How to Setup Raspberry Pi 4 Minecraft Server That Works WITH GAMEPLAY

It’s a common question we received and we’ve even discussed it internally can a raspberry pi microcomputer power a minecraft server well today we’re going to answer that question and provide you with all the tools that you need to get up and running the links are in the description below

But please follow along with us throughout this video and you’re going to learn how to set it up and see how it performs here’s what you’re going to need a raspberry pi 4 with either 4 or 8 gigabytes of ram a very good power supply and active cooling since we’re going to be

Overclocking your raspberry pi to help get things started quickly we’ll use a micro sd card but i want to be able to trust this storage so that’s why i’m going to go with the kingston endurance card which is built specifically for right intensive applications this feature is brought to you by

Ameridroid.com get your raspberry pi 4 or other single board computer to power your minecraft server at ameridroid.com american-based electronic sales shipping and support visit ameridroid.com now first up you’re going to need to install a debian based headless distro so that means no desktop environment and no extra apps running

For the raspberry pi 4 the 64-bit of the raspberry pi os lite isn’t available yet so for now we’re going to have to stick with the 32-bit this means that we’re limited to only four gigabytes of ram for java so buying the eight gigabyte pi 4 right away is fine for future

Readiness and the installer will accommodate this just fine and allow you to later upgrade to use more ram once the 64-bit os is released but for now there’s really no advantage of the eight gigabyte model over the four gigabyte because i needed a fancy name for the project and because this installer is

Built to work on any adequate spc such as the pine 64 rock pro 64. i’m calling the project pinecraft it’s simply not limited to the raspberry pi so just make sure whatever system you intend to run it on is going to be dedicated and has at least

Four gigabytes of ram let’s get started turning our raspberry pi 4 into a dedicated minecraft server i’ve connected to my raspberry pi os with ssh and the first thing that we need to do is install git so that’s sudo apt install git say yes that’s going to download git

And install it for us and now git is going to be a command on our system so i can go get clone https colon slash github.comcat5tv slash and then the name of this project which is pinecraft like minecraft but it’s going to work on pine64 boards as well

So hit enter now we’ve got a folder keep in mind i was in my home folder when i ran that command so where i am now is slash home slash pi pinecraft now notice i’m using the pi user because i’m using a default install so please for goodness sake as the pi user

Type password it’s like password but spelt kind of weird and then hit enter enter your current password which is raspberry and enter a new password please for goodness sake do that because that is just common sense um never use the default password that’s one of the first things we’re going to do so

I digress look at the folder here that we’ve get cloned and you see a file called install i’m not going to show you everything and explain everything here but if you have any questions get onto our discord go to category5.tv click on interact but what i’ve done here is i’ve basically

Scripted the entire process of setting up this minecraft server using spigot so that you don’t have to go through each of these steps manually and so that this video is in three hours long so this is basically the automated process of how i was able to get minecraft up and running on

A raspberry pi as well as possible so it overclocks it automatically does a whole bunch of stuff detects how much ram you have what kind of operating system you’re running and so on and so forth i’d encourage you anytime you’re going to run any kind of installer script hey look at the code

Find out what it’s actually doing and and see this also gives you a chance to trust what i’m doing here but also it just is really good information and shows you exactly what i’m doing but this is basically just the installer the script that’s going to do it it is well commented so

I think you won’t have any trouble figuring out what it is that i’m doing there however if you have any questions let us know all right so let’s run it i’m going to go sudo because i need to be the root user in order to run this

Dot slash install because it’s in the current folder and it is executable and then i need to specify my linux user so this is going to be who is going to be running the minecraft server because we don’t want that to be root right so if i type robbie for example

You’ll see that robbie does not exist i haven’t created that user the only user on my raspberry pi is the pi user which is default because it’s just like a vanilla raspberry pi os so i’m going to instead type sudo dot slash install pi and hit enter and there we go it’s

Running so first thing we need to do is accept mo yang’s eula the end user license agreement so i’ve included the link there for you you have to accept that in order to install now this is warning me this is very important now while my raspberry pi server that we’re going

To be looking at uh with the gameplay in just a few moments time is a raspberry pi with four gigs of ram i’m right now running this on one with eight gigs of ram for the demonstration so it’s detected up here that i’m running the 32-bit os so i’m

Not actually going to be able to get all eight gigs of ram i’m only going to be able to use four which is capping it off at 2.5 gigabytes of ram being used by the game so that’s fine it’s still going to run great but do keep in mind

If you’ve gone and bought the 8 gig version of the raspberry pi 4 you have to use the 64-bit os but why am i using the 32-bit os then it’s because they haven’t released the 64-bit light os yet so that is uh the desktop is currently in beta

And we will inevitably see the light version of uh of the 64-bit so keep that in mind keep watch for it you can install this on your pi right now then back it up and then re-install with the 64 bit once it’s released and you’ll be able to take

Advantage of all that ram in the meantime it’s going to overclock to 1.9 gigahertz the default is 1.5 so that’s pretty good but conservative because i don’t want to void your warranty and i don’t want to cause any trouble with stability or anything like that so it’s just warning me that i’m going

To overwrite the config.txt file which inevitably when it does that it also backs it up so keep that in mind you will find a new copy that has a date stamp in your slash boot on that drive so if you get stuck you’re good to go it’s going to install the

Server now it’s going to go through anything that it needs to do first of all it’s downloading the installer for spigot and it’s going to go through this process this is going to take some time so i’m just going to warp through time And there we have it all the steps have been automated with the pinecraft install script and we’re ready to start playing it’s really important for you to know and remember that you can’t shut down or reboot a minecraft server in the traditional linux way if you do you’re going to lose all the

