7 ms·

A Census of Minecraft Servers

245 points by sidedishes 4y ago

bemmu 4y ago
Really good post. It's amazing how fast you can scan all of IPv4. I also needed tune SQLite recently for an event logging server, and "PRAGMA journal_mode=WAL" helped a lot.
- yellow_lead 4y ago
  Yes, the author would probably get another huge speed up there. Some more potential optimizations here [1]. [1] https://phiresky.github.io/blog/2020/sqlite-performance-tuning/ https://phiresky.github.io/blog/2020/sqlite-performance-tuni...
- capableweb 4y ago
  > Really good post. It's amazing how fast you can scan all of IPv4. If you're just scanning one port, which the author seems to have done, you can probably do it in some minute or two, unless you wanna play nice and lower the rate of sending packets. Otherwise if you wanna scan full IPv4 + all ports, it'll take a couple of minutes at least. Masscan with the right hardware seems to be able to do it in five minutes or less.
  - 0des 4y ago
    speaking of massscan, how about those dang expanse palo alto networks guys. > YES IM STILL SITTING IN THE SAME SPOT I WAS THE LAST TIME YOU SCANNED ME AN HOUR AGO.
NelsonMinar 4y ago
The most interesting part of this to me was the list of top mods by popularity. But when I looked a lot of them seemed for much older Minecraft versions or for old versions of the mods. For instance "Pam's HarvestCraft" is mentioned but that's been deprecated in favor of a HarvestCraft 2. Is that just a quirk of how the mod names are reported and folks are really running newer stuff? Are older modded servers still popular? Are the servers themselves mostly old and no longer used?
- Forricide 4y ago
  Many people still run on older modded versions. To use the example you gave, HarvestCraft 2's CurseForge page[0] says: > Welcome to the brand new HarvestCraft for 1.14.4 and beyond! Please read carefully as this is NOT a update of Pam's HarvestCraft but a re-boot. 1.14.4 is 3 years old, but many (many!) servers are still running on 1.12 or older versions if doing modded. There simply isn't an incentive for many mod owners to update their mods to the latest version, so the "community updates" as a whole are generally quite slow and people end up stuck on their favourite version. Edit: Looking at the article, they also only analyze Forge mods. On newer versions, other mod loaders are gaining popularity, whereas Forge is the de-facto mod loader for 1.12. [0] https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc-mods/pams-harvestcraft-2-food-core https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc-mods/pams-harvestcra...
  - Filligree 4y ago
    > There simply isn't an incentive for many mod owners to update their mods to the latest version There is quite a strong incentive. What there is not, is means — Forge and Minecraft have both changed dramatically between versions, to the point that many mod developers throw their hands up in the air and rewrite the mod entirely. For something complex enough that that isn't an option, for instance Electrical Age, it's easy to remain stuck on an older version forever. There's no documentation, and the API owners often assume that forcing a complete rewrite of major parts of the mod is fine. It's really not.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Some mods are also forever stuck at a given version as the source isn’t open and the mod author doesn’t want to port, is missing, or has died. Thaumcraft 4 is a big example.
    - NelsonMinar 4y ago
      It's a miracle that the Minecraft mod scene exists at all. The old MCP project that made tools to decompile the obfuscated code to something readable and then recompile it again was just the most remarkable hack. I guess that's years out of date now and I vaguely recall Microsoft was more open to supporting mod authors in recent years. But I guess from this discussion it's still kind of a mess.
ryukafalz 4y ago
One thing the author may have missed here because I didn’t see it mentioned: this also misses any servers not hosted on the default port of 25565. I don’t know how common this really is, but Minecraft has SRV record support, and for those of us running more than one Minecraft server on a single box it’s likely at least one will be on a different port.
- teaearlgraycold 4y ago
  It’s very common for cheaper Minecraft SaaS hosts to serve it on a non-default port.
- ruune 4y ago
  Yeah, I usually set up private servers to use some meme port and I'm sure that's not an uncommon practice
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
