Minecraft 1.17 (Caves and Cliffs Update) is here! This script and guide are written to help you get a great performing Raspberry Pi Minecraft server up and running in only a few minutes.
This is the standalone version. It runs on most flavors of Linux and should work on most architectures as well (arm, aarch64, etc.).
I highly recommend using Docker over the standalone version for most people. Installing Docker is as simple as sudo apt install docker.io. There are 3 Docker options available:
Sets up Minecraft as a system service with option to autostart at boot
Automatic backups to minecraft/backups when server restarts
Updates automatically to the latest version when server is started
Easy control of server with start.sh, stop.sh and restart.sh scripts
Optional scheduled daily restart of Pi using cron
Requirements
Raspberry Pi model with 1 GB of RAM or higher. Basically a Raspberry Pi 2B or higher. (No Zero unfortunately, 512MB is not enough RAM to do this, I’ve tried!)
Headless Linux distribution such as Raspbian Buster Lite, Ubuntu Server 18.04.2, or any Debian based distribution (GUI distros can be used at the expense of available RAM and server performance)
Solid state drive highly recommended but not required. You can get a SSD setup on a Pi for less than most Micro SD cards cost. See my article here for details
The Raspberry Pi 4 is available in different memory configurations all the way up to 8 GB. It’s about the size of a credit card and uses an extremely low amount of power making it ideal for all sorts of projects and ideas!
The Raspberry Pi 400 kit includes everything you need for a full Pi 400 desktop build. The Pi 400 is the fastest Raspberry Pi ever released and comes in the form factor of a keyboard!
The Kingston A400 has been a great drive to use with the Pi for years. It’s reliable, widely available around the world, has low power requirements and performs very well. It’s also very affordable. This drive has been benchmarked over 1000 times at pibenchmarks.com and is the #1 most popular SSD among the Pi community!
The USB 3.1 variant of the StarTech 2.5″ SATA adapter works well with the Pi 4. The USB 3.0 variant doesn’t have firmware updates available and is not recommended.
The SanDisk Extreme A1-A2 SD card has the best scoring SD card on Pi Benchmarks for years and is second in popularity only to the SanDisk Ultra (often included in combo kits). The application class (A1) means random I/O speeds (very important when running an OS) have to meet a higher standard. There’s no benefit on the Pi for A2 right now so get whichever is cheaper/available.
The most important consideration when choosing which flavor of Linux to run the server on is simple: available RAM. Headless Linux distributions such as Raspbian Lite that don’t have a built in GUI have
Our biggest obstacle when running a Minecraft server on the Pi is available RAM since 1 GB is extremely low for this type of server. To have a playable experience you should not be running anything else on the Pi so all memory is available to be used.
After testing on many different distros I am finding Raspbian Lite and Ubuntu Server 18.04.4 32-bit to be the best choices. These distributions come with very few background processes and have rock solid support and performance.
64-bit vs 32-bit
There’s a lot of discussion in the Pi world about the up and coming aarch64 64-bit distributions vs. armhf 32-bit distributions. They have been and continue to improve dramatically. There are already use cases where 64-bit is far superior such as video encoding, advanced compression, etc.
So how about for running a Minecraft server? I have been testing extensively with Ubuntu Server 18.04 64-bit and the Debian Buster 64-bit. I have consistently had worse performance and stability than on 32-bit versions of the exact same distros.
But how can that be? It’s certainly true that Minecraft servers benefit in CPU performance from 64-bit versions of Java. The answer is actually incredibly simple: memory. The server running on a 64-bit Java Virtual Machine uses a minimum of about 100 MB more memory. This makes perfect sense because 64 bits > 32 bits by definition!
The Raspberry Pi’s 1 GB of memory has been the biggest obstacle for this project since the very beginning. Back when I first went into the Paper Minecraft developer IRC room and told them what I was trying to do I was practically laughed out of the chat room for even thinking of trying this. Most Minecraft server branches including vanilla can’t even start on the Pi because of the limited memory.
For a dedicated Minecraft server on the Pi I very highly recommend staying 32-bit. You will have more available memory which means it will be much faster and more stable. Since memory is our bottleneck the increased CPU throughput does not help us and losing *any* of our memory is disastrous!