Blocks that are in memory possibly a day or more of gameplay so pinecraft includes a couple handy scripts including one called reboot and one called stop minecraft is all set and ready to go at load as soon as you reboot but of course we need to reboot so we need to do that

Safely using the command sudo tilde minecraft slash reboot it’s going to store all the blocks to disk and reboot the pi that’s the command you’re going to use from now on similarly the stop command will safely store your blocks and stop the minecraft the minecraft server uh but leave it

Running so that you can either then halt the system or run a backup or something like that so both of these commands can take several minutes just keep that in mind because they’re going to be storing several days possibly worth of blocks that are in your ram to

Disk so now that the new raspberry pi minecraft server is rebooted it’s time it’s like the moment of truth let’s try to connect absolutely flawless fantastic well when we come back after the break we’re gonna give it a real world test connecting several players to a raspberry pi 4 minecraft server stick around Alright it’s time to check out the gameplay performance notice that we’ve got the cpu and ram stats at the bottom of your screen and that’ll remain for the whole demonstration all right so i’m here at jeff’s place and just going to kind of quickly run around to show you the

You know that this is performing very very well so this is a raspberry pi 4 is the server and i’ve overclocked it to 1.95 gigahertz it’s got 4 gigs of ram and a kingston uh endurance microsd card all right so i wanted to show the performance with just me

Uh everything looks pretty good and and here at jeff’s place jeff i guess things should be performing it poorly here if anywhere right because you’ve got all these animals and stuff and that’s correct yeah i tried to to to build a base that was busy enough with lots of elements and so there’s

Lots of animals making noise in the background i want to try and tax the surfer out yeah okay so let’s uh let’s see what happens as we start to add players because i think that was one of the questions that came up when you and i were first discussing this project was

You know what how many players are going to be able to come on here all right and uh i think i’m the last to join there’s mangled fox 70 yeah oh yeah jeff maybe it’d be nice if you could join me there he is that’s a random one right hey

The one so check this out so we’ve got one two three four five six seven eight people online at once on our raspberry pi 4 server and a chicken and a whole bunch of uh animals in the background and there’s i’m not seeing a single glitch at all no glitches

It’s hard to see right now because it is late late late at night and in order to wow you’re good uh in order to speed through the night we all have to have a bet and jeff only has the one bed at his place so yes all right all right

So we can follow the one oh okay you’ve got a shield i do not but i will i’m going to be like your videographer Done oh creepers let’s avoid that yeah these guys these are the guys that if you get too close they explode when you’re followed by a spider too and a bunch of creepers oh that was okay that was effective and i see an enderman the shadow of an enderman oh somebody’s

Oh oh oh no so oh and there’s zombies everywhere and i have no weapons dude okay we may have to just wait out the night yeah you may have to oh my god there’s an enderman yes i got an iron sword finally congratulations do you guys see my stuff did you have uh

Iron sword pants and shoes yeah exactly but then i died out in front of my house i think hinger may have collected your stuff um ball nerd i just killed a zombie under high oh i got it here’s my stuff oh that was that was from the zombies that was from

The zombie i think so bald nerd did you have this armor here that uh hingers were in the hindrance that’s the armor that the zombie dropped no that was the armor that i dropped yeah the zombie picked it up i did not know zombies could pick up

Our viewers can see that the performance is like this is probably better than more time or you would know because you’ve played on a lot of online servers how’s the performance of our minecraft server on a raspberry pi uh compared to some of those online servers better actually this is better yeah i

Would agree i i have that’s what i’ve been told there’s way less players though but i mean there i have a free server that uh i’ve used with my kids and we get lag issues when it’s just the four of us on so the fact that this is a raspberry pi

And there’s what nine of us it’s sorry my my my internet just dropped out so i lost you for a second there you were talking jeff well i was just saying that i have a um a free server that i use with my kids oh okay like online like a cloud

Online okay yeah and it is um it can be quite laggy sometimes when it’s just the four of us so this performs exceptionally better than that and i’ve i’ve also paid for servers where it’s you know 60 a year and this is better performance you don’t have much in the way of armor

But are you interested in following me into the nether just for a quick tour uh sure because that should be a performance hit right that’s loading another world and we’re going to have multiple people in that world and multiple people in this one yeah let’s do it all right so instantaneous load

Just be careful where you walk because uh you don’t want to fall into the lava yeah i’ll say all right Oh man so look at the world gent now why is it that’s not snow that’s like from stranger things yeah it’s the weird stuff that’s just kind of floating yeah okay i’m just astounded where did you die were you were you here with us all right

I am so impressed with how well this world gens there’s zero issues i was expecting now i’ve i have no experience with minecraft but i’ve seen the lag that causes the world gen to kind of stutter yep um on other servers so i was expecting that because this is

Just a single board computer that’s right but it’s running great it’s running very very well apparently this is the place to stand i’m like safe from the rain right here it’s all around me whoa whoa you fell yeah i put a cactus on top and it collapsed what

I would avoid against touching cactus no i no it’s not the cactus that killed me i had cactus in my inventory and then i dropped them on the ground and like i placed it on the ground on top of the sand that i was standing on

And then the sand collapsed and then i fell into the um whatever yeah you know what i’m hearing here jeff what like i mean we’re we’re the dads that are you know the performance is really really great on a single board computer but the kids are having fun well

Exactly i’ve got my three kids sitting beside me and they’re they’re having a blast so this is good awesome i think it’s a mission success my friend hooray [Applause] You