I have been meaning to do a post about this for a while. There's some unique issues that I ran into while trying to host a Minecraft Bedrock dedicated server and maybe it will be helpful to others if I share.

For very brief background; I offered to self host my friend's Minecraft bedrock realm after getting a Dell Optiplex 7050 micro in mid-late 2024 off a second hand marketplace. The realm started in Bedrock edition (the cross-platform version of Minecraft) and almost every player uses a different platform, so we will be keeping it in this version of the game. I am aware of Geyser, but I don't use it at this time.

Sections


The Physical Server PC

I use a second hand Dell Optiplex 7050 micro. These types of office PCs, from about 2016 onwards, are being discarded en masse at the moment by businesses because a lot of them don't meet requirements for an official Windows 11 upgrade. Almost all of them CAN run Windows 11 (mine came with it), but they probably won't have the proper license/tech support that businesses want, and they would have to pay their IT staff to manually upgrade every PC. Another "capitalism breeds innovation" moment, it is 'good business' to create tonnes of e-waste buying and replacing a couple dozen/hundred computers than it is to pay someone to maintain them. And that's even if a business has their own IT staff, a lot of places contract/outsource (same with HR, which is rough to deal with).

That aside, these PCs were comparitively cheap when I got this one, they are even cheaper now and will continue to drop in price as Windows 10 ends official security support in October (one month from now) with extended support licenses one year from Oct for consumers, and I think three years for businesses. I believe that the requirements for Windows 11 have dropped a bit since first announcements in 2021, but many businesses had already made the choice to totally replace their PCs.

Most of these PCs come with a 6th-7th gen intel CPU, which are enough to run many small home lab/server projects. The one I have has an i5-7500T; the T means throttled (I think?), in the sense that because of the micro form factor chassis that it sits in, it can not carry a large power supply and instead has a small external 75W power brick like a laptop. The 'T' line are less powerful than the un-numbered version (i5-7500), but usually more powerful than mobile laptop 'U' line CPUs (that is to say CPUs with a 'U' at the end of their model number).

The micro form factor ones are very small and light, but function as any desktop PC would for office work, web browsing, video playback, even lighter games that don't need a GPU. And I can say from hosting this Minecraft server for a year, it does that perfectly fine. It typically sits at 10W or less when idle, which is like 95% of the time. Even when multiple people are online it rarely ever breaks 40W. That is the benefit of these things; they are designed to be left on 24/7 in offices and barely maintained, so they are energy efficient as well as efficient in processing power.

Only downfalls of the micro are; they have essentially a laptop cooling fan which can be noticably audible under load, and they don't have much space for other parts (extra storage etc.) Smaller fans have to spin more in order to move more air, and make more noise doing so. The micro's usually only have one 2.5 inch hard drive bay, and one M.2 slot for storage. If these issues could be a problem (maybe you want to do personal cloud/media server also), it may be better looking for a 'Small Form Factor' office PC. They have larger fans (better airflow, less noise), 1-2 M.2 slots & 2-3 hard drive bays (2.5 or 3.5 inch depends on model), usually at least one PCIE slot (small graphics card could help with video encoding on media server?) with a 180-250W power supply and are about the size of a game console. These are often the same price or sometimes cheaper than the micro/tiny form factor.

You can also hire a plain server locally to you, the price depends on where you live. You will be required to know how to do all of this stuff remotely through SSH. Otherwise there are sites that can do the work of hosting a Bedrock server for you, again pricing and availability will depend on where you live. Some of the below info may still be helpful if you do either of these options.


Operating System

This was the first time I had done anything like this, and I didn't really want to be stuck with the command line only. I'm not used to it, I am not an IT student or professional, and it does my head in when I miss one little thing in a command and it doesn't work. I first tested this server out on a Linux Mint Xfce setup, it worked fine but it wastes resources for running the desktop. Later on in testing (before I made the server live) I switched to Bodhi Linux as it has; a very simple low resource desktop (Moksha), Ubuntu base (recommended for this software as it is compiled for Ubuntu), and very little other apps installed drawing background resources. This leaves me only having to use the command line for system updates (sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y) and for managing the server itself when necessary. I use James A Chambers' Bedrock Dedicated Server setup; this requires simple commands to view server status, start/stop/restart, and to update it's own files.

