TheAlienDoctor – How to make a server on Minecraft Bedrock for FREE [Tutorial]

In today’s tutorial I’m going to show you how to create your own Minecraft Bedrock Edition server on Windows although of course the server will be joinable by any bedrock Edition platform and I have dedicated tutorials in the description of how to join Bedrock servers on any platform if you’re

Wondering but this is actually how to make those servers that you can join so hello humans I’m the alien doctor but you can call me alien and welcome back to another Bedrock edition tutorial as I said today I’m going to show you how to create a server on Bedrock Edition using

The default BDS server software such as the one I’m on right now which is of course just my testing world so without further Ado let’s get into the tutorial also timestamps in the description down below of course so the first step to making your own server on Minecraft

Bedrock Edition is to head over to the Minecraft Bedrock Edition dedicated server page so this is the vanilla server software for Minecraft Bedrock Edition and you could either download it for Windows or for Ubuntu which is of course a Linux distro now you also have the options to download for the

Minecraft preview down here but I’m going to stick to the main release however the Minecraft preview should essentially be the same process if you want a preview server but we’re going to stick to the main release so you simply just want to press I agree and then

Download and save this wherever you want I’m going to make a new folder in my downloads and just call it Minecraft server one thing to point out on the Bedrock dedicated server fandom page is if you scroll down to the download section you can actually find loads of

Links to older versions of the BDS server software if for whatever reason you want a server running on an older version which is quite nice and the same with the older preview versions here as well but anyway we’re getting off topic so once you’ve downloaded the Bedrock server software you actually need to

Extract it out of the dot zip folder so just extract it like any regular dot zip folder add once it’s unzipped you should have a zip folder like this I’m gonna move all of the files outside of the unzip folder just to the my Minecraft server folder so that they’re like this

And you can go ahead and delete the original dot zip because you probably won’t need that anymore so inside here we have essentially all the files that you need for your server some of the main ones include this Bedrock undersource server exe which is actually the file that you’ll open to start the

Server you have an allow list here which is on Java called whitelist and it’s just a list of players are allowed on to play on your server permissions which just controls whether players or an operator or not and server.properties which is where you can change the settings of your server so we’re going

To start out with the server.properties so you can simply open this in any regular text editor I’m using notepad plus plus but you can use just regular notepad that comes pre-installed or really anything now I’m not going to go through every single one one of these

Options because there is quite a lot but I’ll go through some of the more important ones so firstly we have your server name this actually doesn’t matter technically too much but I’m going to go ahead and just name it aliens server now if you’re wondering this actually gets

Displayed underneath here so for example you can see here I have set pinacraft in my server list to be called pineacraft but the server name that I have set in the server.properties is pineacraft colon season 4. so anyway I’m going to set that to alien server we then have

The game mode which you can obviously choose you have the options here I’m just going to leave that as survival we have the difficulty which I’m going to change too hard allow cheats which is obviously where the players can use cheats or not even if cheats are enabled

Only operators can use them which is pretty good below that we then have the backs players which is the maximum amount of plays that can join the server this is pretty good for stopping lots of lag so I’ll just leave this at the default of Ted online mode is about

Whether players can join that aren’t signed into Xbox I’d recommend keeping this true because it’s just more secure because that way only players that are signed into an Xbox account can join now the allow list is another one that’s pretty good so personally I’m going to

Keep this at true or set it to true so if you keep the allow list at false anybody will be able to join your server as long as they have the IP whereas if you said it’s true only players that you specifically add to the allow list will

Be able to join so next we have this server Port option now this is what port the player will have to type in in the ad server screen to actually connect to your server so if you’re running multiple servers from the same computer then they’re each going to need to have

A different port however if you’re only running one you can probably just keep this at the default unless you know you want to use a specific port for whatever reason we have the view distance which is the maximum allowed render distance essentially that players are allowed to

Have so I’m going to set this at 16 because most of the time 32 is quite High The Tick distance is the same distance for lag reasons I’d recommend keeping this at four it’s also the default for most worlds generally you’d know if you want to change this this

Only really affects technical players if it’s on any higher the player idle timeout is about how long a player can AFK for before they get kicked so we’re going to set this to zero because we don’t want players to get kicked for being AFK here we have the level name

Which is essentially the name of your world so you can just keep this at the default bedroom level or if you’re importing an already existing World which I’ll show you how to do you can set it to that so we’ll just keep it at Bedrock level for now and then the level

Seed is obviously the world seed as well we have the default player permission so this is just the default permission level for players when they first join so you might want to accept players to be on visitor by default which means they can’t do anything other than walk