  > Minecraft has SRV record support He’s scanning IP addresses, not dns names, so there’s no easy way to get SRV records. He could first do a reverse DNS lookup, but that would slow things down tremendously and also there are many, many Minecraft servers running without DNS names
  - dwild 4y ago
    His point is that because of SRV record, using the default port is not needed, thus it's make it more likely that a server wouldn't mind being on another port.
- trutannus 4y ago
  25565 is less common than alternate ports from what I've seen. Most small, individually run, servers are not running 25565.
- infogulch 4y ago
  So a proper census would do a reverse dns lookup on every IP looking for a "minecraft" SRV record and connecting to that.
TkTech 4y ago
I guess I should add a "Blog Posts" page to wiki.vg for good quality dev-orientated articles like this.
- TkTech 4y ago
  https://wiki.vg/Dev-focused_Blog_Articles https://wiki.vg/Dev-focused_Blog_Articles
lom 4y ago
What a pleasant surprise, I know the author from somewhere else. Small world! Very enjoyable read and even more interesting results. 4 Minecraft servers per 10000 people in Germany is kind of insane to think about. What was the number 2? The author made it sound like it was the US, but that has 4x less
farmerstan 4y ago
Do ISP block this sort of mass scanning? Seems like something that is easy to detect and block.
- alar44 4y ago
  No, why would they? It's like pissing in the ocean.
jtvjan 4y ago
I'm surprised that the majority of servers are running an unmodified version of the server software. I had expected the majority of servers to be running a Bukkit-compatible modification at this point.
rnd420_69 4y ago
a few dozen transactions a second seems horrendously slow no matter what is going on under the hood there.
jrmg 4y ago
I’m kind of amazed that you can still do massive scans like this and not face some bad consequences like getting blocked somewhere, or having your hosting provider get very annoyed at you.
- ethbr0 4y ago
  1 packet going out to 4 billion hosts probably doesn't even matter next to a few 4K video streams. I expect if author had launched it through CGNAT, someone wouldn't have been pleased. (Correct me if I'm wrong)
  - MertsA 4y ago
    Presumably CGNAT implementations have some safeguards to prevent one client from exhausting state tables.
- poink 4y ago
  Your host isn't likely to care unless it causes them grief. There are so many scans happening at any given moment I doubt any of the targets will notice yours. I do vaguely remember one of these, "I scanned the whole internet! It's easy!" stories from years ago where the author wound up receiving an email from someone at Electric Boat who told them, "Please don't portscan us. We're required to call the FBI when it happens." Your host would probably be "very annoyed" if they received one of those, but I doubt anyone cares enough to send such a message nowadays.
  - andai 4y ago
    >I scanned the whole internet! This one? http://census2012.sourceforge.net/paper.html http://census2012.sourceforge.net/paper.html My favorite part is the animated day/night cycle at the end.
  - R0b0t1 4y ago
    Portscan them more so they fix their process.
- Teletio 4y ago
TheGoodBarn 4y ago
This article is wonderful, I love the working knowledge. A lot of the idea feels similar to the recent Tom7 Harder Drive video: https://youtu.be/JcJSW7Rprio https://youtu.be/JcJSW7Rprio I had never seen some of this IP charting and stuff and in his video he does a lot of similar stuff.
TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
> how many Minecraft servers are out there? Drumroll, please... 160,992
- Jamie9912 4y ago
  On IPv4, running on port 25565, which were online at the time of being scanned
  - lostlogin 4y ago
    … and were publicly accessible.
    - glowingly 4y ago
      and were Java servers. Bedrock not included (runs on a different port over UDP only). Probably not including any Java or Bedrock Realms (official MSFT servers), who likely seat all access behind an authenticated gateway of some sort. For extra fun, is a wiki.vg page trying to accumulate documentation on the Bedrock UDP interface. https://wiki.vg/Bedrock_Protocol https://wiki.vg/Bedrock_Protocol This is still a neat sample of Java Minecraft servers.
      - lostlogin 4y ago
        Absolutely. I wonder how many servers are completely hidden. I’d love an easier way of making a server that wasn’t accessible to the world at large. It isn’t so much that setting up the VPN is painful, but helping a kid install the software over the phone with no tech-savvy parent around is hard.