I am still not confident to run this entirely via command line on something like Ubuntu Server (which is the recommended OS), but recently I have been testing out Debian with Openbox and LXQt as a backup. I am considering swapping to that to use less resources, and to slowly move somewhere between command line and desktop. BUT there is no point changing something that works, and frankly the resource improvement will be unnoticably minimal. I will only bother with this when migrating the server to a new PC or Bodhi ends support for the version I have. If I migrate it to Debian 13, there will be long term support until 2030


The Server Software

As I mentioned before, I use the Bedrock Dedicated Server for Linux from Minecraft.net. This is considered to be in Alpha despite being available for some years. I guess they could use that as a means to remove it from the public one day and force Bedrock players to use Realms only, I won't be surprised if that happens tbh. This software can run as is and they have some guidance documentation along with it. I tried this for a couple weeks and it worked fine. I highly recommend using James A. Chambers' Minecraft Bedrock Server software though as it makes a lot of things easier. You can see his guide and info about it in the link previous, and the github page. It sets up the server for you with simple prompts, sets it to autostart at boot, creates automatic backups on server restart, and sets the server to restart daily at 0400 local time. The daily backups are great for ensuring game progress is saved, and managing the server with the few commands it has is pretty easy.

This setup has worked for over a year with only two or three issues in that time. I think once after a blackout I forgor to turn the PC back on, so my friends were like "I can't connect". And there were two times that Mojang/Microsoft changed the URL where updated versions of the base bedrock server software is pulled from, the the James A. Chambers setup couldn't update itself. Those two times were a little annoying, the guy can take over a week before responding to issues/updating his scripts, but people in the comments of his blog and the issues section of the github had the solutions prior. It was a case of simply changing one line in one of the script files both times this happened. You could also just directly download the base server software and update it yourself (paste/overwrite it into your existing server files), which I did on one of those occasions. That is how the base server software is intended to be used anyway.

James A. Chambers also has scripts for running the same bedrock dedicated software on Raspberry Pi (which may be pretty slow), and Docker containers for Linux/Raspberry Pi, and a Java + Geyser + Floodgate + Paper setup allowing Bedrock & Java players to play together. The Docker containers are more efficient and what he recommends (even the Pi ones run well apparently), I haven't used Docker but his guide seems pretty straight forward. Again, I just don't really want to change something that's working fine. This also applies to converting our world's save file for use on Java with Geyser; I don't want to risk corrupting the world and only finding out after playing for some time. Our world is a forever one, and is coming up to five years existence in December 2025. Frankly, if it was lost somehow I would stop playing the game altogether.

If you wish to protect your personal home internet service/IP address then you should configure a reverse proxy to mask you IP through a domain. This is quite technically involved and will require you to pay for a domain name ongoing. See this Nginx Reverse Proxy documentation page, and this easier to follow Nginx Reverse Proxy configuration guide from DigitalOcean (for Ubuntu 22.04).


Connecting to the Server

If you are playing bedrock on Windows PC or Android (or an unofficial Android port to Linux) then you have the ability to manually add servers by IP and port at the bottom of the Servers tab. IF you play on any console Microsoft/Mojang offers only six 'featured' servers, with no native way to connect to third party servers. This weird sleight to one of the major reasons minecraft is so successful today (private servers) is pretty frustrating, but there is a community workaround.

Bedrock Connect is a service/software that allows console players to access a server list user interface. In your console's settings you must manually enter one of the DNS addresses they list in their guide. You will then see next to some of the featured servers "Join to see server list", join any of those and this will bring up the Bedrock Connect server list UI, where you can add servers by IP/port like on Android/PC. This might sound technical, but it is genuinely very easy when following their guide, and once it is done the server will stay in that list. They also have another method where you can 'Add a friend' to connect to the server list, I haven't tried this. Common troubleshooting problems are usually misentered DNS numbers, or issues related to heavy traffic.


Texture Packs & Mods

Applying a texture pack is pretty easy, especially following this guide also provided by James A. Chambers. You can customise your pack by overwriting textures in it, or deleteing any of them will revert them back to vanilla. You just have to make sure that the individual file names are identical, as the naming & folder structure in bedrock is pretty unintuitive, and they change it semi-often. Exploring the texture files is an easy way to become familiar with this.

FINDING a texture pack though, is pretty rough on a self-hosted bedrock server. Mojang/Microsoft have facilitated a total lockdown on texture packs that are available on marketplace. They are encoded somehow and can only work with official paid realms or in single player worlds if you have paid for the pack. And if someone puts in the work to create a full texture pack or mod for any game, they are entitled to do what they wan't with it, I have absolutely no gripe with them trying to make some money selling it through the minecraft marketplace. BUT it leaves you with very little options if you are self-hosting a bedrock server.

