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:
How do you edit world permissions and other things after stopping and restarting the server? I just set this up over ssh but I can’t get back to the server shell to do those things. Is this done in another place after first shutdown? Also, how would I port forward and set up a custom dns address for this? Thanks.
Great questions! So the way to get in and out of the server console is like this:
screen -r
or
screen -r minecraft
will get you back into the console using the “screen” application. To get back out of the console to the SSH command line press “Ctrl+A” followed quickly by “Ctrl+D”. This will send the screen instance back to the background so you can use the normal CLI.
For your second question the port forwarding will depend completely on your router. Usually just looking at your router and finding the model # and giving that a quick Google search will bring up instructions for your specific router. For custom DNS you can use one of the free dynamic DNS providers such as dyndns (and some routers have this built in too) or you can purchase a domain name. I’m guessing you meant the former and that you want one of the dynamic IP address forwarding services!
Great question. So yes it will, but if the world has already been upgraded you can’t generally go back. It will crash since it will encounter new data structures it doesn’t understand from the new version.
If you are restoring from a backup though you can totally just set it to an older version that matches the version from when that backup is from. Hopefully that helps!
James;
I have a 8gb rpi4 running as a 64 bit Minecraft Multiverse server with several large worlds available, but only used one at a time. The problem that I am having is that world backups eat up all my ssd storage in about 3-4 weeks. Once this happens the server acts weirdly or fails to boot and I need to go in with FileZilla and delete most of the backup files that are around 1.5gb each. Other than not saving the backups, I wish there was a way like a file FIFO (first in first out) to limit the number of backups that are stored. Thanks for any suggestions. Dick
Thanks for letting me know your experience! I thought I added backup rotation to this like I did for my Bedrock version of the script but I just looked through the source code and I surely do not see it anywhere!
I’m actually adding it in right now. It’s going to keep the last 10 backups like Bedrock by default but you can easily modify this if your backups are getting really large (it sounds like they’re getting up there).
I’ve committed the update to GitHub if you want to try the latest version which should add this for you!
No problem Richard, let me know how it is working! I’ve been waiting for 1.17 to get closer here to jump back in so I haven’t been actively testing the server script as much but I definitely need this in.
This exact issue actually crashed my last server because I left it for a few weeks and it got full! That seemed like a bit like the cure being worse than the disease for backups so the script definitely needs the backup rotation. Cheers!
Hi,
I’ve been using this script to set up all of my servers of the past year.
Now I have a problem with the Performance in 1.16.5. Everytime a user joins the mspt (milliseconds per tick) goes through the roof.
Do you have any idea where this comes from?
The 1.16.4 has run perfect, so I’m thinking about simply rolling back. I’ve read your charpter about rolling back, but wouldn’t it be easier (of cource after a backup 😉 ) to simply change the link in the start.sh? Or would there be any problems?
Thanks in advance
It probably is something with 1.16.5. I’m not totally sure if the data structures will have changed from 1.16.5 to 1.16.4 but I doubt it. You may need to restore a backup from that time period if you are experiencing crashes after rolling back but that is so close and since it is just a minor revision I am guessing your existing file will work just fine! Make sure you have backups of everything before you try anything or make any changes just in case.
The Paper Minecraft server is frequently updated to fix things like this so I am guessing that it will fix itself on it’s own over the next few days/couple of weeks. I think what you are trying should work for the mean time though!
One question. In my install, everything works except the cron job for restart.sh.
If I run restart.sh manually in the command line, it works. If I let cron handle it, it closes the server correctly, but it doesn’t reboot the machine.
Confirmed. I see it in crontab and I know it at least partially runs. It goes all the way through the shutting down of the server, but then it seems to hang as the last echo isn’t output to the command line.
Strangely, if I run it manually (./restart.sh in the command line), it all works fine.
That is very strange! I do have one idea you can try. Try putting the restart.sh crontab line in the user crontab file instead of the superuser’s. You can access this by typing “crontab -e” without the sudo part as the user you want to edit. I’m not sure if it will work or not yet but it seems like it’s not happy about something with our cron setup and this is one way to change it up while still accomplishing the same task. Since you added this user to the sudo group they should have permissions to restart it!
I believe there is one minor difference in syntax between the system crontab and the user crontab (an extra field) so you may need to adjust the line slightly (make it match the examples at the top of the file). I think you’ll remove one field which is either the username or an asterisk if I remember correctly.