H8crilA 4y ago
"Fun" fact: Microsoft set up Minecraft to be open to everyone by default. Consequence: griefing groups that scan the web and blow the ever living shit of whatever they can find on those random servers (TNT blocks can be supplied by item duplication exploits): https://youtu.be/hoS0PM20KJk https://youtu.be/hoS0PM20KJk
- beaconstudios 4y ago
  Yup, my family minecraft server fell victim to that. Thankfully it was a new map with only a couple days' work into it, but annoying nonetheless. Whitelist your private servers!
  - lostlogin 4y ago
    Requiring a VPN is how I handled that - not so much for preventing people from joining the game but because I don’t like open ports. I’m surprised that VPN usage isn’t more common for minecraft players.
    - alar44 4y ago
      It's not more common because it doesn't really make sense.
      - lostlogin 4y ago
        Can you explain this a bit further? Is white listing users the way to avoid it? I’m possibly too cautious and only have a couple of ports allowed though.
        SirGiggles 4y ago
        In essence, without knowing much more about your setup, you're just shifting responsibility somewhere else. Whitelisting is the route most (no actual statistics to backup, but based on personal intuition) would take because the server can prevent a connection after making a authentication (online-mode=true) and authorization (white-list=true) check. Mesh like VPN solutions used to be popular in the past with software like Hamachi but, at least in my experience, performance was dismal and required additional setup for potentially non-technically minded end users.
strogonoff 4y ago
Our Minecraft server is spun up only when we play, with a simple bespoke front-end that allows any Cognito-authenticated user to start or stop the AWS instance. The dashboard also shows an auto-updated leaderboard with some in-game stats (death count, miles traveled, last login and so on), stored in DynamoDB and periodically updated by a cron job on the server. I also planned to add a map of the spawn, but not sure if that’ll happen. We have not played since MS started effectively requiring a phone number from every Minecraft player.
- sander1095 4y ago
  I'd love to read a blog post or a link to a repo to see how this is done. Sounds very fun and interesting!
  - strogonoff 4y ago
    Thanks for the interest, I might publish the thing after auditing and documenting. There are hard-coded insensitive credentials like Cognito pool ID and player UUIDs, which I should make nicely configurable. If I do it soon enough I’ll reply here. It’s very basic-looking though (and without dynamic registration, intended for small infrequently changing groups with memberships managed by an admin). As I have already been using AWS and this was not at all business-critical, I did not care about vendor lock-in and thought of it as an exercise in how much I could delegate (neither letting random visitors access our dashboard, nor spending time implementing custom auth). Their JS SDK documentation wasn’t great, but after some digging it was somewhat straightforward to make a fully static SPA (hosted on S3) access specified AWS resources (per IAM policy) on behalf of authenticated Cognito user. The app also “integrates” with Discord to ping a channel on each instance start/stop, but that is merely posting to a webhook URL. I wrote it in React and TypeScript with a bare-minimal Babel + Webpack configuration but it could just as well be written in vanilla JS. As to the server, it is plain Ubuntu with a cron job that periodically tries to launch MC server if it’s not already running (or something silly like that). Another cron job publishes stats to DynamoDB (IAM policy allowing the instance access the table), and I wanted to add yet another job to generate a PNG with a pretty map of the spawn.
  - 4y ago
shadowfacts 4y ago
I... kinda can't believe that one of my libraries (Forgelin) is the second most common mod on all Minecraft servers. It doesn't support the five most recent versions of the game and I haven't touched it in years. I guess there are a lot of other mods (or a few really popular ones) for somewhat older versions that use Kotlin.
- Kye 4y ago
  All online games have factions that think their game has been downhill since one version or another and stay there with private servers. Minecraft has a few such factions, so your plugin probably serves one of them.
