi-homing, meaning most of the big game server providers are a bit snotty about the whole affair.

Some friends in the industry have quoted around 55-80p per slot per month based on resources (price is dependent on resource testing) to house on an unmanaged vms (might be an effort to set that up though)

what do you think the chances are that the author will rewrite the code into a more server- friendly way?

having looked through the code, I'd say between 0 and none.

It might improve a bit as some of the stuff is optimized, but no great changes without rewriting the lot I'd imagine

coincidentally multiplay are currently offering 75p per slot. They're expensive, but I've noticed a lot of minecraft server rental shops spring up, take money orders then disappear.

Well until recently SMP was very much on the backburner, and there does need to be a rewrite (I suspect of both the Nether and the server) for the Nether to work in SMP. So I'm not actually so pessimistic of a rewrite at some point IF they do try and put the Nether in SMP at all

That being said it could be a *very* long way off if that is the case.

ok guys got the server up and running your world. Give it a go and let me know. Kadey said it was ok and he can drop blocks now

IP 99.225.10.230:25565

Kermit you are a GOD! The server runs perfectly! The only glitches I'm getting are due to the Beta nature of the game! I cannot thank you enough If you need anything don't hesitate to ask.