WiFi setup for Minecraft Church

Wifi setup for Minecraft church

A good and reliable wifi connection is needed to run a Minecraft church. You may have wifi in your church already or nothing at all. The information here we hope will let you know what is needed, what our different groups do and what the trade-offs are! Make sure the technical person on your team gets to see this!

What a Minecraft Church needs

We use one server that holds the shared game world and many different devices for each player. Each player device continuously communicates streams of data to and from the server, updating world position and world changes continuously. Once, when starting each player device, it needs to authenticate to Minecraft’s servers to prove it has a valid software licence. This uses broadband (not much either!). The vast amount of data flows in the local network between server and player devices.

• One PC running a Minecraft server. A moderate-strength PC is needed. It needs a high-performing connection to the local network. An Ethernet cable connection to the wifi router is best for this. This means the tablets and other game devices can use the wifi connection (which is slower) and the server can use a fast Ethernet cable to speak to the wifi router.
• One Wifi router. We have not needed anything special for this. Each router allocates IP addresses to every device that is registered to it. These IP addresses allow the server to speak to an individual device. They can change over an hour or a couple of days, or even seem like they never change, but beware – it will one day when you least expect it! You need your Minecraft server to be predictably at the same IP address each and every session. Most wifi routers offer a feature to make a device “static”. Check with your local guru for help!
• Player Devices. Android tablets, iPads, phones, and laptops can all be connected and used together.
• Broadband internet. All the above happen in the venue where you are running Minecraft church. You will need a broadband connection to the internet for authentication. Devices can also be updated like this. Often, the broadband connection is directly into the wifi router! But churches are ancient and not all have easy internet connections if any.

Lessons Learned

The community have learned some things over time!

1. Even if your church has a good wifi setup, it might not work! Sometimes there are filters, protocols and policies in place that interfere with a good Minecraft setup. Or simply poor coverage in the space you want to use! Test well before events to make sure. Some groups have abandoned their wifi setup for a more portable one due to such issues.
2. Hotspots – you can use your phone as a hotspot or even your PC server in some cases. However, in such cases, the number of player devices is often limited to 5 or 10, and device 11 may not connect! But for small groups, this can work well. Note that your server IP address may be unstable (dynamic) in this case.
3. Portable broadband wifi routers (such as this one from TP-Link, but EE, Three and other networks offer them) can be really helpful. We have found they work well. You can also position them in a church close to where you are and/or close to the best broadband signal.
4. Hotspots and portable Wi-Fi have other advantages: running a small portable WiFi router not only meant one group worked around a device limit, but also made it easier to update tablets. Now they only register one WiFi network on the tablets because they can use the same router at home to do Minecraft updates.  This can also help with some devices that don’t like being updated on one network and then used on another!
5. Homebrew setup. Rev Kev ran his group for a year or two before the church had broadband, and when no broadband provider would sell us portable broadband, as our area was saturated with devices, apparently. So he took a wifi router and then connected a Raspberry Pi device as a network bridge to the WAN port of the router via an Ethernet cable. Then, taking his work mobile phone, he plugged it into the Raspberry Pi and shared his mobile broadband via USB. Set up scripts for this are available – please ask.
6. Mesh networks and range extenders can be troublesome. Needing to do multiple hops before reaching the router and server can really ruin performance, as it takes much longer for game updates to travel back and forth.
7. The most important thing is to TEST TEST TEST before you start to iron out the bugs. Once up and running, most of us have a trouble-free existence!
8. Until the internet breaks and/or someone forgets to pay the bills. In that case, it is always good to have a backup session plan for such moments. After all, a power cut would probably ruin your session anyway, so do be prepared.

We hope this answers some of your questions – please put more in the comments. If you are struggling, reach out to the network.