- alar44 4y ago
  It's super common to run older server versions due to mod support. Unless there's some new mechanic in an update that people want to use, not using the latest version isn't really a big deal. Easiest to grab the mods you like and just freeze it.
  - shadowfacts 4y ago
    That part doesn't surprise me, it's just the sheer magnitude of 41% of modded servers that's shocking.
eternityforest 4y ago
What's up with MineTest? Seems like the only issue is some of the mods aren't maintained, but other than that, it looks like there's some real potential. It would be interesting to see a similar census, and if it's gaining any ground.
- Tepix 4y ago
  I tried it a while ago and unfortunately immediately ran into some rather serious bugs.
  - agravier 4y ago
    My kids have been using it on a regular basis for a couple of years now, the core engine is stable and I didn't find any bug, and there are nice games and non-buggy mods.
    - eternityforest 4y ago
      I briefly played with it on a Pi4 just to see what the fuss is about(Partly because I wanted to figure out why they chose to include proprietary minecraft instead since its supposed to be hacker friendly). Seems fine except there are no creepers in in any of the apt-gettable mods I can find, so that might get in the way of preinstalled it fully ready to play. I sure do admire the patience it takes to build anything in either. It almost seems like a good fit for a history themed game that teaches how hard things were to bootstrap, a la Oregon Trail almost.
hunterb123 4y ago
The subtle advertising: > This is probably thanks to cheap hosting offerings from companies like Hetzner (insert link). Conflicts with their own data: - OVH 24,417 - QuadraNet 9,927 - GPORTAL 9,339 - GMO Internet 5,466 - Hetzner 5,327 For those not in the game server hosting scene, it's because OVH offers a robust DDOS system for free for their servers. The price is not much different either. OVH is by far the leader for ALL game servers due to DDOS protection, price, and value. Hetzner is good, but OVH is a league of it's own.
- hardwaresofton 4y ago
  Are you in the game server hosting scene? Curious how you came by such an insight
  - hunterb123 4y ago
    I used to run a few big private game servers, yes.
- der_rod 4y ago
  You have to take the quote in context: > However, Germany ends up taking the prize for most Minecraft servers per capita, with a whopping four servers for every 10,000 people. This is probably thanks to cheap hosting offerings from companies like Hetzner. Hetzner is a German company, OVH is not. And while OVH has a presence in Germany, if we run this query on Shodan: https://www.shodan.io/search?query=product%3A%22Minecraft%22+country%3ADE https://www.shodan.io/search?query=product%3A%22Minecraft%22... OVH is #8 while Hetzner is #2. So I'm not sure why you'd think this is advertising, they're merely providing an example for Germany. That being said, GPortal is also a German company and #3 overall, but they're a dedicated provider of game servers, rather than commodity servers. Conspicuously absent is Nitrado - also a German company - probably because they run most of their servers on non-default ports, whereas GPortal assigns each server its own IPv4 last I checked.
  - hunterb123 4y ago
    > Hetzner is a German company, OVH is not. > That being said, GPortal is also a German company and #3 overall, Gportal (Ociris GmbH) is #1 in Germany, by far. 8,291 (24.2%) vs 3,380 (9.8%) > but they're a dedicated provider of game servers, rather than commodity servers. Why does that matter? The statement is about Minecraft servers and why Germany is popular. Seems if you were going to name drop one to support that reasoning you'd use the most popular one. Heztner is neither the leading Germany Minecraft provider, nor the leading overall provider, both by a wide margin. I appreciate you joining HN to comment and clear that up though.
DilanTendor71 4y ago
It depends on what server you want to play. It is not hard to download a pirated version of Minecraft and play it without paying. But, if you do it, you won't have access to most online servers available on the internet. In my opinion, the best thing to do is to buy it. After that, you can download any server you want from https://servers-minecraft.net/minecraft-bedwars-servers https://servers-minecraft.net/minecraft-bedwars-servers . Check it out by yourself. I am sure you won't be disappointed about it. Also, you can build your server here.