If the Raspberry Pi 4 has more memory like we all expect it to this recommendation will change completely. Even 2 GB of memory would make the extra memory that 64-bit uses a non-issue and the CPU throughput performance gains very desirable. For now though stay 32-bit for a Minecraft server!
Tested Distributions
Raspberry Pi OS – It’s Raspbian. It has very low memory usage and is the official distribution of the Raspberry Pi. The server runs very well on this. It’s overall the best choice. The Buster release has made OpenJDK 11 available on it so it’s no longer behind the rest of the distros.
Ubuntu Server 18.04 / 20.04 – Ubuntu Server is my favorite Linux distro. I use it for nearly all of my projects. The performance of the 32-bit armhf version is on par with Raspbian. It’s a great choice! Click here for my Ubuntu setup guide for Raspberry Pi. The 64-bit version is not a fantastic choice and not recommended because of the higher memory usage. Stick with 32-bit and you’ll be a happy camper with Ubuntu Server.
Debian Buster 64-bit – Debian is the distribution Raspbian is based on. This version is a preview of Debian “Buster” which is the successor to Stretch and will be the next version of Raspbian when it is released. I like this distribution but it is currently still unofficial and unsupported. Performance and stability was less than Ubuntu and Raspbian.
Minecraft Server Installation
SSH into your Raspberry Pi and paste the following commands:
The script will setup the Minecraft sever and ask you some questions on how to configure it. I’ll explain here what they mean.
“Enter amount of memory in megabytes to dedicate to the Minecraft server” – The amount of memory that will be dedicated to the Minecraft server. The more the better, but you must leave some room for the operating system background processes.
If you exceed the total available memory either the server will crash or the Pi will get incredibly slow to the point where your SSH session will start timing out. The setup script will make a recommendation to you which is your available memory – 10% for headroom. If you aren’t sure what to put just go with the recommended amount.
Note for Raspberry Pi 4: Currently on 32-bit Raspbian 2700 MB is the maximum that Linux will let us allocate in a 32 bit environment. The script has been updated to check for this as the server will not start if it is set over 2700M on a 32 bit server. 64 bit operating systems will be able to allocate all available memory as Pi 4 support rolls out for them.
“Start Minecraft server at startup automatically (y/n)?” – This will set the Minecraft service to start automatically when your Pi boots. This is great because whenever you want to play you can just plug it in and go without having to SSH in.
“Automatically reboot Pi and update server at 4am daily (y/n)?” – This will add a cron job to the server that reboots the Pi every day at 4am. This is great because every time the server restarts it backs up the server and updates to the latest version. See the “Scheduled Daily Reboots” section below for information on how to customize the time or remove the reboot.
That is it for the setup script. The server will finish configuring and start!
Check Java Version
Sometimes if you have multiple versions of Java installed the wrong version of Java will be selected as the default. If the server didn’t start check that the right version of Java is selected with this command:
sudo update-alternatives --config java
If you get the message “update-alternatives: error: no alternatives for java” then you only have one version of Java installed and can skip to the next section.
If you are presented with a list of choices then your machine has multiple versions of Java installed. It will look like this:
update-alternatives: warning: /etc/alternatives/java has been changed (manually or by a script); switching to manual updates only
There are 2 choices for the alternative java (providing /usr/bin/java).
Selection Path Priority Status
------------------------------------------------------------
0 /usr/lib/jvm/java-11-openjdk-amd64/bin/java 1101 auto mode
1 /usr/lib/jvm/java-11-openjdk-amd64/bin/java 1101 manual mode
2 /usr/lib/jvm/java-8-openjdk-amd64/jre/bin/java 1081 manual mode
You will usually want to just select the newest version of OpenJDK that is listed so you would type 0 and press enter. In some cases on some platforms you may want to switch to the official Oracle JDK although I strongly recommend sticking with OpenJDK!
First Run
The first time you run the server it will take a little longer to start since it is generating all the server data. If you try to log in before it fully starts you will get a connection timeout error. Watch for the line: “Timings Reset”. This is the last line that prints when the server is ready to rock and roll. At this point you will be able to connect successfully.
