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:
You can now open the SetupMinecraft.sh file with TextEdit (for GUIs) or with nano/vi for CLI. The very top lines of the file are:
# Minecraft server version
Version="1.17.1"
# Set to AllowLocalCopy="1" if you make changes to the script otherwise any changes will be discarded and the latest online version will run
AllowLocalCopy="0"
If you change the Version to 1.16.5 and then change AllowLocalCopy=”0″ to AllowLocalCopy=”1″ and then run SetupMinecraft with:
chmod +x SetupMinecraft.sh
./SetupMinecraft.sh
This will install the requested version using the latest API (v2). The fixes for the API in start.sh look like this:
# Get latest build
BuildJSON=$(curl -H "Accept-Encoding: identity" -H "Accept-Language: en" -L -A "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/90.0.4.212 Safari/537.36" https://papermc.io/api/v2/projects/paper/versions/verselect)
Build=$(echo "$BuildJSON" | rev | cut -d, -f 1 | cut -d] -f 2 | rev)
Build=$(($Build + 0))
if [[ $Build != 0 ]]; then
echo "Latest paperclip build found: $Build"
curl -H "Accept-Encoding: identity" -H "Accept-Language: en" -L -A "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/90.0.4.212 Safari/537.36" -o paperclip.jar "https://papermc.io/api/v2/projects/paper/versions/verselect/builds/$Build/downloads/paper-verselect-$Build.jar"
else
echo "Unable to retrieve latest Paper build (got result of $Build)"
fi
You could manually add this system to your old one by changing the “verselect” in the URL to 1.16.5 in my URL as well. There’s a couple of additional options at least, but my recommended one would be to use the override. Then you always get the latest fixes/changes but can still run whatever version you’d like to.
It probably doesn’t matter most of the time if you use a static entry like you did but theoretically if a security vulnerability or something was found in that version or a really serious flaw it’s very possible that the old Paper versions could still get a fix pushed for that version. This is called “backporting” if the changes are deemed important enough that they need to go back and update old versions and push them as well. It’s hypothetical but not unprecedented as it has happened before and is something to still consider.
On the oldest and most infamous anarchy server 2b2t some really clever exploiters actually tricked the Paper Minecraft devs into creating a fix for a different exploit (a socially engineered one that they calculated would get a specific fix that would enable another more powerful type of exploit, some real next level 4D chess being played by these guys) that would let them basically see where everyone was at on the server. This was called the NOCOM exploit and it was something to behold. There’s a good FitMC video on it here.
In 2018, a group of players called Nerds Inc. discovered a bug in 2b2t’s server software that allowed players to query far-away terrain, which players cannot normally view. The loading of huge areas of terrain puts a heavy workload on the server, which Nerds Inc. used to repeatedly crash the server. This was done with the intent to incite a vulnerable bug fix into 2b2t’s upstream server software (PaperMC), which now only responded to the querying of far-away terrain if it was already loaded, i.e., proximate to a player. The developers inadvertently gave anyone aware of the vulnerability the ability to test if any given area in the game world contained a player, and to read that area if so. Nerds Inc. could now locate all online players and remotely observe the terrain around players in real time, including valuable storage of in-game items and player-built constructions.
The reason I included this part was just to show that exploits/fixes are found and pushed even in these old versions (2b2t always runs an ancient version) so it’s definitely worthwhile to run SetupMinecraft.sh with the override so you can get future patches even for versions that aren’t current (and while not frequent the times when they have them is when it’s absolutely critical to get the patch, usually for security reasons). Hopefully that helps!
Right! Of course it’s better to use the latest available version of paper, but I just wanted to get back on that server quickly, banking on you to have a more long-term solution 🙂 Yup, I did amend those lines in SetupMinecraft.sh.
I realise now I overwrote the more up-to-date start.sh (which must have included the commands to download the latest paperclip you mention) when I restored a world from backup. Note to self: don’t overwrite any shell scripts.
Thanks for the advice. And the 2b2t, that hack is a good story that my kids will love.
Welcome! If you are entering them directly on the console you just leave the / off the front of the commands. So you would just type “seed x” instead of “/seed x”.
