My stepson plays Minecraft on his iPad, and I believe you can just join other people’s worlds as part of the regular game. I don’t know if it works cross platform, or what the limits are on the number of people in a world at once.
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What platform of Minecraft? Java edition? Bedrock edition?
I’ve run a few Minecraft servers in the past and it’s fairly straightforward for any sysadmin.
Additionally, paying for hosted Minecraft is quite economical (or was the last time I checked into it).
However, my experience has all been with Java edition, so I would have to investigate the options available for the other editions.
I’m happy to help in any way that I can
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Thank you. That would be amazing. Minecraft baffles me.
They play on an Xbox One, the game was downloaded through the Microsoft store. Does that help?
I think most of their friends play on an Xbox, but assume some are on PS and some on PC.
I think that’s what they do now.
We got him a book for Christmas about how to build a theme park. Dropping 10 of them into something they would find amazing would be pretty cool
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Yes, that would be Bedrock edition, which is the edition you’ll find on mobile, gaming consoles and also the Windows 10 edition.
I’ll do some research and see if I can find a good reputation hosting company that can host in the UK (unless someone already knows of one)
A quick Google search suggests that it could be about £15 or less for 3 months, but I’ll know more once I look into it some more
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£15? That sounds pretty amazing value.
Is that something we could give all his friends a password to?
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Exactly yes. And only those with the password (and probably optionally approved accounts) can connect to the server.
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Sounds great. I tried a google myself, but I’m really not too sure what I’m looking for.
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Well, it seems as though Microsoft is going out of their way to keep Bedrock Edition hosting a bit of a confusing endeavor. Here’s what I’ve come up with:
Easy, Expensive: Minecraft Realms Plus
- Pay money straight to Microsoft/Mojang, and they run a private server for you that’s integrated right into the software (Realms button). It’s $7.99/mo for month-to-month commitments or small discounts for committing to longer terms.
- You have no access to the world data, so if you stop paying, the savegame is lost forever
- It’s confusing; I don’t understand it.
- It’s limited to 10 simultaneous players (I think… again… Microsoft/Mojang make this confusing)
3d Party hosting:
- Streamline Servers – offers hosting in UK but payment only in USD and AUS
- GTXGaming – offers hosting in UK and payment in GBP
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There are hundreds (thousands?) of other hosting providers as well. These are some that I found had some good reviews and offer hosting within the UK (for lower latency, better gameplay experience)
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If you don’t understand Minecraft, it might get confusing. The quality of the hosting provider will really shine through in their ability to help you navigate your options and answer the questions you have. Unfortunately, as much as it should be a commonly asked question, I cannot find a good resource for hosting providers targeted towards parents.
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That said, if you have questions, I am happy to answer them.
Thanks again for doing this. I’ve looked at GTX and I can see there is a £4.50 fee.
I was talking to the boys about this last night and they know a lot more than I do, but to ask the most basic of questions…
What will we actually get for this?
Is it their own private space to play Minecraft with friends, but with no pre built landscape or features? Or does this fee include a world that they can access but there will be stuff pre built in it for them to explore/ interact with?
Ahh, well:
Private Space: Yes! The only people picking up, putting down and rummaging through chests will be the players that are on the approved list (whitelist).
Prebuilt landscape: No. It’ll be a stock standard Minecraft world generation with a random seed. With a bit of interaction with the hosting provider’s website, you could customize the seed (unless maybe that’s just a Java edition thing). So while there is randomly generated content, it will not be curated by a person.
If you want the curated-world experience, Realms Plus is the answer for that, but again, that limits it to 10 simultaneous players. With Realms Plus, you can opt to start the server with any number of pre-made worlds, designed by content creators, with easter eggs and probably quests of some sort (I’m not really sure?)
I believe, and this is where my experience with only the Java edition leaves me at a disadvantage, there’s a marketplace where you can ‘buy’ preset worlds made by Mojang and 3rd party content creators for use with Bedrock edition; whether or not you could load these onto the hosted server, I cannot say; that would be a good question to ask the whichever hosting provider you are considering – and perhaps, if you go that route, the way in which questions like these are answered by a provider are a good indicator of whether you should pay for their service. If they can’t seem to be bothered to spend a bit of time explaining what they can and can’t do for you, that company probably isn’t for you.
And, as always, I’m more than happy to answer any more questions!
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Thank you so much - I think Realms Plus is the way forwards for what we want. It looks like it’ll cost £6.99 for a month (although possibly a free trial for 30 days would be even better!).
The official Minecraft site says this is compatible with Xbox One and PS so that will be ideal.
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Firstly: you can get Xbox Ultimate Gamepass for a dollar or so for 3 months right now (hopefully), if you’re a new member. Tons of games to try for next to nothing on PC or Xbox! A recommend for people who have family to play with but very different skill levels: Minecraft Dungeons is actually really fun, and easy for anyone to pickup.
I got-a one of-a theeese for Christmas:
It doesn’t have the fanciest buttons, but it’s fully customizable and plays like a dream compared to what I was using before. I am officially dropping playing on pad - considering that I can finally do consistent dragon-punch motions.
