Minecraft

Minecraft is a commercial game very popular with geeks. It's a game about blocks. You can build a computer out of the game thanks to logical switches. There is a parallel world. Zombies, pigs, spiders, sheeps, wolves that you can tame, etc... This wiki page is here to help you install the game :)

Installation

You can install minecraft^AUR by using the available package in AUR. This package provides the official launcher and a convenient script for launching minecraft. Upon running minecraft it will procced to download the lastest version and install it in ~/.minecraft/

Setting Up Java

Minecraft should work out-of-the-box with a couple of the various Java JREs.

openJDK6

Minecraft should just work with openjdk6 in community.

# pacman -S openjdk6

openJDK7

If on openJDK7 minecraft gets stuck in the pause menu, you may be able to get it to work following these instructions:

Manually forcing minecraft to use LWJGL 2.8.1 seems to solve the pause screen problem (and, as a bonus, fixes the sticky keys issue). Credit goes to MrIso on reddit. LWJGL 2.8.1 can be downloaded here:

Replace the following files in .minecraft/bin/ with the corresponding versions in lwjgl-2.8.1/jar

jinput.jar
lwjgl.jar
lwjgl_util.jar 

And from .minecraft/bin/natives/ with lwjgl-2.8.1/natives/linux

libjinput-linux.so
libjinput-linux64.so
liblwjgl.so
liblwjgl64.so
libopenal.so
libopenal64.so

Play the game

Run minecraft with :

$ java -jar $HOME/.minecraft/minecraft.jar

If you want to allocate it more ram, do like this :

$ java -jar -Xms1024M -Xmx2048M $HOME/.minecraft/minecraft.jar

Extras

There are several programs and editors which can make your Minecraft experience a little easier to navigate. The most common of these programs are map generators. Using one of these programs will allow you to load up a Minecraft world file and render it as a 2D image, providing you with a top-down map of the world.

Minutor

Minutor is described as a minimalistic map generator for Minecraft. Don't let this mislead you, it generates maps of existing worlds, not the other way around. You are provided with a simple GTK based interface for viewing your world. Several rendering modes are available, as well as custom coloring modes and the ability to slice through z-levels. minutor^AUR is available in the AUR.

Minecraft Server

Minecraft is also available as a server, which will allow you to share a world with other players over the Internet. Here's what you'll need to do:

• Follow the steps above to install Java
• Download the multiplayer beta server jar from the Minecraft site
• Just run the jarfile:

(You can sub the -Xmx and -Xms values for the amount of memory you want your server to use. A good rule of thumb is one GB per ten users.)

$ java -jar -Xmx2048M -Xms2048M -jar minecraft_server.jar nogui

• To configure the server, take a look at this wiki page.

Extras

• You may wish to create a specific folder for the server (/srv/minecraft, for example)
• Establishing a Minecraft-specific user is recommended for security. The reason for this is that Minecraft, being beta software, may still contain security holes. By setting it to a specific, unprivileged user account, anyone who successfully exploits your Minecraft server will have only gotten access to your unprivileged user. (Meaning, do not ever run the server as root!) Here's how:
  • Use 'adduser' to add the user
  • Disable that user's individual login by removing the password (you can still 'sudo su - mineserver' to open a shell as the user)
  • Set the new user as owner of all the server files (generated on the first run) by running 'chown -R mineserver:nobody /path/to/server'
• To leave the server running unattended, take a look into tmux, nohup or screen
• Taking this a step further, you may even decide to create an init script for it, such as this one.
  • (Please note that the script at that link doesn't quite work with Arch entirely. I haven't had the opportunity to troubleshoot it fully yet, but anyone with time and expertise to do so is encouraged to post one on my talk page and I'll find a proper place for it.)
• Finally, you may wish to modify your server, to provide additional features:
  • Server Wrappers are one way to add administrative capabilities
  • Bukkit is a powerful modding API, with a wide variety of plugins available
    • If installing the Dynmap plugin, you will need to install fontconfig and libcups to get it to work.
• You might even set up a cron job with a mapper to generate periodic maps of your world
• ...or you could use rsync to perform routine backups (though this is one function of the init script above)

Useful links

• Main site : http://www.minecraft.net/
• The recipes for crafting things : http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Crafting
• Data values (useful in multiplayer mode) : http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Data_values
• The reddit community : http://www.reddit.com/r/minecraft
• The main dev twitter : https://twitter.com/#!/notch
• The forum : http://www.minecraftforum.net/