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Dedicated Server for Minecraft:EE

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196 comments

  • Christoph Peters

    Bryan Sander, thank you for raising the topic. I would like to answer with a question: Should Minecraft Education serve as a virtual classroom where many students work together? That would in effect be professional multiplayer. Think about esports and such. Or is it primarily a learning tool to do an exercise alone? That would be singleplayer. If a virtual classroom is the primary focus, then the logical conclusion is that a technical infrastructure is needed that makes it possible for me as a teacher to effectively supervise and assess a whole class of 30 students in one world over several lessons. Only then does the content, such as the virtual chemistry lab, become really interesting.

    I am less worried about the content. There is a lot already and Minecraft is such a great tool to improvise. After dedicated servers I would focus on developing necessary tools so the community can create content themselves. And share it of course. 

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  • Aleece Landis
    Bug Zapper Beacon of Knowledge Super Star

    Christoph Peters I think just by the simple fact that Minecraft Education can be used either way, single player or multiplayer.  It is BOTH.
    And using it for "teaching" I think it really needs to be optimized for "Virtual Classroom" since the kids are joining each other's worlds and the teachers really have no control when they do that.  If during class they were expected to join the Server, at least the teacher would be able to "take attendance" and Know who was not where they were supposed to be even if they might not have the tools to do anything about it yet.

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  • Bryan Sanders
    Bug Zapper Beacon of Knowledge Super Star Moderator

    Christoph Peters -- that's fair. It's interesting to ponder these things as we grow and develop what it means to have a class or run a class or have a class gather. Something I have often wondered about meeting in a group is what can we do together that we cannot do alone . . . ? And are we using this group arrangement to its greatest perceived or unknown potential?

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  • My loyalty is with Minecraft and I would like to see MEE developed. But how long should I wait?

    Avantisworld.com is looking more and more attractive. Educational content is there, interactive, VR, multi play, reporting, quizzes. There is no option to self build or create own lessons but if using for Education you want students to interact with the lesson, not build all over it.  It is not perfect by any means and it is not Minecraft, but .....

    I want to build a virtual classroom with lessons, learning themed areas, the whole lot. MEE could be so much more.

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  • Aleece Landis
    Bug Zapper Beacon of Knowledge Super Star

    Marie Waterhouse

    I want to build a virtual classroom with lessons, learning themed areas, the whole lot. MEE could be so much more.

     
    I so agree with you there.  However, it is a HUGE amount of work to develop a world with all the tools/structure you want for your virtual classroom and that is without ANY Educational Content.

    I've spent so much time working on the Addons for teacher controls and such that I've not even had any time to work on the Visual portions of the "classroom" let alone trying to implement any sort of content.
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  • It's been a while since this has been posted on, but please add this feature, or add some way to host your own cloud servers, even if custom code is required. An always-on server would be a massive help and given that it's already available in other editions of Minecraft, it feels like it should be added to Education by now. Would be a great addition to the 1.20 update.

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  • Aleece Landis
    Bug Zapper Beacon of Knowledge Super Star

    quantasium ​
    I agree with you that we really want/need this capability.
      However, with all the issues in the past two updates trying to keep up with the commercial games.  I'm not holding out any hope for a server anymore.  Each update seems to make that idea fall further and further from possibility.  I'm really just hoping that the next update fixes most of the new bugs from the past two updates and hopefully doesn't break multiplayer even worse.  Still can't /give a camera which totally breaks some of the most important library worlds in my opinion and having to get students in/out of creative mode in order to let them get a camera from the creative inventory is rather problematic and I know plenty of teachers don't have time or knowledge to go in and create new world templates with chests of cameras next to all the NPCs that would normally be giving cameras automatically.

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  • Gene Ting

    It's obvious that Minecraft EE is a low value business for Microsoft and Mohjang, thus the awful debacle on the Chromebook version being unuseable for months , and the lack of a server deployment so that students and teachers won't need powerful personal devices to host a multiplayer game. Even an EE version of a bedrock server would have sufficed, as all clients would have needed to login to a school account anyways.

