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A Census of Minecraft Servers

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Re: A Census of Minecraft Servers

#3
The most interesting part of this to me was the list of top mods by popularity. But when I looked a lot of them seemed for much older Minecraft versions or for old versions of the mods. For instance "Pam's HarvestCraft" is mentioned but that's been deprecated in favor of a HarvestCraft 2.

Is that just a quirk of how the mod names are reported and folks are really running newer stuff? Are older modded servers still popular? Are the servers themselves mostly old and no longer used?

Re: A Census of Minecraft Servers

#4

The most interesting part of this to me was the list of top mods by popularity. But when I looked a lot of them seemed for much older Minecraft versions or for old versions of the mods. For instance "Pam's HarvestCraft" is mentioned but that's been deprecated in favor of a HarvestCraft 2. Is that just a quirk of how the mod names are reported and folks are really running newer stuff? Are older modded servers still po…

Many people still run on older modded versions. To use the example you gave, HarvestCraft 2's CurseForge page[0] says:

> Welcome to the brand new HarvestCraft for 1.14.4 and beyond! Please read carefully as this is NOT a update of Pam's HarvestCraft but a re-boot.

1.14.4 is 3 years old, but many (many!) servers are still running on 1.12 or older versions if doing modded. There simply isn't an incentive for many mod owners to update their mods to the latest version, so the "community updates" as a whole are generally quite slow and people end up stuck on their favourite version.

Edit: Looking at the article, they also only analyze Forge mods. On newer versions, other mod loaders are gaining popularity, whereas Forge is the de-facto mod loader for 1.12.

[0] https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc-mods/pams-harvestcra...

Re: A Census of Minecraft Servers

#5
One thing the author may have missed here because I didn’t see it mentioned: this also misses any servers not hosted on the default port of 25565. I don’t know how common this really is, but Minecraft has SRV record support, and for those of us running more than one Minecraft server on a single box it’s likely at least one will be on a different port.

Re: A Census of Minecraft Servers

#6
post #2

Really good post. It's amazing how fast you can scan all of IPv4. I also needed tune SQLite recently for an event logging server, and "PRAGMA journal_mode=WAL" helped a lot.

Yes, the author would probably get another huge speed up there. Some more potential optimizations here [1].

[1] https://phiresky.github.io/blog/2020/sqlite-performance-tuni...

Re: A Census of Minecraft Servers

#7

One thing the author may have missed here because I didn’t see it mentioned: this also misses any servers not hosted on the default port of 25565. I don’t know how common this really is, but Minecraft has SRV record support, and for those of us running more than one Minecraft server on a single box it’s likely at least one will be on a different port.

It’s very common for cheaper Minecraft SaaS hosts to serve it on a non-default port.

Re: A Census of Minecraft Servers

#9
What a pleasant surprise, I know the author from somewhere else. Small world!

Very enjoyable read and even more interesting results. 4 Minecraft servers per 10000 people in Germany is kind of insane to think about.

What was the number 2? The author made it sound like it was the US, but that has 4x less

Re: A Census of Minecraft Servers

#10
post #2

Really good post. It's amazing how fast you can scan all of IPv4. I also needed tune SQLite recently for an event logging server, and "PRAGMA journal_mode=WAL" helped a lot.

> Really good post. It's amazing how fast you can scan all of IPv4.

If you're just scanning one port, which the author seems to have done, you can probably do it in some minute or two, unless you wanna play nice and lower the rate of sending packets.

Otherwise if you wanna scan full IPv4 + all ports, it'll take a couple of minutes at least. Masscan with the right hardware seems to be able to do it in five minutes or less.

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