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A Census of Minecraft Servers

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Re: A Census of Minecraft Servers

#51

Post by rcxdude »

Forricide wrote: post #4
NelsonMinar wrote: post #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 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 o…

To throw in another reason why old versions are still popular, a good chunk of modded players use modpacks, and some of the more popular ones are pretty highly polished collections of mods with a bunch of glue to make them work together as a somewhat unified experience. This can't really happen until the mod ecosystem for a given version has already stabilised a fair amount (and can only happen on versions for which a large number of mods are available, which tends to be every 5 releases or so).

Re: A Census of Minecraft Servers

#52

Post by trutannus »

strogonoff wrote: post #27

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…

What's the latency like with that? When a user causes a wake event, how long until the server is live and ready to play? What sort of wait system do you use? This sounds really cool.

Re: A Census of Minecraft Servers

#55

Post by duskwuff »

infogulch wrote: post #47
ryukafalz wrote: post #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.

So a proper census would do a reverse dns lookup on every IP looking for a "minecraft" SRV record and connecting to that.

Reverse DNS lookups only return one designated name for the IP, not all records referencing the IP.

Re: A Census of Minecraft Servers

#56

Post by lostlogin »

glowingly wrote: post #39
lostlogin wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

… 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.

Absolutely.

I wonder how many servers are completely hidden. I’d love an easier way of making a server that wasn’t accessible to the world at large.

It isn’t so much that setting up the VPN is painful, but helping a kid install the software over the phone with no tech-savvy parent around is hard.

Re: A Census of Minecraft Servers

#57

Post by lostlogin »

alar44 wrote: post #41
lostlogin wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not more common because it doesn't really make sense.

Can you explain this a bit further?

Is white listing users the way to avoid it? I’m possibly too cautious and only have a couple of ports allowed though.

Re: A Census of Minecraft Servers

#58

Post by Forricide »

tetha wrote: post #17
Forricide wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

Additionally, as far as I know, after 1.12, the development of minecraft paced up and a lot of internals of minecraft changed. This turns the update of mods past 1.12 into a complete rewrite most of the times, which has burned out quite a few authors.

This is correct yeah, there's a lot of effort involved in porting mods to newer versions. Larger mods slowly move in that direction, but at the end of the day even now people are playing modpacks from 1.12 because there simply aren't equivalent ones in newer versions (with the same set / feel of mods)

Re: A Census of Minecraft Servers

#59

Post by MertsA »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #29
Filligree wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There simply isn't an incentive for many mod owners to update their mods to the latest version There is quite a strong incentive. What there is not, is means — Forge and Minecraft have both changed dramatically between versions, to the point that many mod developers throw their hands up in the air and rewrite the mod entirely. For something complex enough that that isn't an option, for instance Electrical Age, it's…

It's a miracle that the Minecraft mod scene exists at all. The old MCP project that made tools to decompile the obfuscated code to something readable and then recompile it again was just the most remarkable hack. I guess that's years out of date now and I vaguely recall Microsoft was more open to supporting mod authors in recent years. But I guess from this discussion it's still kind of a mess.

How sad is it that Microsoft is more open to supporting game mods than Mojang when Mojang promised a modding API was just around the corner for years and owed a lot of their success to the modders they seemed to spite.

The funny thing is that before the buyout (and maybe after, I don't know) Mojang's DRM was an abysmal failure. They'd obfuscate their Java binaries in a vain effort to prevent cracks but every cracked version out there would just patch the launcher and run the game unmodified. Cracked launchers would run updated versions just fine and when Mojang actually tried to check for a cracked launcher within the game itself they had a rash of false positives triggering on actual paying customers and nothing but a minor road bump for the pirates. The only thing obfuscating the game binaries did was force MCP to put in a mountain of effort to building the tooling and mappings to deobfuscate it so that mods could be developed. The entire MCP project should not have even been necessary. All this for some crappy attempt at obfuscating their binaries that never even worked against pirates in the first place.

At least a silver lining is they finally have data packs and command blocks.

Re: A Census of Minecraft Servers

#60

Post by hunterb123 »

The subtle advertising:

> This is probably thanks to cheap hosting offerings from companies like Hetzner (insert link).

Conflicts with their own data:

- OVH 24,417

- QuadraNet 9,927

- GPORTAL 9,339

- GMO Internet 5,466

- Hetzner 5,327

For those not in the game server hosting scene, it's because OVH offers a robust DDOS system for free for their servers. The price is not much different either. OVH is by far the leader for ALL game servers due to DDOS protection, price, and value. Hetzner is good, but OVH is a league of it's own.

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