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A Census of Minecraft Servers

blog.bithole.dev

31–40 of 76 posts

Re: A Census of Minecraft Servers

#31

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…

Some of them could be Modpack servers. There are only certain versions with support for most mods (1.12.2, 1.7.10, sometimes 1.10). Many of the more established modpacks still run on 1.7.10 or even older

Re: A Census of Minecraft Servers

#32
I... kinda can't believe that one of my libraries (Forgelin) is the second most common mod on all Minecraft servers. It doesn't support the five most recent versions of the game and I haven't touched it in years. I guess there are a lot of other mods (or a few really popular ones) for somewhat older versions that use Kotlin.

Re: A Census of Minecraft Servers

#34

What's up with MineTest? Seems like the only issue is some of the mods aren't maintained, but other than that, it looks like there's some real potential. It would be interesting to see a similar census, and if it's gaining any ground.

I tried it a while ago and unfortunately immediately ran into some rather serious bugs.

Re: A Census of Minecraft Servers

#35
post #26

"Fun" fact: Microsoft set up Minecraft to be open to everyone by default. Consequence: griefing groups that scan the web and blow the ever living shit of whatever they can find on those random servers (TNT blocks can be supplied by item duplication exploits): https://youtu.be/hoS0PM20KJk

Yup, my family minecraft server fell victim to that. Thankfully it was a new map with only a couple days' work into it, but annoying nonetheless. Whitelist your private servers!

Requiring a VPN is how I handled that - not so much for preventing people from joining the game but because I don’t like open ports.

I’m surprised that VPN usage isn’t more common for minecraft players.

Re: A Census of Minecraft Servers

#37

Our Minecraft server is spun up only when we play, with a simple bespoke front-end that allows any Cognito-authenticated user to start or stop the AWS instance. The dashboard also shows an auto-updated leaderboard with some in-game stats (death count, miles traveled, last login and so on), stored in DynamoDB and periodically updated by a cron job on the server. I also planned to add a map of the spawn, but not sure i…

I'd love to read a blog post or a link to a repo to see how this is done. Sounds very fun and interesting!

Re: A Census of Minecraft Servers

#38

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.

25565 is less common than alternate ports from what I've seen. Most small, individually run, servers are not running 25565.

Re: A Census of Minecraft Servers

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On IPv4, running on port 25565, which were online at the time of being scanned

… and were publicly accessible.

and were Java servers. Bedrock not included (runs on a different port over UDP only). Probably not including any Java or Bedrock Realms (official MSFT servers), who likely seat all access behind an authenticated gateway of some sort.

For extra fun, is a wiki.vg page trying to accumulate documentation on the Bedrock UDP interface. https://wiki.vg/Bedrock_Protocol

This is still a neat sample of Java Minecraft servers.

Re: A Census of Minecraft Servers

#40

Our Minecraft server is spun up only when we play, with a simple bespoke front-end that allows any Cognito-authenticated user to start or stop the AWS instance. The dashboard also shows an auto-updated leaderboard with some in-game stats (death count, miles traveled, last login and so on), stored in DynamoDB and periodically updated by a cron job on the server. I also planned to add a map of the spawn, but not sure i…

I'd love to read a blog post or a link to a repo to see how this is done. Sounds very fun and interesting!

Thanks for the interest, I might publish the thing after auditing and documenting. There are hard-coded insensitive credentials like Cognito pool ID and player UUIDs, which I should make nicely configurable. If I do it soon enough I’ll reply here. It’s very basic-looking though (and without dynamic registration, intended for small infrequently changing groups with memberships managed by an admin).

As I have already been using AWS and this was not at all business-critical, I did not care about vendor lock-in and thought of it as an exercise in how much I could delegate (neither letting random visitors access our dashboard, nor spending time implementing custom auth). Their JS SDK documentation wasn’t great, but after some digging it was somewhat straightforward to make a fully static SPA (hosted on S3) access specified AWS resources (per IAM policy) on behalf of authenticated Cognito user.

The app also “integrates” with Discord to ping a channel on each instance start/stop, but that is merely posting to a webhook URL.

I wrote it in React and TypeScript with a bare-minimal Babel + Webpack configuration but it could just as well be written in vanilla JS.

As to the server, it is plain Ubuntu with a cron job that periodically tries to launch MC server if it’s not already running (or something silly like that). Another cron job publishes stats to DynamoDB (IAM policy allowing the instance access the table), and I wanted to add yet another job to generate a PNG with a pretty map of the spawn.

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