245 points by sidedishes 4y ago

Really good post. It's amazing how fast you can scan all of IPv4. I also needed tune SQLite recently for an event logging server, and "PRAGMA journal_mode=WAL" helped a lot.

yellow_lead 4y ago
Yes, the author would probably get another huge speed up there. Some more potential optimizations here [1]. [1] https://phiresky.github.io/blog/2020/sqlite-performance-tuning/ https://phiresky.github.io/blog/2020/sqlite-performance-tuni...
capableweb 4y ago
> Really good post. It's amazing how fast you can scan all of IPv4. If you're just scanning one port, which the author seems to have done, you can probably do it in some minute or two, unless you wanna play nice and lower the rate of sending packets. Otherwise if you wanna scan full IPv4 + all ports, it'll take a couple of minutes at least. Masscan with the right hardware seems to be able to do it in five minutes or less.
- 0des 4y ago
  speaking of massscan, how about those dang expanse palo alto networks guys. > YES IM STILL SITTING IN THE SAME SPOT I WAS THE LAST TIME YOU SCANNED ME AN HOUR AGO.

NelsonMinar 4y ago

The most interesting part of this to me was the list of top mods by popularity. But when I looked a lot of them seemed for much older Minecraft versions or for old versions of the mods. For instance "Pam's HarvestCraft" is mentioned but that's been deprecated in favor of a HarvestCraft 2. Is that just a quirk of how the mod names are reported and folks are really running newer stuff? Are older modded servers still popular? Are the servers themselves mostly old and no longer used?

Forricide 4y ago
Many people still run on older modded versions. To use the example you gave, HarvestCraft 2's CurseForge page[0] says: > Welcome to the brand new HarvestCraft for 1.14.4 and beyond! Please read carefully as this is NOT a update of Pam's HarvestCraft but a re-boot. 1.14.4 is 3 years old, but many (many!) servers are still running on 1.12 or older versions if doing modded. There simply isn't an incentive for many mod owners to update their mods to the latest version, so the "community updates" as a whole are generally quite slow and people end up stuck on their favourite version. Edit: Looking at the article, they also only analyze Forge mods. On newer versions, other mod loaders are gaining popularity, whereas Forge is the de-facto mod loader for 1.12. [0] https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc-mods/pams-harvestcraft-2-food-core https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc-mods/pams-harvestcra...
- Filligree 4y ago
  > There simply isn't an incentive for many mod owners to update their mods to the latest version There is quite a strong incentive. What there is not, is means — Forge and Minecraft have both changed dramatically between versions, to the point that many mod developers throw their hands up in the air and rewrite the mod entirely. For something complex enough that that isn't an option, for instance Electrical Age, it's easy to remain stuck on an older version forever. There's no documentation, and the API owners often assume that forcing a complete rewrite of major parts of the mod is fine. It's really not.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Some mods are also forever stuck at a given version as the source isn’t open and the mod author doesn’t want to port, is missing, or has died. Thaumcraft 4 is a big example.
  - NelsonMinar 4y ago
    It's a miracle that the Minecraft mod scene exists at all. The old MCP project that made tools to decompile the obfuscated code to something readable and then recompile it again was just the most remarkable hack. I guess that's years out of date now and I vaguely recall Microsoft was more open to supporting mod authors in recent years. But I guess from this discussion it's still kind of a mess.

ryukafalz 4y ago

One thing the author may have missed here because I didn’t see it mentioned: this also misses any servers not hosted on the default port of 25565. I don’t know how common this really is, but Minecraft has SRV record support, and for those of us running more than one Minecraft server on a single box it’s likely at least one will be on a different port.