Around and then manually set them to member but most of the time you’re probably just going to want to keep it like this unless you want all players to use commands in which case set it to operator and all of these other settings aren’t super essential they all have

Explanations underneath but quite a lot of them are super technical things that you probably don’t need to worry about but anyway that’s the server like actually set up now so we’re going to make sure to save this file and then close it now one of the thing to point

Out is there’s this Bedrock server how-to which if we open will just open in your web browser and it just explains a little bit about the BDS server software and also explains some commands that you can run and all of that sort of thing and is essentially the

Documentation for this so you may want to take a look in this file if you have any specific questions but if you have anything that isn’t answered by opening this file then please feel free to ask in the comment section down below or in my Discord

Server and I’ll do my best to answer them anyway so let’s go ahead and open the Bedrock underscore server exe now and this may open with a little antivirus warning if it’s your first time but as far as I’m aware it’s completely safe it is also officially

From Minecraft as well so you know it’s probably going to be fine but anyway here we have this command prompt window and this is your server console and this is where you can actually control your server via commands so for example if I type in say hi it would actually run the

Command say hi and in game all the plays would see that the server says hi essentially now one important thing that you’re going to need to do if you enabled the allow list is make sure to actually answer the players to the allow list and the easiest way to do that is

To type allow list and then add and then the username which in my case would be the alien doctor and this will add you know the alien doctor which is me to the allow list you could also add any other players so let’s say penate was joining

This I could do allow list add enabe etc etc and then to stop the server you can just type the command stop and press enter and well as you saw it will stop the server so let’s go ahead and join the server now there’s sort of three

Different stages to this if you’d like so there’s somebody joining not on your Wi-Fi somebody joining on your Wi-Fi and then if you’re joining on the same computer the server is running on so first of all let’s do if you’re joining on the same computer you’re running on

Because that’s the simplest so if you’re joining on the same computer that the server itself is running on you can simply use the loopback IP which is 127.0.0.1 this essentially tells the computer to loop back to the computer it’s running on itself and then obviously make sure to put in whatever

Port you specified earlier so if I actually go ahead and start the server because this server is running on my computer I actually should just be able to join it using the loopback IP although it looks like I may have made a typo with the allow list so let me go

Ahead and add myself again and there we go I’m now actually on the server as you can see so if I go back to the server console you can see here that I have connected and then spawned which is excellent so now let’s take a look at how players

Would join if they’re on the same Wi-Fi as you but aren’t running the server on the same computer so to do that you’re going to need to go ahead and open command prompt and you’re going to need to type ipconfig and press enter now this is

Going to come up with a whole lot of different things and some of it may need blurring but there’s one that you don’t need to blur and that is the ipv4 address so right here it says IP version so right here it says ipv4 and then 192.168.50113 now this is my local IP

Address of my computer on my Wi-Fi so yours may will probably be something similar to this it will probably start with 192.168 and then these numbers at the end will most likely be different basically every computer or every device that uses the internet that’s connected to your internet will have its own local

IP address that’s just an ipv4 address so if you were say playing on your phone but the server was hosted on your computer you’d need to on your phone add server you need to then copy this ipv4 address paste it into here name the server whatever you want and press play

So I’d actually be able to join the server on my laptop using that ipv4 address and as you can see it has worked because my computer is of course on the same Wi-Fi as itself now the complicated one is getting plays to be able to join when they’re not on your Wi-Fi because

That involves port forwarding now port forwarding is essentially opening up that port and saying that whenever a device tries to connect with that port and your IP address it will be routed to whatever device that you choose which in this case of course needs to be the

Computer that the server is hosted on now because there are so many different devices it’s kind of impossible for me to show you how to do this but you’d essentially want to Google how to port forward on and then the type of router that you have and you simply want to

Port forward the port that you set which by default is 19132 using the UDP protocol and I’ll have more information about this Linked In the description if you’re interested or if you’re stuck on this part but after you’ve done the port forwarding you could then go to a website such as what is

Myip.com and of course I’m going to blur this because I don’t want you knowing my IP but underneath this ipv4 address this is the IP that players would have to use to connect if the port was Port forwarded so that’s well and good we’ve now actually got a server and if you’ve

Done all the port forwarding people are able to join but what happens if you want to use an existing world on this server because you may not want to start a brand new world you may want an existing one well that’s pretty simple so let’s go ahead and stop the server

Now you’re going to need to find that world in your Minecraft server list or just get the files somehow so let’s say I wanted my testing world I’m going to go ahead and press the pencil and scroll all the way down to export world and you can choose to save this wherever I’ll

Just put it to my downloads now with that downloaded file what you’re going to need to do is make sure that you have View and then show file name extensions enabled the UI might be slightly different to change that setting on Windows 10 and then rename it so that it