Hi! Great tutorial! Thank you!
But I have a problem.. When the server starts, it writes 4 times “Preparing spawn area: 0%” for 4 times and then “Loaded 0 spawn chunks for world world”. The same with world_nether and world_the_end.
What can I do? I have a Raspberry PI4 8gb RAM. Thank you very much!
Have you checked the server window or log files to see if there are any errors? If not then it may actually be stuck writing to the storage. Do you have a different SD card you could try with as a test?
Checking those two things should lead us to some answers!
Hi James! Thanks for the reply!
I just tried with another 16GB SD Card but it doesn’t work, same problem. And I check the log file and and there seems to be no errors. If you want I write you on Messenger and I send you the log file. My name is Alberto Filippi! Thank you very much!
Hi James! I found that Paper doesn’t work, if I download BuildTools for Spigot it works! Is there a way to edit your script for Buildtools (Spigot) instead of Paper? Thank you!
thank you for the setup script. Worked nice on my 3B+ 🙂
I was wondering what kind of accessories you a using with your Pi (especially if you a using some kind of cooling)?
Also, did you evertry to max out your server? Roughly how many people can play at one time before the lag gets to bad?
Great question! About 3-4 months ago I recently played a survival server with 3 friends over the internet + myself for a total of 4. We did not experience any lag on a 8 GB Pi 4 on a SSD which was fantastic!
Some people have let me know here in the comments that they’ve had more like 5-6 without too much trouble. One thing that can lag it is if people are “flying” at a very high speed and constantly generating new chunks in a new area, but other than extreme cases it works quite well!
I’d be very curious if someone ever tried something extreme like 10+ more players on there but I haven’t heard of anything that high yet. Hopefully that helps and thanks for the kind words!
How would I set it to reboot every 12 hours?
How do you edit world permissions and other things after stopping and restarting the server? I just set this up over ssh but I can’t get back to the server shell to do those things. Is this done in another place after first shutdown? Also, how would I port forward and set up a custom dns address for this? Thanks.
Hey I,
Great questions! So the way to get in and out of the server console is like this:
screen -ror
screen -r minecraft
will get you back into the console using the “screen” application. To get back out of the console to the SSH command line press “Ctrl+A” followed quickly by “Ctrl+D”. This will send the screen instance back to the background so you can use the normal CLI.
For your second question the port forwarding will depend completely on your router. Usually just looking at your router and finding the model # and giving that a quick Google search will bring up instructions for your specific router. For custom DNS you can use one of the free dynamic DNS providers such as dyndns (and some routers have this built in too) or you can purchase a domain name. I’m guessing you meant the former and that you want one of the dynamic IP address forwarding services!
Hey,
is it possibleto perform a version-rollback by simply changing the link in start.sh ?
Thanks in advance
Paul
Hey Paul,
Great question. So yes it will, but if the world has already been upgraded you can’t generally go back. It will crash since it will encounter new data structures it doesn’t understand from the new version.
If you are restoring from a backup though you can totally just set it to an older version that matches the version from when that backup is from. Hopefully that helps!
James;
I have a 8gb rpi4 running as a 64 bit Minecraft Multiverse server with several large worlds available, but only used one at a time. The problem that I am having is that world backups eat up all my ssd storage in about 3-4 weeks. Once this happens the server acts weirdly or fails to boot and I need to go in with FileZilla and delete most of the backup files that are around 1.5gb each. Other than not saving the backups, I wish there was a way like a file FIFO (first in first out) to limit the number of backups that are stored. Thanks for any suggestions. Dick
Hey Richard,
Thanks for letting me know your experience! I thought I added backup rotation to this like I did for my Bedrock version of the script but I just looked through the source code and I surely do not see it anywhere!
I’m actually adding it in right now. It’s going to keep the last 10 backups like Bedrock by default but you can easily modify this if your backups are getting really large (it sounds like they’re getting up there).
I’ve committed the update to GitHub if you want to try the latest version which should add this for you!
Thanks James; I will give it a try. Dick
No problem Richard, let me know how it is working! I’ve been waiting for 1.17 to get closer here to jump back in so I haven’t been actively testing the server script as much but I definitely need this in.
This exact issue actually crashed my last server because I left it for a few weeks and it got full! That seemed like a bit like the cure being worse than the disease for backups so the script definitely needs the backup rotation. Cheers!