teaearlgraycold 4y ago
It’s very common for cheaper Minecraft SaaS hosts to serve it on a non-default port.
ruune 4y ago
Yeah, I usually set up private servers to use some meme port and I'm sure that's not an uncommon practice
TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
> Minecraft has SRV record support He’s scanning IP addresses, not dns names, so there’s no easy way to get SRV records. He could first do a reverse DNS lookup, but that would slow things down tremendously and also there are many, many Minecraft servers running without DNS names
- dwild 4y ago
  His point is that because of SRV record, using the default port is not needed, thus it's make it more likely that a server wouldn't mind being on another port.
trutannus 4y ago
25565 is less common than alternate ports from what I've seen. Most small, individually run, servers are not running 25565.
infogulch 4y ago
So a proper census would do a reverse dns lookup on every IP looking for a "minecraft" SRV record and connecting to that.

TkTech 4y ago

I guess I should add a "Blog Posts" page to wiki.vg for good quality dev-orientated articles like this.

TkTech 4y ago
https://wiki.vg/Dev-focused_Blog_Articles https://wiki.vg/Dev-focused_Blog_Articles

lom 4y ago

What a pleasant surprise, I know the author from somewhere else. Small world! Very enjoyable read and even more interesting results. 4 Minecraft servers per 10000 people in Germany is kind of insane to think about. What was the number 2? The author made it sound like it was the US, but that has 4x less

farmerstan 4y ago

Do ISP block this sort of mass scanning? Seems like something that is easy to detect and block.

alar44 4y ago
No, why would they? It's like pissing in the ocean.

jtvjan 4y ago

I'm surprised that the majority of servers are running an unmodified version of the server software. I had expected the majority of servers to be running a Bukkit-compatible modification at this point.

rnd420_69 4y ago

a few dozen transactions a second seems horrendously slow no matter what is going on under the hood there.

jrmg 4y ago

I’m kind of amazed that you can still do massive scans like this and not face some bad consequences like getting blocked somewhere, or having your hosting provider get very annoyed at you.

ethbr0 4y ago
1 packet going out to 4 billion hosts probably doesn't even matter next to a few 4K video streams. I expect if author had launched it through CGNAT, someone wouldn't have been pleased. (Correct me if I'm wrong)
- MertsA 4y ago
  Presumably CGNAT implementations have some safeguards to prevent one client from exhausting state tables.
poink 4y ago
Your host isn't likely to care unless it causes them grief. There are so many scans happening at any given moment I doubt any of the targets will notice yours. I do vaguely remember one of these, "I scanned the whole internet! It's easy!" stories from years ago where the author wound up receiving an email from someone at Electric Boat who told them, "Please don't portscan us. We're required to call the FBI when it happens." Your host would probably be "very annoyed" if they received one of those, but I doubt anyone cares enough to send such a message nowadays.
- andai 4y ago
  >I scanned the whole internet! This one? http://census2012.sourceforge.net/paper.html http://census2012.sourceforge.net/paper.html My favorite part is the animated day/night cycle at the end.
- R0b0t1 4y ago
  Portscan them more so they fix their process.
Teletio 4y ago

TheGoodBarn 4y ago

This article is wonderful, I love the working knowledge. A lot of the idea feels similar to the recent Tom7 Harder Drive video: https://youtu.be/JcJSW7Rprio https://youtu.be/JcJSW7Rprio I had never seen some of this IP charting and stuff and in his video he does a lot of similar stuff.

TedDoesntTalk 4y ago

> how many Minecraft servers are out there? Drumroll, please... 160,992

Jamie9912 4y ago
On IPv4, running on port 25565, which were online at the time of being scanned
- lostlogin 4y ago
  … and were publicly accessible.
  - glowingly 4y ago
    and were Java servers. Bedrock not included (runs on a different port over UDP only). Probably not including any Java or Bedrock Realms (official MSFT servers), who likely seat all access behind an authenticated gateway of some sort. For extra fun, is a wiki.vg page trying to accumulate documentation on the Bedrock UDP interface. https://wiki.vg/Bedrock_Protocol https://wiki.vg/Bedrock_Protocol This is still a neat sample of Java Minecraft servers.
    - lostlogin 4y ago
      Absolutely. I wonder how many servers are completely hidden. I’d love an easier way of making a server that wasn’t accessible to the world at large. It isn’t so much that setting up the VPN is painful, but helping a kid install the software over the phone with no tech-savvy parent around is hard.

