Minecraft is a 3D sandbox video game and allows players a large amount of freedom to choose how to play it. It also offers no specific goals to accomplish. By early 2018, Minecraft had been sold over 144 million copies across all platforms and become world’s second-most popular video game of all time. The video game allows players to build with a variety of different cubes in 3D and resource gathering, exploration, combat and crafting. It’s not just a video game, it’s more than that. It’s also a tool where Kids can learn how to code, an open platform to be expanded by mod developers.
If you are new to Minecraft and planning to jump into the video game, you can use Minecraft realms to create your own world. Minecraft Realms is a lightweight alternative for running Minecraft private server. If you want to create your own Minecraft world and full Minecraft experience, then you are at the right place.
Here in this article, we will guide you how to make a Minecraft server on Windows. Follow the article step by step to your own private Minecraft server on the Windows operating system PC.
Prerequisites
- To create or Make server takes some time, you should have a bit of technical knowledge to configure a Minecraft server. You should have some basic knowledge of computers and networking concepts.
- Make sure you have some knowledge about how to using the command-line and editing configuration files
- Make sure you have some knowledge of networking in general (IP, DHCP, ports)
- Make sure you know about your system configuration
- Make sure you know about your network configuration
- Make sure you know about your router configuration (if you want other people to connect over Internet)
Running a Minecraft Server from Home
To run the Minecraft server, you don’t need a high-end configuration system, you just need a desktop computer. Notebooks and Netbooks don’t have good hardware configuration and their I/O performance is not up to mark for running a server. If you have enough powerful system, you can host a Minecraft server and play the game on the same system. If you are running a Minecraft server from home, use a wired ethernet network instead of wireless.
Running a Minecraft Server Outside Home
If you host Minecraft server from home system without a clear understanding of what you are doing, means you’re exposing your home network to the world. If you want to play Minecraft video game without hosting a private server, you can check out the public server options in the Minecraft forum. If you’d rather not take that risk and still want to manage a server, you can check out Minecraft server hosting provider in the Minecraft forum or other websites. You need to pay a monthly or annual fee for this type of server.
How to make a Minecraft server on Windows PC
Step 1. Make Sure you have installed latest version of JAVA
To make a Minecraft server, you required the latest version of Java Runtime Environment (JRE) for security purpose. TO verify that, do one of the following.
- Click on the start button and open the control panel, goto to the programs and look for the Java and click on update now option.
- Or open a command prompt and enter the code, java -version. You will see a version number and check out the latest version of Java. Click Here
- You can visit here to check java version from your browser. You can’t find Java version if you are using Google Chrome browser for this method. Because the browser does not run Java content.
- If you don’t have Java installed in the system of your version is outdated, you can download the latest version of Java from here.
Step 2. Download and start Minecraft Server software
- Download the Minecraft server from here. You will get the Java.jar file.
- Before starting the download, select the proper location to save downloading file.
- When you first run the server, it will create few configuration files on that location, where you save the downloaded file. It is better to have all the server files in a dedicated folder.
- Double click on the downloaded .jar file to start the server. It will create few server configuration files.
- Now find the eula.txt file in the folder and open it in a text editor and modify, eula=false to eula=true. It’s a proof that you accept and understand the end user license agreement. If you don’t modify the file, the Minecraft server will not work properly.
- If you find the “Can’t save server properties” error, then run the Minecraft server as an administrator.
Step 3. Enable port forwarding on your router
Note: port forwarding might cause security risks.
- If you are hosting server for players on your local reason, then you don’t need to do port forwarding. It’s used when you have a server and let users connect to your server. To learn more about the port forwarding. Click Here
- You need to find the router’s admin page to know how to configure port forwarding, once you find it. Find the Port Forwarding page and hit new service or custom service. Now set up the new rule, write its name as Minecraft, type as TCP and port, write 25565.
- It will also ask you to enter server’s local IP address as the Output IP or Server IP for the forwarded port. To find the server’s local IP, open a command prompt and write ipconfig.
Step 4. Configuring server from the command line
- One the command prompt to run Minecraft server.
- Now, Navigate to the Minecraft file path (named similarly like “minecraft_server.1.12.2.jar”) in the Minecraft server folder. Now, write the following command to start the server:
java -Xmx1024M -Xms1024M -jar {server file name} nogui
- Replace {server file name} with the actual server file name.
- If you’d rather use the server’s UI, exclude the “nogui” parameter:
java -Xmx1024M -Xms1024M -jar {server file name}
You can create a .bat file in the server folder to store the commands to start configured Minecraft server without writing all commands every time. Once your server starts running, you can invite other players to connect to your Minecraft server using local IP address, if they are on your home network. Or they can connect to your server via external/public IP address if they’re not on your home network.
You can find your public IP address, here. You can also check your Minecraft server accessibility via entering your public IP address into the Minecraft Server Status Checker tool.