The very first time you log into the server it will be slow for about 1-2 minutes. This is because since nobody has logged in before the server has to scramble to generate all the chunks within your view distance (10 by default) and send them to you/store them. During this time you may not be able to see very far and if you try to destroy blocks there will be noticeable lag from when they break to when they actually disappear.
Don’t panic! This will go away within a couple of minutes as the Pi catches up with all the first time login stuff it needs to do. Performance stabilizes and it will feel very much like the offline experience after that.
If you are hosting for a few friends I’d recommend logging in for the first time right after you set up the server instead of having several people nail a blank server at first startup. This gets it out of the way and when everyone is ready to log in the starting area chunks will be fully fleshed out and the Pi just has to read them. It’s an order of magnitude faster for the Pi to read chunks than to generate and store chunks.
In my experience after the initial login exploring new parts of the server doesn’t cause any lag even though new chunks are being generated. The reason for this is that when you’re walking it’s really only having to generate a new chunk as you get close to the border instead of a huge square area of chunks in all directions and all at the same time like during the first login.
Benchmarking / Testing Storage
If you’re getting poor performance or just want to verify everything is working correctly you may want to run my storage benchmark with:
Now press Ctrl+X to exit nano and answer “y” to save. Now let’s run the script:
chmod +x SetupMinecraft.sh ./SetupMinecraft.sh
And the setup will run and install the version of Minecraft you set at the top of the file!
Changing Minecraft Client Version
If you are wisely running the “stable” branch instead of the “development” branch there will be times where you need to select the version of Minecraft to run otherwise you will get an error message that your client is outdated when you try to log in.
Fortunately this is very easy. Open up the Minecraft launcher and instead of hitting “Play” choose “Launch Options” in the menu at the top of the window. It will look like this:
Minecraft Launcher “Launch Options” Tab
Click the “Add new” button and pick which version you want to add. You can optionally gave it a name or just click save.
Now when you go back to the “News” tab you will see a dropdown arrow where you can select which version of Minecraft you want to play!
Start, Stop and Restart Server
The server can be started, stopped and restarted two different ways. You can use the provided scripts in the Minecraft folder or you can use systemctl. Here are the commands:
The server backs up each time it starts. This helps you recover easily if something goes wrong. This system works best if you configured the server to restart daily since it means you will have a backup every day.
To access these backups type:
cd ~/minecraft/backups ls
When a backup is made the filename will be the date and time the backup was taken. If you need to restore a backup it’s very easy. Substitute the timestamp in my example to the backup you want to roll back to. Type:
cd ~/minecraft
./stop.sh
rm -rf world world_nether world_the_end
tar -xf backups/2019.02.15.22.06.30.tar.gz
./start.sh
Your world has now been restored! It’s a good idea to download these backups off the Pi periodically just in case the Pi’s storage fails.
Scheduled Daily Reboots
The daily reboots are scheduled using cron. It’s very easy to customize the time your server restarts.
To change the time that the server restarts type: crontab -e
This will open a window that will ask you to select a text editor (I find nano to be the easiest) and will show the cronjobs scheduled on the Pi. The Minecraft one will look like the following:
0 4 * * * /home/ubuntu/minecraft/restart.sh
There are 5 fields here. The default restart time is set to reboot at 0 minutes of the 4th hour of the day (4 AM). The other 3 fields are left as * to represent every day of every month. Make any desired changes here and press Ctrl+X to exit nano and update the cronjob.
To remove the daily reboot simply delete the line and save.
Installing Mods / Plugins
The server supports plugins that are compatible with Bukkit / Spigot / Paper. A popular place that you can get plugins is at dev.bukkit.org where there are thousands of them!
To install a plugin you simply download the .jar to the minecraft/plugins folder and restart the server. For example, WorldGuard is a very popular plugin that lets you add protection to different areas of your server.
