it's a common question we received
and we've even discussed it internally
can a raspberry pi microcomputer power a
minecraft server
well today we're going to answer that
question and provide you with all the
tools that you need to get up and
running
the links are in the description below
but please follow along with us
throughout this video
and you're going to learn how to set it
up and see how it performs
here's what you're going to need a
raspberry pi 4 with either 4 or 8
gigabytes of ram
a very good power supply and active
cooling since we're going to be
overclocking your raspberry pi
to help get things started quickly we'll
use a micro sd card but i want to be
able to trust this storage
so that's why i'm going to go with the
kingston endurance card which is built
specifically for right intensive
applications
this feature is brought to you by
ameridroid.com get your raspberry pi 4
or
other single board computer to power
your minecraft server
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now first up you're going to need to
install a debian based headless distro
so that means no desktop environment and
no extra apps running
for the raspberry pi 4 the 64-bit of the
raspberry pi os lite isn't available yet
so
for now we're going to have to stick
with the 32-bit this means that we're
limited to only four gigabytes of ram
for java so buying the eight gigabyte pi
4 right away is fine for future
readiness and the installer will
accommodate this just fine and allow you
to later upgrade to use more ram
once the 64-bit os is released but for
now
there's really no advantage of the eight
gigabyte model over the four gigabyte
because i needed a fancy name for the
project and because this installer is
built to work on any adequate spc
such as the pine 64 rock pro 64.
i'm calling the project pinecraft
it's simply not limited to the raspberry
pi so just make sure whatever system you
intend to run it on is going to be
dedicated and has at least
four gigabytes of ram let's get started
turning our raspberry pi 4 into a
dedicated minecraft server
i've connected to my raspberry pi os
with ssh
and the first thing that we need to do
is install git
so that's sudo apt install git
say yes that's going to download git
and install it for us and now git is
going to be a command on
our system so i can go get clone
https colon slash github.comcat5tv
slash and then the name of this project
which is pinecraft
like minecraft but it's going to work on
pine64 boards as well
so hit enter now we've got a folder
keep in mind i was in my home folder
when i ran that command so
where i am now is slash home slash pi
pinecraft now notice i'm using the pi
user because i'm using a default install
so please for goodness sake as the pi
user
type password it's like password but
spelt kind of weird
and then hit enter enter your current
password which is raspberry
and enter a new password please for
goodness sake do that because that is
just
common sense um never use the default
password
that's one of the first things we're
going to do so
i digress look at the folder here that
we've
get cloned and you see a file called
install
i'm not going to show you everything and
explain everything here but if you have
any questions get onto our discord go to
category5.tv click on interact
but what i've done here is i've
basically
scripted the entire process of setting
up this minecraft server using spigot
so that you don't have to go through
each of these steps manually and so that
this video is in three hours long
so this is basically the automated
process of how i was
able to get minecraft up and running on
a raspberry pi as well as possible so it
overclocks it automatically does a whole
bunch of stuff
detects how much ram you have what kind
of operating system you're running and
so on and so forth
i'd encourage you anytime you're going
to run any kind of installer script hey
look at the code
find out what it's actually doing and
and see this also gives you a chance to
trust what i'm doing here
but also it just is really good
information and shows you
exactly what i'm doing but this is
basically just the
installer the script that's going to do
it it is well commented so
i think you won't have any trouble
figuring out what it is that i'm doing
there however if you have any questions
let us know
all right so let's run it i'm going to
go sudo because i need to be the root
user in order to run this
dot slash install because it's in the
current folder
and it is executable and then i need to
specify my linux user so
this is going to be who is going to be
running the minecraft server because we
don't want that to be
root right so if i type robbie for
example
you'll see that robbie does not exist i
haven't created that user
the only user on my raspberry pi is the
pi user which is default because it's
just like a vanilla
raspberry pi os so i'm going to instead
type sudo dot slash install
pi and hit enter and there we go it's
running so
first thing we need to do is accept mo
yang's eula the end user license
agreement so i've included the link
there for you
you have to accept that in order to
now this is warning me this is very
important now while
my raspberry pi server that we're going
to be looking at uh
with the gameplay in just a few moments
time is a raspberry pi with four gigs of
ram
i'm right now running this on one with
eight gigs of ram for the demonstration
so it's detected up here
that i'm running the 32-bit os so i'm
not actually going to be able to get all
eight gigs of ram i'm only going to be
able to use
four which is capping it off at 2.5
gigabytes of ram being used
by the game so that's fine it's still
going to run great but do keep in mind
if you've gone and bought the 8 gig
version of the raspberry pi 4
you have to use the 64-bit os but why am
i using the 32-bit os then
it's because they haven't released the
64-bit light os
yet so that is uh the desktop is
currently in beta
and we will inevitably see the light
version of uh
of the 64-bit so keep that in mind keep
watch for it you can install this on
your pi right now then back it up and
then re-install with the 64 bit once
it's released and you'll be able to take
advantage of all that ram
in the meantime it's going to overclock
to 1.9 gigahertz the default is 1.5 so
that's pretty good but
conservative because i don't want to
void your warranty and i don't want to
cause any trouble with stability or
anything like that
so it's just warning me that i'm going
to overwrite the config.txt file which
inevitably
when it does that it also backs it up so
keep that in mind you will find
a new copy that has a date stamp in your
slash boot
on that drive so if you get stuck you're
good to go it's going to install the
server now it's going to go through
anything that it needs to do
first of all it's downloading the
installer for spigot and it's going to
go through this process this is going to
take some time
so i'm just going to warp through time
[Music]
and there we have it all the steps have
been automated with the pinecraft
install script
and we're ready to start playing it's