Previously on the realm, we had used ChromaHills, which is a medieval fantasy/RPG/cartoon style pack. We all really liked it, even though it was pretty slow with updates. It would often be missing textures and be multiple updates behind, including a period of over two years with no update. This is probably the biggest issue with marketplace, you can buy a pack that's $7-15 and have no way of knowing if it is abandoned by the dev. Anyway, we weren't able to use ChromaHills even if we wanted because it is on the marketplace and encoded.

I searched around a bunch of random texture pack sites, I can't really remember them all, looking for something similar and free. Looking at the logs I kept, I can see that we trialed several, I will just list them below with my comments from August 2024. (and additional comments today in parenthesis & italics)

Dokucraft was our lord and saviour, I really can not recommend these packs enough. As mentioned, it comes in four unique variants, and we decided to stick with Light the majority of the time. We sometimes switch to High during in world celebrations/festivals, and Dark during halloween and other events. Dwarvern is also very cool, but quite different, I think it would be better suited if you had started playing/building with it so you were used to it. Overall Dokucraft kinda looks like 32 bit Zelda/RPG textures, but there is a lot of charm to it. They also have many variants of common blocks that add so much to the world, like different sand or dirt textures with rocks or bones in them. The nether textures remind me of Hexen or Doom, they add random eyes and teeth into the netherrack. Genuinely the best texture pack I have ever come across

In addition to how great it looks and runs, Dokucraft will forever be prohibited from being on the marketplace. It began as a one person creation (by Doku) 12-13 years ago, it was then handed over to the fans as the dev moved on to other work. There are hundreds of contributors and their contributions have not always been as well documented as they are now. This creates potential licensing issues as certain textures can't be accurately attributed. Hence, they are not able to license it for sale on marketplace even if they wanted. In addition to that, there are hardcore anti-marketplace contributors to the project who won't allow it for sale regardless. This means that Dokucraft is forever free and available for use on dedicated bedrock servers (and java), and with hundreds of dedicated contributors it is always up to date, more so than any marketplace pack I have seen.

Dokucraft also has a really solid website with their 'DokuStash' where contributors post all of their work. You are able to individually look up and download any texture from any of the four packs, in addition to thousands of extras that you can manually apply to your game/server. Things like unique weapons, tools, blocks, or mobs, even textures that were formerly apart of the main packs are available there, allowing you to mix and match for a custom look (this would require manual overwriting each update FYI). They also have decent mod support, and more complex texture blending options. Their discord is also very helpful and has a bug resolution section. Their discord is also where I found out that they have running WIP versions of their packs available that are always the MOST up to date. We always use the WIP packs, and have never ran into any issues with them (links: Light, High, Dark, Dwarven). It is outrageous that this is all free, it totally saved our server.

If Dokucraft is not your jam, you will have to do independent research. Hopefully the notes above can help you in some way, but again it was pretty rough then (Aug 2024) as there was a big push for texture packs to be added to marketplace then, it's probably worse now tbh. During most of testing we did use a placeholder pack called Kawaii World which was very cute while also being up to date and free! I remember stumbling across it after scouring through a bunch of texture pack sites, and finding the link to where the bedrock version is hosted. The page defaults to spanish (and restricts viewing with an adblocker) which reminded me of how my some of my favourite good quality mods for other games were from sites not in english (shoutout mixmods.com.br, the best San Andreas mods on earth, among many other games). If you have the ability to search for bedrock texture packs in languages other than english, you may have more luck finding decent ones to use.


Closing notes

I wanted to add some stuff about worldbuilding here too, but this post is already pretty long and I am tired. I will do another post with ideas I've had for things like festivals and guilds, how we've named places, civic planning, and more. We also poorly tested a war/battle system that I think could be fun with more people and time. I can't do that stuff justice in a paragraph or two. In the meantime I have my server's website linked on my Internet page, where a lot of our worldbuilding ideas are presented free for the taking/inspiration (this is not an advertisement for it, as it is a private IRL friends server).

In the future I don't plan any major changes apart from moving it to a small form factor office PC that I can do a bit more with (media/storage server, other game servers). I acquired one last week (HP Prodesk 600 G3) for a wildly low price, almost half what I paid for the micro last year. I think the prices will continue to drop past October this year, so it might be worth holding out, idk.

Thanks for reading!