Prompt #8: Building a Minecraft Server

In my blog post from last week, I wrote about the Raspberry Pi: A credit card sized computer that computer hobbyists use to create many different things, like robots, gaming machines, and media centers. I mentioned how I planned on using mine to create a server as a project, and I decided to spend my weekend doing just that.

For over five years, one of my personal favorite video games has been Minecraft. Minecraft is a sandbox game where you can explore an open world made of pixelated blocks, and create many different things in an interactive environment. You can play it by yourself or with others online, but in order to play it online you have to connect to a server that someone has set up. Many people pay to rent out an existing server somewhere that they can use, but I decided to try to use my Raspberry Pi to set up my own server in my dorm room.

To start, I installed the server software onto my Raspberry Pi. Mojang, the company that develops Minecraft, provides a free file you can download off of their website to run a server off of. After running a few scripts, I had it set up and logged into the server on my computer. Initially there was a bit of lag, but after playing around with the server settings I managed to minimalize it.

Setting up the server on my Raspberry Pi

In order to control the server, I set up a Secure Shell client on my computer. Secure Shell (commonly abbreviated as SSH) is a technology that allows you to remotely access another computer. This allowed me to leave my Raspberry Pi plugged in somewhere else in my room, while controlling everything on it via a window on my desktop.

A frequent misconception is that Computer Science is limited to just programming and creating software. However, there are many different fields and types of jobs within Computer Science that require very little programming. In doing this project, I learned a little bit more about how servers and networks work, which is an increasingly important aspect of Computer Science today. Doing this project involved no coding whatsoever, and yet I still learned gained experience that could potentially help me in the future if I get an occupation that involves working with servers.

-Erik B.