Month: March 2020

I’ve recently setup a computer each for both my boys, my eldest – currently 8 at writing, is around the same age I was when I first got into computer (anyone remember loading games and programs from tapes… ahh the sound – good times ;))

Anyway, with the mass of available games, and a lot of inappropriate games too I decided to put Minecraft on, they both like Lego and I thought this would be an ideal start.

So, computer running and Minecraft installed, they both like it. But.. while I don’t want them to play online, I quite like the idea of them being able to interact in the same world. So, why not setup a local minecraft server they can play and be safe in (real world safe, not from creepers!)

Ideally I would of preferred a Raspberry Pi setup, doesn’t take it too much space and with the Pi 4 and 4GB ram should be enough, at the moment there isn’t an ARM version of the Bedrock server, and while I know you can create one – or even get the current one working on a Pi – I wanted something quick.

Using Ubuntu Server

This is the route I am going down, I have re purposed an old slimline desktop pc to use.

First job, get Ubunto, go to; https://ubuntu.com/download/server. I think it makes sense to use the server edition, at the time of writing the 2 versions available are version 18.04.4 LTS and 19.10. I got the 18.04.4 as this was the recommended version for the Minecraft Bedrock server, and as this was the only thing I would be using it for it was okay for me.

I used Rufus to create a bootable USB and off I went installing Linux. Wow how times have changed since my last Linux install (exluding Pi’s here), it was so.. easy. As it was so easy I am not going to go through this step by step. Follow all the prompts. At the networking one I disabled IPv6 and set a static IPv4 address for my network, make the appropriate changes for your setup – a fixed IP is preferable!

So now we have a computer running Ubunto, how easy was that.

Minecraft Bedrock

Now for minecraft, you can download it from https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/download/server/bedrock/, but I pefer to us a script to do it – fortunately someone has already created a nice script for us – James Chambers.

To get it, follow these steps;#

First, log into your Linux terminal, or SSH in.
Now to get the script, run

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/TheRemote/RaspberryPiMinecraft/master/SetupMinecraft.sh

We need to alter the permissions, so run

chmod +x SetupMinecraft.sh

and finally, to run the script, type

./SetupMinecraft.sh

Now it will ask you some questions for the setup, the first one being what is the name, think of this as the instance, you can have multiple instances running – remember though, if you have multiple instances make sure you change the ports to different ones. For each instance you will get a new folder within the minecraftbe folder. Follow all the prompts, and at the end you should have a running instance.

Now all I had to do log onto my sons computers and add the server, yay it works.

So.. next, how do I setup a different world?!?
I downloaded a world from the marketplace, just a cheapish one to try, I did this on the Windows 10 version, once downloaded I created the world, this is then saved to the following folder on your Windows PC

C:\Users\yourusername\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.MinecraftUWP_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalState\games\com.mojang\minecraftWorlds

In this folder you will see a folder per world, what you can do is copy this folder into the worlds folder within the instance folder of the minecraftbe folders on your Linux server. If you aren’t sure how, you can use WinSCP from windows to transfer the folder – rename the world folder after copying to the name, within the world folder there is a file called levelname.txt, open this file and make a note of the text.

Now, open the server.properties file in the instance folder, find the line:

level-name=Bedrock level

Replace the Bedrock level text to the name from the levelname.txt.
In my case, it says Jungle Template in the txt file, so my new line would read

level-name=Jungle Template

The case is important.

Restart your instance, it should be working with the new World.