Hey! A friend recently asked me and a few other friends to play Minecraft, and I don’t know anything about hosting one, so why not give it a try? This page is mainly for writing down rough notes I had along the way, so I don’t forget about them :) . It is not meant to be a follow-along guide on how to set one up.

We first hosted it on my local machine via Docker and we all used ZeroTier to be on the same network (like Hamachi) then moved it to a VPS of mine. We ended up playing on a lightweight vanilla mod pack called SimplyOptimized then just added a few small mods on top. For that, a VPS with 2vCPU and 4GB RAM seems to be enough for 5 players playing at once.

Running the server Connecting to the same network (if server hosted locally)Running the client

Running the server

I used the Minecraft Server on Docker (https://docker-minecraft-server.readthedocs.io/en/latest/).

First, we tried a few Forge mod packs using the “Auto-download from CurseForge” method on the Minecraft image

Roguelike Adventures and Dungeons 2

Cottage Witch

To look for mods and modpacks, https://modrinth.com/ has a lot of them and the site looks nice.

TODO but we had some issues of server failing to start as I think some mods are not correctly categorized as client/server, or that the client had missing mods that needs to be fixed manually

Exclude client mods doesn’t seem to work

then tried the “Manual CurseForge server packs” method which is deprecated but works, cause it takes the server modpack instead, which I guess guarantees that it does not have any client only mods there

some tips

A friend of mine suggested to use paper mc as its more lightweight than the vanilla server with forge or fabric mod loader, but there wasn’t many mods for paper mc, so we went ahead with fabric instead.

Set memory to 1-1.5 GB lower than a VPS’s limit, otherwise the Docker container can be killed due to excess VPS RAM usage.

Set a max world size limit, so players don’t wander too far.

Preload chunks of the Minecraft world using https://modrinth.com/plugin/chunky, so server has less work when players are exploring, but it does make the save file bigger.

Can run some server commands from the cli using RCON docker exec -i minecraft-server-compose-mc-fabric-1 rcon-cli

some commands: to make someone admin /op <username> , to send a message to the world chat /say <message>

to create a new world or regenerate one, use LEVEL and FORCE_WORLD_COPY ref https://github.com/itzg/docker-minecraft-server/issues/1649

there is a config SETUP_ONLY, which is useful for using a modpack, but wanting to add a world generation mod, as normally, when server is created, it automatically creates the world as well

this is useful for migrating worlds as well

TODO add to onedrive things to do on join

change leaves
edit world map to display player icons
disable inventory failed swap notification
join party

Here is the docker-compose.yml file I have now.


services:
  mc-fabric:
    image: itzg/minecraft-server:java21
    tty: true
    stdin_open: true
    ports:
      - "25123:25565"
    environment:
      EULA: "TRUE"
      TYPE: "MODRINTH"
      MODRINTH_MODPACK: "https://modrinth.com/modpack/sop/version/1.21-4.2.1"
      # Set it 1-1.5GB lower than host's limit. Ref https://aikar.co/2018/07/02/tuning-the-jvm-g1gc-garbage-collector-flags-for-minecraft/
      MEMORY: "2700M"
      # Java jvm flags for better garbage collection
      USE_AIKAR_FLAGS: true
      # Minecraft version
      VERSION: "1.21"
      # False for cracked launchers to work
      ONLINE_MODE: "FALSE"
      # World settings
      # Unsure, but some evars e.g. LEVEL may need a full docker compose up -d to take affect, not just docker compose restart
      LEVEL: "terra"
      MAX_PLAYERS: 10
      MAX_WORLD_SIZE: 10000
      SPAWN_PROTECTION: 0
    volumes:
      - ./mc-fabric:/data

Connecting to the same network (if server hosted locally)

TODO

Running the client

TODO

Hosting a Minecraft Server

Running the server

Connecting to the same network (if server hosted locally)

Running the client