To install this plugin on our Minecraft server we would use the following commands:
cd ~/minecraft/plugins
curl -H "Accept-Encoding: identity" -H "Accept-Language: en" -L -A "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/90.0.12.212 Safari/537.36" -o worldguard.jarhttps://dev.bukkit.org/projects/worldguard/files/latest
sudo systemctl restart minecraft
The reason the middle line is so long is that “robots” (roughly anything that isn’t a web browser being used by a user in this context) including scripts and utilities are blocked by the Bukkit server. The extra parameters we’re including in this line will add the location (-L) flag as well as a user agent and an identity / language header which will allow us to fetch the files without getting a 403 forbidden error.
Make sure to change “-o worldguard.jar” (second to last parameter) and the URL (very last parameter) to match the project you want to download.
The server will restart and the plugin will be installed. It’s that simple! To use the plugin refer to the documentation on the plugin download page to find out which commands you use to configure/interact with it.
Warning: be advised that plugins are the #1 issue for performance degradation on Minecraft servers. This isn’t because all plugins are bad. Some plugins are coded very inefficiently or perform features that require a lot of hooks in the code.
You should be careful about what plugins you install on the server and if you start having bad performance disable your plugins one by one until you find the culprit!
Reconfigure / Update Scripts
The scripts can always be reconfigured and updated by downloading the latest SetupMinecraft.sh and running the installer again. It will update all of the scripts in the Minecraft directory and reinstall the startup service for you.
Running SetupMinecraft.sh again will also give you a chance to reconfigure options such as the memory dedicated to the server, daily reboots, starting the server on boot, etc.
This will not overwrite your world or any other data so it is safe to run!
Port Forwarding
If everyone on your server is on the same LAN or WiFi network as you then you don’t need to do this. If you want people to connect from outside your local network then you need to set up port forwarding on your router.
The process for this is different for every router so the best thing to do is just look at your router and find the model # and put that in google with port forwarding for easy instructions on how to do it for your specific router.
You want to forward port 25565. The type of connection is TCP if your router asks. Once you do this people will be able to connect to your Minecraft server through your public IP address. This is different than your local IP which is usually a 192.x.x.x or 10.x.x.x. If you don’t know what that is just go to google and type “what’s my ip” and Google will kindly tell you!
Wired vs. Wireless
Going with an ethernet (wired) connection is going to be faster and more reliable. There’s so much wireless traffic and other interference in the air that running your server on WiFi is not recommended.
Even if it is working great 99% of the time it can ruin your experience very quickly if the WiFi drops for a couple of seconds and you get blown up by a creeper!
All that being said, the server works fine on wireless. The script will work fine as is with a wireless connection.
Upgrading
PLEASE BACK UP YOUR SERVER FIRST! The server makes automated backups by default for you in the backups folder but I recommend you back up the entire server folder yourself (basically the entire minecraft folder) any time you attempt to upgrade or downgrade. If you need to roll back to older versions it won’t work without a backup from that version or older!
The easiest way to upgrade an installation is to download the latest SetupMinecraft.sh and run it. This will automatically upgrade you to the latest version.
Upgrading and downgrading to versions that aren’t the default the script chooses is pretty simple. Simply change the Version line at the top in the SetupMinecraft.sh script:
#!/bin/bash # Minecraft Server Installation Script - James A. Chambers - https://jamesachambers.com # More information at https://jamesachambers.com/raspberry-pi-minecraft-server-script-with-startup-service/ # GitHub Repository: https://github.com/TheRemote/RaspberryPiMinecraft
# Minecraft server version Version="1.16.1"
Edit this file in your favorite text editor (you can use nano or vi on the Pi like nano SetupMinecraft.sh) and change the Minecraft version to what you want.
Downgrading
PLEASE RESTORE USING A BACK UP FROM THE VERSION YOU ARE DOWNGRADING TO
If you are having problems on a newer version of Minecraft and want to downgrade you can do so using a complete backup of your server before you ran it on a newer version.
The reason you can’t take server data that has been touched by a version such as 1.17 and go back to 1.16 is that the new version adds all sorts of new data types/structures for the new content into your server data files. If you try to roll back the old versions of the Minecraft server will not understand these data types since they didn’t exist in that version and will crash.
As long as you use a backup for your server files from that version (or older) it’s as simple as changing the version in SetupMinecraft.sh just like I show in the “Upgrading” section.