H8crilA 4y ago

"Fun" fact: Microsoft set up Minecraft to be open to everyone by default. Consequence: griefing groups that scan the web and blow the ever living shit of whatever they can find on those random servers (TNT blocks can be supplied by item duplication exploits): https://youtu.be/hoS0PM20KJk https://youtu.be/hoS0PM20KJk

beaconstudios 4y ago
Yup, my family minecraft server fell victim to that. Thankfully it was a new map with only a couple days' work into it, but annoying nonetheless. Whitelist your private servers!
- lostlogin 4y ago
  Requiring a VPN is how I handled that - not so much for preventing people from joining the game but because I don’t like open ports. I’m surprised that VPN usage isn’t more common for minecraft players.
  - alar44 4y ago
    It's not more common because it doesn't really make sense.
    - lostlogin 4y ago
      Can you explain this a bit further? Is white listing users the way to avoid it? I’m possibly too cautious and only have a couple of ports allowed though.
      - SirGiggles 4y ago
        In essence, without knowing much more about your setup, you're just shifting responsibility somewhere else. Whitelisting is the route most (no actual statistics to backup, but based on personal intuition) would take because the server can prevent a connection after making a authentication (online-mode=true) and authorization (white-list=true) check. Mesh like VPN solutions used to be popular in the past with software like Hamachi but, at least in my experience, performance was dismal and required additional setup for potentially non-technically minded end users.

strogonoff 4y ago

Our Minecraft server is spun up only when we play, with a simple bespoke front-end that allows any Cognito-authenticated user to start or stop the AWS instance. The dashboard also shows an auto-updated leaderboard with some in-game stats (death count, miles traveled, last login and so on), stored in DynamoDB and periodically updated by a cron job on the server. I also planned to add a map of the spawn, but not sure if that’ll happen. We have not played since MS started effectively requiring a phone number from every Minecraft player.

sander1095 4y ago
I'd love to read a blog post or a link to a repo to see how this is done. Sounds very fun and interesting!
- strogonoff 4y ago
  Thanks for the interest, I might publish the thing after auditing and documenting. There are hard-coded insensitive credentials like Cognito pool ID and player UUIDs, which I should make nicely configurable. If I do it soon enough I’ll reply here. It’s very basic-looking though (and without dynamic registration, intended for small infrequently changing groups with memberships managed by an admin). As I have already been using AWS and this was not at all business-critical, I did not care about vendor lock-in and thought of it as an exercise in how much I could delegate (neither letting random visitors access our dashboard, nor spending time implementing custom auth). Their JS SDK documentation wasn’t great, but after some digging it was somewhat straightforward to make a fully static SPA (hosted on S3) access specified AWS resources (per IAM policy) on behalf of authenticated Cognito user. The app also “integrates” with Discord to ping a channel on each instance start/stop, but that is merely posting to a webhook URL. I wrote it in React and TypeScript with a bare-minimal Babel + Webpack configuration but it could just as well be written in vanilla JS. As to the server, it is plain Ubuntu with a cron job that periodically tries to launch MC server if it’s not already running (or something silly like that). Another cron job publishes stats to DynamoDB (IAM policy allowing the instance access the table), and I wanted to add yet another job to generate a PNG with a pretty map of the spawn.
- 4y ago

shadowfacts 4y ago

I... kinda can't believe that one of my libraries (Forgelin) is the second most common mod on all Minecraft servers. It doesn't support the five most recent versions of the game and I haven't touched it in years. I guess there are a lot of other mods (or a few really popular ones) for somewhat older versions that use Kotlin.