really important for you to know and
remember that you can't shut down
or reboot a minecraft server in the
traditional linux way
if you do you're going to lose all the
blocks that are in memory
possibly a day or more of gameplay so
pinecraft includes a couple handy
scripts including one called
reboot and one called stop minecraft is
all set and ready to go at
load as soon as you reboot but of course
we need to reboot so we need to do that
safely using the command
sudo tilde minecraft slash
reboot it's going to store all the
blocks to disk
and reboot the pi that's the command
you're going to use
from now on similarly the stop command
will safely store your blocks and stop
the minecraft
the minecraft server uh but leave it
running so that you can either
then halt the system or run a backup or
something like that
so both of these commands can take
several minutes just keep that in mind
because they're going to be storing
several days possibly worth of blocks
that are in your ram to
disk so now that the new raspberry pi
minecraft server is rebooted
it's time it's like the moment of truth
let's try to connect
absolutely flawless fantastic well
when we come back after the break we're
gonna give it a real world test
connecting
several players to a raspberry pi 4
minecraft server stick around
alright it's time to check out the
gameplay performance notice that we've
got the cpu and ram stats at the bottom
of your screen
and that'll remain for the whole
demonstration all right so i'm here
at jeff's place and just going to kind
of quickly run around to show you the
you know that this is performing very
very well
so this is a raspberry pi 4 is the
server
and i've overclocked it to 1.95
gigahertz
it's got 4 gigs of ram and a kingston
uh endurance microsd card
all right so i wanted to show the
performance with just me
uh everything looks pretty good and and
here at jeff's place
jeff i guess things should be performing
it poorly here if anywhere right
because you've got all these animals and
stuff and that's correct
yeah i tried to to to build a base that
was busy enough
with lots of elements and so there's
lots of animals making noise in the
background i want to try and tax the
surfer out
yeah okay so let's uh let's see what
happens as we start to add players
because i think that was one of the
questions that came up
when you and i were first discussing
this project was
you know what how many players are going
to be able to come on here
all right and uh i think i'm the last to
join
there's mangled fox 70 yeah oh yeah jeff
maybe it'd be nice if you could join me
there he is that's a random one right
hey
the one so check this out
so we've got one two three four five six
seven eight people
online at once on our raspberry pi 4
and a chicken and a whole bunch of uh
animals in the background
and there's i'm not seeing a single
glitch at all no glitches
it's hard to see right now because it is
late late late at night and
in order to wow you're good uh in order
to
speed through the night we all have to
have a bet and jeff only has the one bed
at his place so
yes all right all right
so we can follow the one oh
okay you've got a shield i do not but i
will i'm going to be like
your videographer
done oh creepers let's avoid that yeah
these guys these are the guys that if
you get too close they explode
when you're followed by a spider too
and a bunch of creepers oh that was okay
that was effective and i see an enderman
the shadow of an enderman oh somebody's
oh oh oh no
so oh and there's zombies everywhere and
i have
no weapons dude okay
we may have to just wait out the night
yeah you may have to oh my god there's
an enderman yes
i got an iron sword finally
congratulations
do you guys see my stuff did you have uh
iron sword pants and shoes
yeah exactly but then i died out in
front of my house
i think hinger may have collected your
stuff um
ball nerd i just killed a
zombie under high
oh i got it here's my stuff oh that was
that was from the zombies that was from
the zombie i think
so bald nerd did you have this armor
here
that uh hingers were in the hindrance
that's the armor that the zombie dropped
no that was the armor that i
dropped yeah the zombie picked it up i
did not know zombies could pick up
our viewers can see that the performance
is like
this is probably better than more time
or you would know because you've played
on a lot of online servers
how's the performance of our minecraft
server on a raspberry pi
uh compared to some of those online
servers
better actually this is better yeah i
would agree
i i have that's what i've been told
there's way less players though
but i mean there i have a free server
that uh i've used with my kids and
we get lag issues when it's just the
four of us on
so the fact that this is a raspberry pi
and there's what
nine of us it's sorry my my my internet
just dropped out so i lost you for a
second there
you were talking jeff well i was just
saying that i have a
um a free server
that i use with my kids oh okay like
online like a cloud
online okay yeah and it is
um it can be quite laggy sometimes when
it's just the four of us
so this performs exceptionally better
than that
and i've i've also paid for servers
where it's you know 60
a year and this is
better performance you don't have much
in the way of armor
but are you interested in following me
into the nether just for a quick tour
uh sure because that should be a
performance hit right that's loading
another world
and we're going to have multiple people
in that world and multiple people in
this one
yeah let's do it all right
so instantaneous load
just be careful where you walk because
uh you don't want to fall into the lava
yeah i'll say all right
oh man so look at the world gent now why
is it
that's not snow that's like from
stranger things yeah
it's the weird stuff that's just kind of
floating yeah okay
i'm just astounded
where did you die
were you were you here with us
all right
i am so impressed with how well this
world gens
there's zero issues i was expecting
now i've i have no experience with
minecraft but i've seen
the lag that causes the world gen to
kind of
stutter yep um on other servers
so i was expecting that because this is
just a single board computer
that's right but it's running great it's
very very well apparently this is the
place to stand i'm like
safe from the rain right here
it's all around me whoa whoa
you fell yeah i put a cactus on top
and it collapsed what
i would avoid against touching cactus
no i no it's not the cactus that killed
me i had cactus in my inventory and then
i dropped them on the ground
and like i placed it on the ground on
top of the sand that i was standing on
and then the sand collapsed and then i
fell into the
um whatever yeah
you know what i'm hearing here jeff what
like
i mean we're we're the dads that are you
know the performance is really really
great
on a single board computer but the kids
are having fun well
exactly i've got my three kids sitting
beside me and they're
they're having a blast so this is good
awesome i think it's a mission success
my friend
hooray
[Applause]
you