You can upgrade any old version of Minecraft to any version, but again make sure you have a backup first as it is a one way street and you will need that backup if you want to roll back!
Troubleshooting Note – Oracle Virtual Machines
A very common problem people have with the Oracle Virtual Machine tutorials out there that typically show you how to use a free VM is that the VM is much more difficult to configure than just about any other product / offering out there.
It is because there are several steps you need to take to open the ports on the Oracle VM. You need to both:
Set the ingress ports (TCP/UDP) in the Virtual Cloud Network (VCN) security list
*and* set the ingress ports in a Network Security Group assigned to your instance
Both of these settings are typically required before you will be able to connect to your VM instance. This is purely configuration related and has nothing to do with the script or the Minecraft server itself.
I do not recommend this platform due to the configuration difficulty but the people who have gone through the pain of configuring an Oracle VM have had good experiences with it after that point. Just keep in mind it’s going to be a rough ride through the configuration for most people.
Troubleshooting Note – Hyper-V
There is a weird bug in Hyper-V that breaks UDP connections on the Minecraft server. The fix for this is that you have to use a Generation 1 VM with the Legacy LAN network driver.
Version History
To view the version history check out the GitHub README here:
1,112 thoughts on “Raspberry Pi Minecraft Server Setup Script w/ Startup Service”
pedro44
hello,
I have 1170 score but when I launch the server he tell me “Can’t keep up! Is the server overloaded? Running 27597ms or 551 ticks behind”… Can I solve this ?
This is normal in 1.14. Even if you are using a solid state drive you will usually see this message once or twice upon startup.
What is happening is that when the server starts it is loading and crunching a ton of data. If you run the command “top” you will see that the Pi is at something like 400% CPU usage for about the first minute as all of this data is loaded and processed. After that it will drop dramatically (you can leave top open while the server loads to observe this behavior).
I spoke to the Paper Minecraft server devs about this and they said that this was happening before in previous versions but that warning was silenced. Basically the warning is telling you that it is 27 seconds behind. This is pretty much just the time to load the server. You may see a second warning that is a much shorter time a few minutes after that (it will say something around on average 700ms to a few thousand ms for the second warning, if you see it at all).
It’s common to see this warning once on startup even on server grade hardware (although the amount of time it falls behind is much shorter than a Pi since they are so much more powerful). The server is just doing its job and telling you that it fell behind where the timers say it should have been since it was busy loading.
Unless you are seeing this error continuously instead of just once or twice after starting up the server it is safe to ignore as it is just a warning for your information and not an error! If you are seeing it continuously (every few minutes even after startup has completed) then that means the Pi is likely fighting with other processes for resources and you’d want to check the top command and see what is fighting with the Minecraft server for CPU cycles and close those other processes.
Hey How you doing sir, I would like to ask you if you could make a guide on how to make a Minecraft FTB server guide. I am running an overclocked raspberry pi 4 with 4 GB of ram using raspbarian buster. And if you could include a way to increase the maximum available ram from 2700 to 4000. I would really appreciate it. Thanks in advance.
Just set this up on a new RPi4, and wanted to know how I go about getting at some of the server configuration options. For example, how to whitelist users, set up server params (MOTD, administrators, change to creative mode, etc.). It may be that you can already do this, but I’m not familiar with this setup, so just pointing to documentation in the how-to would be useful!
That’s good feedback. Here’s some links to get started beginning with the basic server operator commands and then moving on to basic configuration with server.properties and advanced/fine tuned configuration with paper.yml/spigot.yml/bukkit.yml:
Excellent, thank you for the reference links! I’m comfortable in the world of Ubuntu/Debian server config (LAMP setup and nginx), but Minecraft server config is a new thing to me! Also taking this opportunity to learn more about screen/tmux.
It would also be cool to see what packages are being set up as part of this install. I was reading about setting up a run-of-the-mill Minecraft Java server, versus the PaperMC server that this script installs–I presume the PaperMC server is more performant and tuned for running on the Pi?