If you type op “your name” it will give you operator access inside the server and let you use the commands there as well. Hopefully that helps!
Hey, just wondering if this script can be run on an AMD64 platform instead of a Pi? I used to run a Java server, but I had to setup everything from scratch and this script would certainly be of a lot of help. Tank you!
Fantastic question! It absolutely will work on AMD64 as is as I do the same thing here at home and use the script to set up servers on my AMD64 machines and it shouldn’t need any changes. Hopefully that helps!
After much wrangling with a server I just started up on a Pi 4B 8GB I found your guide, and discovered that the reason behind loading new chunks being slow (even though loading old chunks was fine) was because I was hitting the write speed limit on my SD card. Tried out writing to one of my Desktop’s SSDs with a cable and it fixed it. Time to buy a small SSD lol
Great guide, going to keep it bookmarked for the future.
I’m so glad you were able to meet with success at the end of your journey! You actually just walked a lot of the steps I myself walked to get into Raspberry Pis many years ago.
The Minecraft Server script was one of the first things I did on the Pi and was my first GitHub project released for this site a few years ago now. My road looked really similar as I had to keep optimizing and this led me inevitably to the storage. The storage is for sure the #1 bottleneck on the Pi (for everything basically on the Pi 4, the RAM and CPU are quite fast). The storage was the final piece for me and once I solved it my server performed as fast as I expected/needed to!
You can see the true power of the Pi when it’s hooked up to SSD storage (or what the CPU / RAM is capable of without the SD card bottlenecking it). I definitely have a bunch of small ones that I use for this purpose and they have been a good investment. I have used them for a lot of other things too that benefitted from fast storage! I pretty much don’t use SD cards with them anymore unless I need a really ultra-portable setup for some reason and it makes sense to use one. If you ever have a choice SSD is the way to go.
Thanks for the kind words and leaving your story as I’m sure there’s others out there searching as well that this will resonate with for sure and let them know they’re on the right track. Have fun and take care!
Hey James! First off, thank you SO much for sharing this with us, super awesome script!!
Now to my question… I have been banging my head on the wall for a few hours now, trying to set this up on my new Pi 4. I’m having trouble with the Java Install, so I’ve been reading through your raw source code to try and find my issue. If I’m not mistaken, I think I may have found a new bug in the code. When the Java installer falls back to Snap, it then just runs an install for “openjdk”, then checks the installed version to make sure it’s version 16. If, after that, the version still isn’t 16, it then throws error “Openjdk Install Failed. Version is still reporting less or greater than 16!”
Well, the Snap store is now updated to version OpenJDK 17, so even when the script fell back and successfully installed Java from Snap, the version check still wasn’t happy.
Assuming the rest of the script and server will still work fine with OpenJDK 17, is this something you could update in the scrip to version check for instead/in-addition to version 16? Alternatively, I would love to just skip the Java check at this point and continue with the script if that was an option. Not sure how to go about doing that manually, myself. I’m way too new with this raspberry pi.
Thanks for the heads up and the kind words, this is a tricky one! So the reason it’s that way is that originally Paper would *not* work with OpenJDK 17 and only worked with OpenJDK 16.
I just checked though and this has been fixed! I just uploaded this change to GitHub which allows OpenJDK 17 (and will probably remove the check entirely if Paper is now compatible with all newer OpenJDK versions since originally this wasn’t the case and it would display an error).
Can you give it a try again and let’s see if it works for you now!
i tried starting it but when it tried to start the server it said “Must be connected to a terminal.”
any idea of how to fix this? this is my first time using raspi and linux in general
It will be the same IP as your Pi which you can find with:
ifconfig
If you are looking for your public IP then you can just type “what’s my IP” in Google and Google will actually tell you at the top of the search. Hopefully that helps!
Hi, loving the script since 2019! We like to play version 1.16.5, and I noticed the API for downloading paperclip.jar has changed. See here.