Speaking of fighting games, this: Tough Love Arena is a free, browser based, easy to learn fighter with real-deal online play. Wow it’s good for being so simple, and also is a great intro to playing real fighting games without having to do all sorts of complicated inputs. For the price of free, no download, no commitment - it’s a 10/10.
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Jumped back into Hollow Knight. Beat Hornet #2, though I did cheese it a bit by jumping on her (with some help from the thorns charm) when she was in a corner at the end. Then got down the abyss for the shade cloak and howl spell, and to finally get Izma’s Tear, which wasn’t nearly as hard as I expected
Stupidly donated all my souls to the fountain, then stumbled upon the map man in the foglands when I had no money. Goddamnit. This is the second time I made the fountain/map man error! Thought I had all the maps so wasn’t bothered, then stumbled into that dark corner.
Think I’m at the point when I should be fighting the 3 big bosses… but I don’t want to!
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Played some Dreams on PS4 after picking up a second hand PSVR headset and Move controllers. Looking forward to trying some other games but VR sculpting in Dreams is absolutely lovely. I bounced off after trying with a regular controller but the wands make it far easier to navigate and control the 3D space.
I continue to wade my way through the mountains of content in Ghost of Tsushima, although not with as much vigor as I once did (over 30 hours into the game, this perhaps shouldn’t be a surprise). It continues to be a beautiful, lived in world that I adore exploring, although much of the initial danger in conflict has been substantially mitigated by a much more robust amount of health and a few “unblockable” attacks that make Jin far more deadly than his opponents.
I have stopped playing LoZ Breath of the Wild entirely for the time being, as I have no time for it and I really dislike loading and unloading cartridges into the Switch. It feels so… fragile. I have been playing a lot of RingFit Adventure, three times a week for the last two weeks or so (I’m on “Day 9”, but it hasn’t quite been 3 weeks). It’s neat! It’s fun! I don’t know how much of a workout it really is, but it’s something, and that’s good enough for me for now. I am toying with picking up the Switch Boxing exercise game as well, since my partner isn’t a huge fan of the RingFit Adventure game (she likes the exercises, but not the voice or story of the Ring itself).
Lastly, I have started to play a little of Starcon Nexus, an open-universe sorta-sandboxy exploration style game. The closest I can compare it to is the sublime Star Control II, both in its sense of humour and its gameplay, but it’s not nearly that good. It is good, though, and there is a neat sense of progression and a robust (and expanding) tech tree which is neat. If I had a niggle, it’s that the earning of tech-points is arbitrary (linked to specific exploration milestones/events, rather than time or resources), which is frustrating, but otherwise a pretty solid little game. Oh, and I wish enemy ships displayed health bars over their heads and that collisions weren’t terminal (many objects can’t be collided with at all, like planets, but some spacestations or debris can be while others can’t, and there isn’t a clear way to know which is which until you accidentally smash into them). Anyway, I got it on sale and I’m enjoying it, although I won’t say it’s great it is fun thus far. Imperfect, but a worthwhile use of a few minutes here or there while I wait for dinner to reheat.
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Made the mistake of firing up Tales of Maj’Eyal again for the first time since 2014 on Saturday and it has immediately consumed all my solo gaming time. I did install a somewhat cheaty mod to increase the number of points I get on levelup because that’s like, the best part of the game, but not massively, I don’t think. Running a Temporal Warden, currently level 15 and halfway through the tour of the second tier dungeons. It’s such a bonkers class, I love it. Between being able to literally instantly swap between bow and arrow and dual wielding whenever I want (and it’s automatically done when attempting a melee attack or special ability or a shoot action or bow special ability) and shit like popping out fully functional (but less powerful) clones when I take enough damage and running a time shield that first blocks damage then reverses it into healing when it pops? Ugh. So good. I could do without occasionally paradoxing myself into the middle of a bunch of stone walls, but oh well.
And then for girlfriend time, since my C: drive is apparently going to fail any time now and that’s where Cyberpunk is currently installed, went back to Persona 4 Golden for its location on a good drive & definite Steam cloud saves. I’d kind of fallen off it because I’m trying to do everything in one run (stupid, since it requires very precise scheduling, but doable and I’m not going to replay probably) and that means doing the dungeons in one day w/ a bunch of sub-objectives about which sorts of persona you need to have available afterwards and drops and stuff. And that means a bunch of grinding. So…doing that first Shadow Castle dungeon to save Yukiko? I ground up to level 18 (to be able to fuse the first Aeon persona) before finishing it. There was quite a bit of dropping down to repeat floor 1 over and over for chest drops of SP-healing items. But! I did it! And supposedly my GF wasn’t bored silly, which is impressive.
Will get back to Cyberpunk when my new SSD arrives and I make the transfer over, but, until then…
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I never dipped into it but I read about a rhythm action section to ringfit in the vain of beat saber. Might be a more appealing alternative for your partner.
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I think I won it with a Temporal Warden, and found the game a little too easy compared to other Roguelikes so I haven’t tried more than a handful of classes.
The balance may have changed (well, definitely has), but I definitely have buried more than a few characters back in the day. Albeit maybe not in the fairest ways - I think usually running into some randomized elite monster that just murdered me without a ton of recourse, occasionally a particularly nasty boss.
The Temporal Warden, though. So far feeling real good.