One observation I did make; enabling creative mode and flying around very quickly crashed the MC server on the RPi4. I think the movement speed of flying very quickly overwhelms the poor little server trying to generate the new chunks, and it just hard fails. Walking around seems to be fine. Haven’t gotten far enough to test riding on horseback or when you get the gliding wings. Perhaps it’s the case that if the chunks have already been generated, the server handles it better?
Love what you’ve done with this. I found a guide somewhere else that showed how to set up a vanilla server on a Raspberry Pi, but it was using Java 8 and the vanilla server JAR. Even my RPi4/4GB was having issues keeping up at times. I researched Paperclip a bit, and then stumbled across this guide. Working well so far.
The one thing I did like about the other guide is that rather than just backing up the world folders, it backed up the entire Minecraft directory. While the world directories are important, there are things contained in other folders as well that I’d rather avoid replicating if the server goes belly up. Examples: plugins, the server.properties file, the whitelist file, the server JAR itself, etc. It was easy enough to just comment out your backup routine in the start.sh script and then set up a crontab to do the other backup script an hour before the restart.
Looking forward to 64-bit maybe eventually being officially supported so that we can bump up the memory allocation a bit more!
I’m confused, as a rpi4 4GB ram user you don’t recommend 64bit, yet RAM allocation seem to be an issue above 2700MB on 32bit.
So is it better to use 32bit at roughly 2700MB allocation than 64bit at etc 3700MB allocation?
Which 64bit systems have you tested?
That’s a great question! I’m getting very close to recommending 64 bit for the Pi4 4 GB model.
There’s a couple of key things I’m looking for before I switch my recommendation fully to 64 bit. The first one I’m looking to see official 64 bit support for the Pi 4 from distributions like Ubuntu. I have been working on a Ubuntu 64 bit image that works pretty well but it is unofficial and the apt repositories don’t update the kernel/firmware from official sources yet. As support improves this will make it easier and more stable to run the server long term on 64 bit.
The second thing I’m looking for is official USB booting support to be added to the Pi. I also have an article on how to work around this and get it working, but again it’s unofficial and requires a SD card just to be the bootloader.
Once these two things are added the experience for most users will be vastly improved. I expect these two things to happen in the next month or two and then I will update the recommendation to 64 bit!
For the more tech savvy users you can already do 64 bit and it works great but there are a lot of asterisks while official support catches up that lead me to not recommend it for general Pi users yet!
hello,
I have 1170 score but when I launch the server he tell me “Can’t keep up! Is the server overloaded? Running 27597ms or 551 ticks behind”… Can I solve this ?
Hey pedro44,
This is normal in 1.14. Even if you are using a solid state drive you will usually see this message once or twice upon startup.
What is happening is that when the server starts it is loading and crunching a ton of data. If you run the command “top” you will see that the Pi is at something like 400% CPU usage for about the first minute as all of this data is loaded and processed. After that it will drop dramatically (you can leave top open while the server loads to observe this behavior).
I spoke to the Paper Minecraft server devs about this and they said that this was happening before in previous versions but that warning was silenced. Basically the warning is telling you that it is 27 seconds behind. This is pretty much just the time to load the server. You may see a second warning that is a much shorter time a few minutes after that (it will say something around on average 700ms to a few thousand ms for the second warning, if you see it at all).
It’s common to see this warning once on startup even on server grade hardware (although the amount of time it falls behind is much shorter than a Pi since they are so much more powerful). The server is just doing its job and telling you that it fell behind where the timers say it should have been since it was busy loading.
Unless you are seeing this error continuously instead of just once or twice after starting up the server it is safe to ignore as it is just a warning for your information and not an error! If you are seeing it continuously (every few minutes even after startup has completed) then that means the Pi is likely fighting with other processes for resources and you’d want to check the top command and see what is fighting with the Minecraft server for CPU cycles and close those other processes.
Hi,
I have start a server with the official minecraft server 1.14 and I wonder if I can backup my world into this server you exposed ?
Thanks.
Brilliant! Where can I change the settings to make it Creative instead of Survival?