If anyone has the same problem, my clumsy solution to the start.sh script is to exchange the line where it downloads paperclip.jar into
wget -O paperclip.jar https://papermc.io/api/v2/projects/paper/versions/1.16.5/builds/790/downloads/paper-1.16.5-790.jarHey Christian,
Thanks for the kind words! You did this correctly for sure, but there is another way to do it as well that I wanted to let you know about.
If you download SetupMinecraft.sh (instead of running it directly as the instructions recommend) by using:
curl -o SetupMinecraft.sh https://raw.githubusercontent.com/TheRemote/RaspberryPiMinecraft/master/SetupMinecraft.shYou can now open the SetupMinecraft.sh file with TextEdit (for GUIs) or with nano/vi for CLI. The very top lines of the file are:
# Minecraft server versionVersion="1.17.1"
# Set to AllowLocalCopy="1" if you make changes to the script otherwise any changes will be discarded and the latest online version will run
AllowLocalCopy="0"
If you change the Version to 1.16.5 and then change AllowLocalCopy=”0″ to AllowLocalCopy=”1″ and then run SetupMinecraft with:
chmod +x SetupMinecraft.sh./SetupMinecraft.sh
This will install the requested version using the latest API (v2). The fixes for the API in start.sh look like this:
# Get latest buildBuildJSON=$(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/90.0.4.212 Safari/537.36" https://papermc.io/api/v2/projects/paper/versions/verselect)
Build=$(echo "$BuildJSON" | rev | cut -d, -f 1 | cut -d] -f 2 | rev)
Build=$(($Build + 0))
if [[ $Build != 0 ]]; then
echo "Latest paperclip build found: $Build"
curl -H "Accept-Encoding: identity" -H "Accept-Language: en" -L -A "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/90.0.4.212 Safari/537.36" -o paperclip.jar "https://papermc.io/api/v2/projects/paper/versions/verselect/builds/$Build/downloads/paper-verselect-$Build.jar"
else
echo "Unable to retrieve latest Paper build (got result of $Build)"
fi
You could manually add this system to your old one by changing the “verselect” in the URL to 1.16.5 in my URL as well. There’s a couple of additional options at least, but my recommended one would be to use the override. Then you always get the latest fixes/changes but can still run whatever version you’d like to.
It probably doesn’t matter most of the time if you use a static entry like you did but theoretically if a security vulnerability or something was found in that version or a really serious flaw it’s very possible that the old Paper versions could still get a fix pushed for that version. This is called “backporting” if the changes are deemed important enough that they need to go back and update old versions and push them as well. It’s hypothetical but not unprecedented as it has happened before and is something to still consider.
On the oldest and most infamous anarchy server 2b2t some really clever exploiters actually tricked the Paper Minecraft devs into creating a fix for a different exploit (a socially engineered one that they calculated would get a specific fix that would enable another more powerful type of exploit, some real next level 4D chess being played by these guys) that would let them basically see where everyone was at on the server. This was called the NOCOM exploit and it was something to behold. There’s a good FitMC video on it here.
From the 2b2t Wikipedia page:
The reason I included this part was just to show that exploits/fixes are found and pushed even in these old versions (2b2t always runs an ancient version) so it’s definitely worthwhile to run SetupMinecraft.sh with the override so you can get future patches even for versions that aren’t current (and while not frequent the times when they have them is when it’s absolutely critical to get the patch, usually for security reasons). Hopefully that helps!
Right! Of course it’s better to use the latest available version of paper, but I just wanted to get back on that server quickly, banking on you to have a more long-term solution 🙂 Yup, I did amend those lines in SetupMinecraft.sh.
I realise now I overwrote the more up-to-date start.sh (which must have included the commands to download the latest paperclip you mention) when I restored a world from backup. Note to self: don’t overwrite any shell scripts.
Thanks for the advice. And the 2b2t, that hack is a good story that my kids will love.
No problem at all, take care and enjoy!
Hello James,
I have just started making my own Minecraft server and I was just wondering how do I do commands in the server cmd center (e.g. /seed, /tp @user)
Hey Freedered,
Welcome! If you are entering them directly on the console you just leave the / off the front of the commands. So you would just type “seed x” instead of “/seed x”.
