abestic9

I’ve been playing this game for a while (I purchased it in August 2010) so this is not necessarily a review but my personal experience with the game.

Minecraft is a sandbox-style game in which there is no set purpose, other than to build. During the day, your objective may be to collect building materials to survive the dangerous creatures that spawn at night, or you might craft yourself a sword to attack said monsters.

A main selling point of the game is the multiplayer support which has been built into the game, pretty much since inception. I’m currently running two servers for my gaming community (interested?); a main server which supports up to 20 players, and a development server which I can test new features on.

Beware, the server eats RAM faster than anything I have ever seen – I ended up having to double the memory in the box (thanks ColdFyre!). Both the client and the server are Java-based (which would explain the appetite for memory – as my personal experience has shown me), and I’ve been messing around with many different server wrappers to achieve a self-sustaining, moderated game. What I have now is a pretty (keyword: pretty) stable server which runs itself.

If you have purchased Minecraft (and if you haven’t, get on it!) you may be interested in running a server for your friends to join. I recommend using a wrapper called “CraftBukkit” as it supports server plugins which can add some amazing functionality to your server. You will need a bit of a technical mind to use this software. If you need any help with your server, hit me up in the comments or on the contact page and I’ll see what I can do for you.

If you’re not of the technical mindset, try out MinecraftMachines – one of the many Minecraft hosting companies out there. They provide servers and support that can assist you in getting a server up and running in no time. Tell them I sent you!

Edit: It looks like the domain is no longer accessible, Google is your friend now folks.

Servers aside, the client is pretty demanding in terms of memory. If you have a beefy system, feel free to ramp up the view distance (default key for that is [F]) and install some HD texture packs (thanks Cam!).