How to host a Minecraft Server on an old PC

 So in my last blog post, I mentioned hosting Minecraft servers on a "computer that's on sometimes". Today, I also mentioned that I hadn't done it for a while and would make a blog post on it whenever I next did it. A week has passed from then and in that period, I have been required to setup another server and today, I'm going to tell you exactly how to do it. For free.

Lets first go into what you're going to need:

• An old PC - this is the hardware that you'll run your server on. I'll refer to this as the server PC from now on.
• A PC to play on - a separate computer with a Minecraft client installed on it. We'll also use this to do the setup of the server.
• A USB stick - we're going to install an operating system onto the server PC from the USB stick.
• A domain - you can get a free domain from a service such as Freenom (https://www.freenom.com/)

Lets get started! Note: if you are installing the server on an existing operating system, you can skip steps 1 and 2.

1 - Flashing an Operating System onto a USB Drive

Go ahead and plug your USB drive into your client PC. It is important to note that all data will be wiped from this USB stick during the next step. You're then going to want to install a free piece of software called Etcher from balena. Visit https://etcher.balena.io, download and install the software.

Next up we're going to want to download the actual operating system we're going to use. Personally, I recommend a liteweight version of Windows, as the server panel we're going to be using has an easy-to-use installer for Windows. I would not recommend the default Windows because it has a lot of background tasks which are always running, taking up a lot of resources. I use Windows Superlite by a company called Ghost Spectre. If you want to use it, feel free to download it here: https://www.partitionwizard.com/partitionmagic/ghost-spectre-win11-superlite-iso-download.html. You can also use default Windows, which you can download from here: https://www.microsoft.com/software-download/windows11.

From either of these sources, you should be provided with an ISO file. Go ahead and open balena Etcher, and you should be presented with a similar screen to this:

Here, you're going to want to select 'Flash from file' and select the ISO file you downloaded from either of the two sources above. Then, for your target, select your USB drive. Remember, all data will be wiped from this USB stick during this step. Once you've done that, it will allow you to press 'Flash!'. Click that button and wait for it to finish flashing your USB drive. It may take a few minutes.

2 - Installing the Operating System onto the Server PC

Remove your USB drive from the client PC and place it into the server PC. WARNING: INSTALLING A NEW OPERATING SYSTEM AS SHOWN HERE WILL LEAD TO ALL DATA ON THE SERVER PC BEING PERMENANTLY DELETED. Then, turn on your server PC while spamming the keys F10, F2 and DEL. One of these keys will allow you to access your PC's BIOS settings. These are the most common keys, but if this does not work, search for your motherboard manufacturer's BIOS key. Once into the BIOS, you'll be greeted with a slightly ominous looking menu. This is where the process may get a little confusing because all BIOS menus are different from manufacturer to manufacturer. So, I'll be giving a generic description.

You're going to want to look for something along the lines of 'Boot Options' or 'Boot Order'. Once you've found this menu, you're going to want to ensure that your USB drive is first on the boot order. If you're a bit confused here, Google "How to change boot order with <motherboard manufacturer> BIOS", where you replace <motherboard manufacturer> with the company who made the motherboard inside your server PC.

Once you've done this, you're going to want to press F10 (the SAVE key in most BIOS, but not all!) and save and exit. Your server PC will then restart and (hopefully, if everything is done right) boot into a menu which will guide you through the installation of a new operating system. Follow the instructions in this menu and then move onto step 3.

NOTE: if you're using the Liteweight Windows ISO, choose the operating system containing 'SUPERLITE' with no SE or anything on the end.

3 - Installing the Minecraft Server Panel

Now we can get to actually installing the server panel itself. Open up a web browser (if using superlite, you're going to have to install one using Ghost Toolbox) and navigate to https://www.multicraft.org. I've chosen Multicraft for this tutorial as it is the panel I use myself and I think that it is one of the easiest to set up. Once there, go ahead and click on the 'Get Multicraft' button, like the one shown below:

Next, you're going to want to download the latest version for Windows. If there are multiple versions availiable (similarly to the image below) then choose the newest one. For me, I'll choose 2.5.0 PREVIEW. This should start a download of an EXE file.

Open up that EXE file and follow the instructions to install Multicraft. Move onto step 4 once you have closed the install wizzard.

4 - Creating a Minecraft Server and editing its properties

The final step for the server PC is to get its IP, so we can edit the Minecraft server properties from our client PC. Open up the Command Prompt app and type in the command 'ipconfig'. It should show an IPv4 address which we'll use to access the dashboard. Note down this IPv4 address (it may start with 192.***.*.***) and head back on over to the client PC.

On the client PC, open a web browser and type in the IP address you noted down. 

It will take you to a page that looks something like this. Click on 'Login' and enter the username 'admin' and the password you entered during installation.

Click 'Login' and then 'Create server'. Fill in all the details on that page. Note that 10 is the max. player slots for the free version of Multicraft and that the RAM is measured in Mebibytes (1024, 2048, etc). Also, the boxes 'Assign to user', 'IP' and 'Port' can be left blank unless you know what you're doing! You should leave the JAR file box blank until after you have initially created the server. Then, after you have created it, you should change it to 'paper.jar'.

Once this has done. you have made a Minecraft server and can join it from anywhere on your local network by using the IPv4 address of the server PC. Next up is the hard part: making the server accessible to anyone not on your home network.

5 - Making the server accessible to people not on your network safely.

We don't want to expose anything we don't have to here, so we'll be using something called TCPShield to keep ourselves and our network safe. Head to https://tcpshield.com and setup a free account. Once signed in click the green button that says 'Add Network'. 

You can call your network anything at all. It doesn't matter! Open your network and on the side panel, click on 'Backends'. Add a new Backend set again with whatever name you want. In the backends box, enter your public IPv4 address. You can find this at https://www.whatismyip.com. Directly following this, add a colon (:) and '25565'. This is the port of your Minecraft server. Unless you have set it to anything different, keep it as this. See the image below for my example backend.

If there's an error, it most likely means you have not port forwarded the port 25565 on your router. Even if there is no error, you need to do this. I will not go into how to do this here as there are a million ways to do this. If you're unsure how to do this, just Google "How to port forward on <router manufacturer> router.

Once you've created your backend set, click on 'Domains' in the side panel. There, you'll see a CNAME record which you need to assign to your domain. Head over to the site where you've registered your domain and look for DNS settings. There you should be able to add a new CNAME record where the name should be what you want to preceed your domain with when joining your server (e.g. the name 'join' would require the address join.yourdomain.suffix to be able to join the Minecraft server) and the value should be that on the TCPShield page.

After you've done this, head back over to the TCPShield Domains page and download the TCPShield plugin for Spigot. Once downloaded, this plugin should be placed in the 'plugins' folder of your Minecraft server (you can access all the files of your Minecraft server through the FTP client on the web dashboard).

The final step here should be to click the 'Add Domain' button at the bottom of the page. There, go ahead and enter your domain and click 'Re-check domain' once verified successfully, set the Backend set to that which you created before and click 'Add'.

Finally, once all of this is done, you can start your server (if you haven't done already) and play with your friends who aren't on your network!

I hope this has been useful to you, even if just parts of it have. If you have any questions, please feel free to leave a comment and I'll do my best to respond.