If you type op “your name” it will give you operator access inside the server and let you use the commands there as well. Hopefully that helps!
Hey, just wondering if this script can be run on an AMD64 platform instead of a Pi? I used to run a Java server, but I had to setup everything from scratch and this script would certainly be of a lot of help. Tank you!
Hey Ouji,
Fantastic question! It absolutely will work on AMD64 as is as I do the same thing here at home and use the script to set up servers on my AMD64 machines and it shouldn’t need any changes. Hopefully that helps!
After much wrangling with a server I just started up on a Pi 4B 8GB I found your guide, and discovered that the reason behind loading new chunks being slow (even though loading old chunks was fine) was because I was hitting the write speed limit on my SD card. Tried out writing to one of my Desktop’s SSDs with a cable and it fixed it. Time to buy a small SSD lol
Great guide, going to keep it bookmarked for the future.
Hey Some,
I’m so glad you were able to meet with success at the end of your journey! You actually just walked a lot of the steps I myself walked to get into Raspberry Pis many years ago.
The Minecraft Server script was one of the first things I did on the Pi and was my first GitHub project released for this site a few years ago now. My road looked really similar as I had to keep optimizing and this led me inevitably to the storage. The storage is for sure the #1 bottleneck on the Pi (for everything basically on the Pi 4, the RAM and CPU are quite fast). The storage was the final piece for me and once I solved it my server performed as fast as I expected/needed to!
You can see the true power of the Pi when it’s hooked up to SSD storage (or what the CPU / RAM is capable of without the SD card bottlenecking it). I definitely have a bunch of small ones that I use for this purpose and they have been a good investment. I have used them for a lot of other things too that benefitted from fast storage! I pretty much don’t use SD cards with them anymore unless I need a really ultra-portable setup for some reason and it makes sense to use one. If you ever have a choice SSD is the way to go.
Thanks for the kind words and leaving your story as I’m sure there’s others out there searching as well that this will resonate with for sure and let them know they’re on the right track. Have fun and take care!
Hey James! First off, thank you SO much for sharing this with us, super awesome script!!
Now to my question… I have been banging my head on the wall for a few hours now, trying to set this up on my new Pi 4. I’m having trouble with the Java Install, so I’ve been reading through your raw source code to try and find my issue. If I’m not mistaken, I think I may have found a new bug in the code. When the Java installer falls back to Snap, it then just runs an install for “openjdk”, then checks the installed version to make sure it’s version 16. If, after that, the version still isn’t 16, it then throws error “Openjdk Install Failed. Version is still reporting less or greater than 16!”
Well, the Snap store is now updated to version OpenJDK 17, so even when the script fell back and successfully installed Java from Snap, the version check still wasn’t happy.
Assuming the rest of the script and server will still work fine with OpenJDK 17, is this something you could update in the scrip to version check for instead/in-addition to version 16? Alternatively, I would love to just skip the Java check at this point and continue with the script if that was an option. Not sure how to go about doing that manually, myself. I’m way too new with this raspberry pi.
Thank you so much!!
-Kaylor
Hey Kaylor,
Thanks for the heads up and the kind words, this is a tricky one! So the reason it’s that way is that originally Paper would *not* work with OpenJDK 17 and only worked with OpenJDK 16.
I just checked though and this has been fixed! I just uploaded this change to GitHub which allows OpenJDK 17 (and will probably remove the check entirely if Paper is now compatible with all newer OpenJDK versions since originally this wasn’t the case and it would display an error).
Can you give it a try again and let’s see if it works for you now!
i tried starting it but when it tried to start the server it said “Must be connected to a terminal.”
any idea of how to fix this? this is my first time using raspi and linux in general
Hey Kupono,
Sometimes that just means the server started too quickly and if you type:
screen -rit should pull up the server. If not check the “logs” folder and we should be able to help get you going!
Hey James,
How do I check the server IP address?
Hey Schizzers,
It will be the same IP as your Pi which you can find with:
ifconfigIf you are looking for your public IP then you can just type “what’s my IP” in Google and Google will actually tell you at the top of the search. Hopefully that helps!