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  • Aleece Landis
    Bug Zapper Beacon of Knowledge Super Star

    So here is my work around for a "server" It requires an extra account to "Host" the server.  The teacher needs to be able to access that machine to regularly to restart and get the join codes to share with students (since IP address and port are no longer an option, that used to be nice since I didn't have to re-share join codes and I didn't have to restart nearly so often.)
    Anyway, you will need a little extra time to set up any new world that you want to run in survival mode since you will need to get your "hosting" account into the nether and put them into an allow block box.  I usually like to do this as near the bottom of the nether near cordinate 0 0 0 as I can.  This takes several steps since you need to Create a ticking area and a marker like an armor stand you can return to then create a nether portal and go through, get rid of the nether portal in the nether Create the Allow block box where you want it, teleport into it, set a marker and ticking area in the nether box so you can teleport back to it.  Teleport back to the marker in the overworld and get rid of the nether portal there.  Get rid of the overworld ticking area and initial marker.  Do any other world prep in the overworld that you need to do for the class.  Teleport back to the Nether box marker, you may or may not wish to leave your marker and ticking area as a way to get back to the nether box.

    Storing the "hosting" player in creative mode in a nether or end box means that they will not interfere with players sleeping through the night in the Overworld.  Also, placing them in an allow block box in an out of the way place means players without Operator status or worldbuilder ability can't get to them or mess with them.

    If this is something you think you may need to do for new worlds on a regular basis, I recommend all teachers create their own Behavior Pack that can hold functions they use regularly as well as any NPC Dialogue files and structure files they might want to use repeatedly.  Using functions and structure files is an easy way to handle the set up of a nether box as well as other things you might want to set up like perhaps a spawn marker and automatically refilling starter chest with key items you may wish your students to have for the activity.  Perhaps you want to create a classroom "lobby" to store in a structure file so you can load in in any new world you are going to set up an activity.  Or perhaps you need the students to go through a digital citizen refresher each season so they can sign a book saying they will follow the rules for using minecraft in class or with your club.

    Anyway, this method is DEFINITELY NOT a replacement for a good server software with management tools plugins but it is a step.

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  • Brian Konrad

    Yes, and yes.   My thoughts exactly:

    1.  Let us host a server without joining the session (drags resources on the server)

    2.  100 player limit

    For anyone who wants to have a dedicated server now, I was able to get the job done, but my VM needed to have a lot of resources. So .... overspec your server and then do the following:

    1.  Install the app on the server

    2.  Log in to the server with a service AD account

    3.  Log into the app with a service Minecraft account and host the server

    4.  Press "T" to open the chat window, leave the app open and close your remote connection to the server

    I have been doing this for a couple of weeks.  Had to reload the servers once so far.  Every time you reload the server, the join codes and link will change.  

    For my teachers, I made an intranet webpage where I can past the links and screenshots of the join codes.  Whenever I reload the server, I will need to update the links and join codes.  But that way I don't need to keep communicating with the teachers.  

    So far it's getting the job done, at the expense of a few extra imaginary processors (4 sockets with 2 cores each) and 32GB memory.  :)

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  • KANJI CAMACHO

    Brian Konrad Can you tell me the link for your Intranet webpage for your server? 

     

     

           Thank you,

     

        Kanji Camacho

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  • Marie Waterhouse

    Has anyone tried setting up and running ME on a virtual machine using a service like Microsoft Azure?
    Chat GPT seems to think it is possible.

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  • Luk Van den Bossche

    Marie Waterhouse You don't need chat-gpt for that ;-) It is possible, but it comes with a cost. And most of our schools don't want to pay extra for this.

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  • Brian Konrad

    KANJI CAMACHO I tried to add screenshots here but the msg didn't get approved.  It's only reachable from inside my domain and controlled by Google share permissions.  But to describe it:

    A single simple webpage:

    • Title at the top "Minecraft Education Edition"
    • Join links (as links) and Join Codes (I screenshot the codes and insert them as pictures).
    • A picture carousel I filled with a few official Minecraft EDU promotional images
    • My contact info at the bottom
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  • Brian Weiss

    We are in the middle of the Battle of the Boroughs NYC competition right now and being able to host multiple worlds as a teacher would be a great asset, and being able to keep them open on a permanent server would be even better. I am only able to be with my students after school once a week and they need more time to work. It is very hard for my elementary school students to be responsible hosting their world for their team outside of school. I wasn't able to read through every comment since this has been a discussion for years but I hope something can be done about this. 

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  • Marie Waterhouse

    Are we getting any closer to this with the new release of Preview? Does it help the cause in any way?
    Have downloaded Preview and can't get into it hence the question. Has anyone else been able to investigate?
    https://educommunity.minecraft.net/hc/en-us/articles/23498937165844-Minecraft-Education-Preview-Program?fbclid=IwAR1_EXM518VDBfanb5P1Gdwdgd2uIb-dyGASxAzN_CS1oO71GSa5PTg0AKg

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