Need help with Minecraft/Server Fundamentals

Minecraft
1

Hello all! I am hoping that someone can provide me some guidance related to Minecraft, specifically around Single vs Multi Player, servers, and worlds.

Here’s the background:
I have a home built FreeNAS machine that serves several purposes. I recently installed the MineOS plugin as an experiment because my kids play Minecraft. I admittedly know very little about the game. I was able to install the plugin and get the server up and running with little problems.

My daughter plays Minecraft on the Windows 10 (the W10 version). Since that version cannot connect to my server, I bought a new account and downloaded the Java version. I am able to launch that version and connect to my server and play Minecraft. All is well!

This is where my questions come in. When my daughter plays on the W10 version, she is playing single player and has created a bunch of different worlds. When playing the java version, and connecting to a server, how do worlds work? Do you/can you create new worlds on a single server? Or is that not even how it’s intended to work? If I buy a second account for child 2 on a different computer, I assume he can connect to that server and the two kids can see each other? What is the difference between a world and a server?

I realize that is a bunch of questions but I appreciate any guidance.

2

The biggst diffrence is between java and bedrock (W10-app/console/andoid/iOS) is how worlds is handled. There is no clean and esay way to convert worlds from java to bedrock or the other way.

As for the difference between “servers” and “worlds” there is no practical difference on a standard server

A “server” contains everything needed to run the game, including handling users and chat and such. The world just handles that, the world on the minecraft server. If you look in your minecraft server directory you will find a folder named “world” (or your wordls name if you changed it from default upon creation). This is where all the world files are stored.

This is the easy version.

If you look closer on how the server works you will see that one server can contain many worlds. On a standard server this is how the main world, nether, and end are handled. each are from the servers point of view different worlds.

With special plugins or mods (running specialized versions of the server) you can actually have several different worlds connected by teleporters (or whatever the server or server admin wants to call them). .But for your example, and a basic server, a world and your server is the same thing, even though your server software in the bakgournd treats topside, nether, and wend as separate worlds.

You server will allow connection from anyone you give access to. I reccomend strongly that you activate the following server attributes:

online-mode: true
whitelist: true
enforce whitelist: true

The first thing to understand is that the “online-mode” is somewhat badly named. It do not control wether your server is acessbile from the internet or not, it means your server is allowed to connect to Mojang/Microsoft to check if your guest/users have a valid minecraft user. Diabling this means your server is unable to control who is logging on, and that anyone who guesses a username may connect to your server. Highly recoomended to set this to true

Whitelist
With a whitelist enabled, users not on the whitelist will be unable to connect. Intended for private servers, such as those for real-life friends or strangers carefully selected via an application process, for example

enforce whitelist:
When this option is enabled, users who are not present on the whitelist (if it’s enabled) will be kicked from the server after the server reloads the whitelist file.

3

Thank you so much, @iMelsom, for taking the time to respond.

So if I’m thinking of this correctly, when someone plays single player mode, they are in control of how things look, their worlds, etc. But when playing on a server, the server admin is in control of the world, how it looks, its mods, etc. Is that right?

And if I’m thinking of this from a kid’s point of view - let’s say my two kids are playing on the server for a week or so and get tired of it and want to start over, or change things up, or make things different. What is the intended process for that as the server admin?

4

This is true. On a server, the server admin controls the world.

The best way to do this in MineOS is to stop the current server, archive it, and make a new one. Then you have a copy of the old world if your kids want to revisit, and they have the new one.

The standard vanilla minecrafter server do not really support mods or plugins, to du that you need to look into FTB servers, that are minecraft servers that comes with a huge vareity of modpacks.