Ends in a dot zip instead of dot MC world and then extracts like a regular zip folder once it’s finished extracting you should have the world files right here but you’re actually going to want to take the X extracted folder and you’re going to want to open your

Minecraft server area go into Worlds and paste it here then you’re going to want to copy the name of this folder which should just be the name of the world go back to the server.properties scroll down and change the level name to the same as the world that you just put in

That folder which in this case is aliens testing world with all those Unicode symbols I’d also recommend setting the level seed to whatever seed the world is in my case it doesn’t matter because it’s a super flat world however if we go ahead and start the server now then you

Can see here that it’s got the level name aliens testing world with all the weird Unicode symbols and it’s gone ahead and started the server so if we go back to servers and join it via the loopback IP which is of course this one because I’m on the same computer as the

Server I’m going to press join server and we should see that I’m now on my testing world and there we go as you can see I’m now on my testing world this is running on the server which is why it’s lagging a little bit more than normal because my computer’s you know obviously

Rendering my game and also running the server and if there were any add-ons or resource packs or anything like that then it would have added them as well which is pretty nice now if you want a dedicated tutorial on how to add add-ons resource packs and behavior packs to your world servers and

Realms then make sure to check out the tutorial Linked In the description and whilst you’re down there why not like the video and subscribe to the channel as it really does help me out so the last part of this tutorial is updating your server to the latest version

Because of course Minecraft is a constantly updating game so the first step is to stop the server which you could do by typing stop and hitting enter now I’d strongly recommend creating a backup of your server before you do anything because in case anything goes wrong it’s good to be able to roll

Back the server so we’re just going to select all these files right click and press press the zip file this will put all of our server files into an ice dot zip folder that we can essentially use as a backup of course if you wanted to

You could just copy the folder or the file somewhere else but this is probably the quickest and easiest way and we’re just going to name This Server backup in full caps so we definitely remember what it is now the first step is to actually delete some files which is once again

Why it’s so important to make a backup so if you haven’t installed any Behavior packs globally then you can delete the behavior packs folder so the tutorial I’m releasing next week about installing add-ons to your server will show you to install them to the worlds folder which

Is the better place in my opinion to install them it however you may have some add-ons whether that be Behavior pack or resource packs installed to the these folders in the root of your server directory in which case you don’t want to delete these folders but in my case I

Haven’t got any so we can actually go ahead and select all of these except for the config and press delete now the config is only necessary if you have any game test packs installed so or beta API packs so if you haven’t installed a beta

API or game test pack then you can also delete the config and then as long as you haven’t deleted any world templates you can delete that as well you can delete these three files here here along with the packet statistics although that doesn’t matter as much and same with the

Valid note packs you can delete that if you want to but it doesn’t matter too much and of course release those so you should be left with something a little bit like this then you’re going to need to head over to the official BDS download page that I’ll link to the

Description and press the download button on the latest version I’m going to use the preview because the version hasn’t released since I’ve been recording this video so I I can’t really show you how to update it properly and once it’s finished downloading like the last time it simply extracts all for the

Dot zip that it downloads so after that’s finished I’d recommend having two tabs one that has all of the updated uh latest version files add that the other tab that has your original server files because we’re going to need to do some copying so essentially what you just

Want to go ahead and do is get all the important files out of the new version and paste them into the old version so we need the updated Behavior packs the updated config definitions resource packs Bedrock underscore server Bedrock server pbd or whatever that is the how

To add the release notes then you could simply just go ahead and copy these and paste them into the old original server area now once those files have finished copying over you should essentially have an updated server so if we go ahead and download the Bedrock underscore server.exe so once those files have

Finished copying over you should essentially have an updated server so all that’s left to do now is open the Bedrock underscore server.exe and you can see here the version is 1.20.30 B to 21 which is obviously the latest preview so we can see here that it has worked

And it has started successfully now I’ve not got the latest preview downloaded so I’m not going to go ahead and enjoy it and see if it works but there’s no reason why this shouldn’t work now and that’s it it’s actually super easy to update the Minecraft Bedrock Edition BDS

Server software once you know what you’re doing one important thing to double check though is that sometimes they will add new sections to the server.properties so it is always worth opening your old and your new server.properties and just double check that they haven’t added anything else typically they only add stuff at the

Bottom they don’t add stuff anywhere else but yeah it’s just important to make sure that they haven’t added a new section but anyway that’s going to be it for today’s tutorial a huge thank you for watching if you have any questions or need any help with this then don’t

Forget to comment down below or join my Discord server and ask in the technical help Channel I’ll see you in the next video coming very very soon bye