Hey michael,
As a server operator you can do the following command to change the game mode:
Survival - /gamemode 0Creative - /gamemode 1
Adventure - /gamemode 2
Spectator - /gamemode 3
You can also open the server console (screen -r minecraft) and type the command in there but you need to specify a name, so:
gamemode 1 playername
Bonus command:
From the console you can also make people a server operator without having to edit ops.txt or any files:
op playername
Hey How you doing sir, I would like to ask you if you could make a guide on how to make a Minecraft FTB server guide. I am running an overclocked raspberry pi 4 with 4 GB of ram using raspbarian buster. And if you could include a way to increase the maximum available ram from 2700 to 4000. I would really appreciate it. Thanks in advance.
Just set this up on a new RPi4, and wanted to know how I go about getting at some of the server configuration options. For example, how to whitelist users, set up server params (MOTD, administrators, change to creative mode, etc.). It may be that you can already do this, but I’m not familiar with this setup, so just pointing to documentation in the how-to would be useful!
Hey hi_pat_trick,
That’s good feedback. Here’s some links to get started beginning with the basic server operator commands and then moving on to basic configuration with server.properties and advanced/fine tuned configuration with paper.yml/spigot.yml/bukkit.yml:
For the more general overview of basic admin/server commands including ops.txt, etc.
For server.properties.
To see all the configuration options available for the Paper Minecraft server.
Excellent, thank you for the reference links! I’m comfortable in the world of Ubuntu/Debian server config (LAMP setup and nginx), but Minecraft server config is a new thing to me! Also taking this opportunity to learn more about screen/tmux.
It would also be cool to see what packages are being set up as part of this install. I was reading about setting up a run-of-the-mill Minecraft Java server, versus the PaperMC server that this script installs–I presume the PaperMC server is more performant and tuned for running on the Pi?
One observation I did make; enabling creative mode and flying around very quickly crashed the MC server on the RPi4. I think the movement speed of flying very quickly overwhelms the poor little server trying to generate the new chunks, and it just hard fails. Walking around seems to be fine. Haven’t gotten far enough to test riding on horseback or when you get the gliding wings. Perhaps it’s the case that if the chunks have already been generated, the server handles it better?
Love what you’ve done with this. I found a guide somewhere else that showed how to set up a vanilla server on a Raspberry Pi, but it was using Java 8 and the vanilla server JAR. Even my RPi4/4GB was having issues keeping up at times. I researched Paperclip a bit, and then stumbled across this guide. Working well so far.
The one thing I did like about the other guide is that rather than just backing up the world folders, it backed up the entire Minecraft directory. While the world directories are important, there are things contained in other folders as well that I’d rather avoid replicating if the server goes belly up. Examples: plugins, the server.properties file, the whitelist file, the server JAR itself, etc. It was easy enough to just comment out your backup routine in the start.sh script and then set up a crontab to do the other backup script an hour before the restart.
Looking forward to 64-bit maybe eventually being officially supported so that we can bump up the memory allocation a bit more!
I’m confused, as a rpi4 4GB ram user you don’t recommend 64bit, yet RAM allocation seem to be an issue above 2700MB on 32bit.
So is it better to use 32bit at roughly 2700MB allocation than 64bit at etc 3700MB allocation?
Which 64bit systems have you tested?
Hey Stefan,
That’s a great question! I’m getting very close to recommending 64 bit for the Pi4 4 GB model.
There’s a couple of key things I’m looking for before I switch my recommendation fully to 64 bit. The first one I’m looking to see official 64 bit support for the Pi 4 from distributions like Ubuntu. I have been working on a Ubuntu 64 bit image that works pretty well but it is unofficial and the apt repositories don’t update the kernel/firmware from official sources yet. As support improves this will make it easier and more stable to run the server long term on 64 bit.
The second thing I’m looking for is official USB booting support to be added to the Pi. I also have an article on how to work around this and get it working, but again it’s unofficial and requires a SD card just to be the bootloader.
Once these two things are added the experience for most users will be vastly improved. I expect these two things to happen in the next month or two and then I will update the recommendation to 64 bit!
For the more tech savvy users you can already do 64 bit and it works great but there are a lot of asterisks while official support catches up that lead me to not recommend it for general Pi users yet!