Kye 4y ago
All online games have factions that think their game has been downhill since one version or another and stay there with private servers. Minecraft has a few such factions, so your plugin probably serves one of them.
alar44 4y ago
It's super common to run older server versions due to mod support. Unless there's some new mechanic in an update that people want to use, not using the latest version isn't really a big deal. Easiest to grab the mods you like and just freeze it.
- shadowfacts 4y ago
  That part doesn't surprise me, it's just the sheer magnitude of 41% of modded servers that's shocking.

eternityforest 4y ago

What's up with MineTest? Seems like the only issue is some of the mods aren't maintained, but other than that, it looks like there's some real potential. It would be interesting to see a similar census, and if it's gaining any ground.

Tepix 4y ago
I tried it a while ago and unfortunately immediately ran into some rather serious bugs.
- agravier 4y ago
  My kids have been using it on a regular basis for a couple of years now, the core engine is stable and I didn't find any bug, and there are nice games and non-buggy mods.
  - eternityforest 4y ago
    I briefly played with it on a Pi4 just to see what the fuss is about(Partly because I wanted to figure out why they chose to include proprietary minecraft instead since its supposed to be hacker friendly). Seems fine except there are no creepers in in any of the apt-gettable mods I can find, so that might get in the way of preinstalled it fully ready to play. I sure do admire the patience it takes to build anything in either. It almost seems like a good fit for a history themed game that teaches how hard things were to bootstrap, a la Oregon Trail almost.

hunterb123 4y ago

The subtle advertising: > This is probably thanks to cheap hosting offerings from companies like Hetzner (insert link). Conflicts with their own data: - OVH 24,417 - QuadraNet 9,927 - GPORTAL 9,339 - GMO Internet 5,466 - Hetzner 5,327 For those not in the game server hosting scene, it's because OVH offers a robust DDOS system for free for their servers. The price is not much different either. OVH is by far the leader for ALL game servers due to DDOS protection, price, and value. Hetzner is good, but OVH is a league of it's own.

hardwaresofton 4y ago
Are you in the game server hosting scene? Curious how you came by such an insight
- hunterb123 4y ago
  I used to run a few big private game servers, yes.
der_rod 4y ago
You have to take the quote in context: > However, Germany ends up taking the prize for most Minecraft servers per capita, with a whopping four servers for every 10,000 people. This is probably thanks to cheap hosting offerings from companies like Hetzner. Hetzner is a German company, OVH is not. And while OVH has a presence in Germany, if we run this query on Shodan: https://www.shodan.io/search?query=product%3A%22Minecraft%22+country%3ADE https://www.shodan.io/search?query=product%3A%22Minecraft%22... OVH is #8 while Hetzner is #2. So I'm not sure why you'd think this is advertising, they're merely providing an example for Germany. That being said, GPortal is also a German company and #3 overall, but they're a dedicated provider of game servers, rather than commodity servers. Conspicuously absent is Nitrado - also a German company - probably because they run most of their servers on non-default ports, whereas GPortal assigns each server its own IPv4 last I checked.
- hunterb123 4y ago
  > Hetzner is a German company, OVH is not. > That being said, GPortal is also a German company and #3 overall, Gportal (Ociris GmbH) is #1 in Germany, by far. 8,291 (24.2%) vs 3,380 (9.8%) > but they're a dedicated provider of game servers, rather than commodity servers. Why does that matter? The statement is about Minecraft servers and why Germany is popular. Seems if you were going to name drop one to support that reasoning you'd use the most popular one. Heztner is neither the leading Germany Minecraft provider, nor the leading overall provider, both by a wide margin. I appreciate you joining HN to comment and clear that up though.

DilanTendor71 4y ago

It depends on what server you want to play. It is not hard to download a pirated version of Minecraft and play it without paying. But, if you do it, you won't have access to most online servers available on the internet. In my opinion, the best thing to do is to buy it. After that, you can download any server you want from https://servers-minecraft.net/minecraft-bedwars-servers https://servers-minecraft.net/minecraft-bedwars-servers . Check it out by yourself. I am sure you won't be disappointed about it. Also, you can build your server here.