Hi,
I’ve been using this script to set up all of my servers of the past year.
Now I have a problem with the Performance in 1.16.5. Everytime a user joins the mspt (milliseconds per tick) goes through the roof.
Do you have any idea where this comes from?
The 1.16.4 has run perfect, so I’m thinking about simply rolling back. I’ve read your charpter about rolling back, but wouldn’t it be easier (of cource after a backup 😉 ) to simply change the link in the start.sh? Or would there be any problems?
Thanks in advance
Pauö
Hey Paul,
It probably is something with 1.16.5. I’m not totally sure if the data structures will have changed from 1.16.5 to 1.16.4 but I doubt it. You may need to restore a backup from that time period if you are experiencing crashes after rolling back but that is so close and since it is just a minor revision I am guessing your existing file will work just fine! Make sure you have backups of everything before you try anything or make any changes just in case.
The Paper Minecraft server is frequently updated to fix things like this so I am guessing that it will fix itself on it’s own over the next few days/couple of weeks. I think what you are trying should work for the mean time though!
Thanks for the excellent tutorial, James.
One question. In my install, everything works except the cron job for restart.sh.
If I run restart.sh manually in the command line, it works. If I let cron handle it, it closes the server correctly, but it doesn’t reboot the machine.
Any thoughts? I am stumped.
One additional fact. I am not using the “pi” user but rather a created user with sudo privileges.
Hey Zarkon,
If you type:
sudo crontab -eDo you see the restart line in there?
Hi James,
Confirmed. I see it in crontab and I know it at least partially runs. It goes all the way through the shutting down of the server, but then it seems to hang as the last echo isn’t output to the command line.
Strangely, if I run it manually (./restart.sh in the command line), it all works fine.
Hey Zarkon,
That is very strange! I do have one idea you can try. Try putting the restart.sh crontab line in the user crontab file instead of the superuser’s. You can access this by typing “crontab -e” without the sudo part as the user you want to edit. I’m not sure if it will work or not yet but it seems like it’s not happy about something with our cron setup and this is one way to change it up while still accomplishing the same task. Since you added this user to the sudo group they should have permissions to restart it!
I believe there is one minor difference in syntax between the system crontab and the user crontab (an extra field) so you may need to adjust the line slightly (make it match the examples at the top of the file). I think you’ll remove one field which is either the username or an asterisk if I remember correctly.
Hy,
I had the same issue on Ubuntu 20.10.
To fix it, I added 1 line to the crontab file:
@reboot /home/ubuntu/minecraft/start.shgreetings stizn
Hi! Great tutorial! Thank you!
But I have a problem.. When the server starts, it writes 4 times “Preparing spawn area: 0%” for 4 times and then “Loaded 0 spawn chunks for world world”. The same with world_nether and world_the_end.
What can I do? I have a Raspberry PI4 8gb RAM. Thank you very much!
Hey Alberto,
Have you checked the server window or log files to see if there are any errors? If not then it may actually be stuck writing to the storage. Do you have a different SD card you could try with as a test?
Checking those two things should lead us to some answers!
Hi James! Thanks for the reply!
I just tried with another 16GB SD Card but it doesn’t work, same problem. And I check the log file and and there seems to be no errors. If you want I write you on Messenger and I send you the log file. My name is Alberto Filippi! Thank you very much!
Hi James! I found that Paper doesn’t work, if I download BuildTools for Spigot it works! Is there a way to edit your script for Buildtools (Spigot) instead of Paper? Thank you!
Hi James,
thank you for the setup script. Worked nice on my 3B+ 🙂
I was wondering what kind of accessories you a using with your Pi (especially if you a using some kind of cooling)?
Also, did you evertry to max out your server? Roughly how many people can play at one time before the lag gets to bad?
Hey Dominik,
Great question! About 3-4 months ago I recently played a survival server with 3 friends over the internet + myself for a total of 4. We did not experience any lag on a 8 GB Pi 4 on a SSD which was fantastic!
Some people have let me know here in the comments that they’ve had more like 5-6 without too much trouble. One thing that can lag it is if people are “flying” at a very high speed and constantly generating new chunks in a new area, but other than extreme cases it works quite well!
I’d be very curious if someone ever tried something extreme like 10+ more players on there but I haven’t heard of anything that high yet. Hopefully that helps and thanks for the kind words!