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Dedicated Server for Minecraft:EE

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196 comments

  • Per-Ole Fanuelsen

    Would be great if you made a dedicated server solution. We have several projects in our municipality that would fit the use-case for a dedicated server. Also more than 30 slots would be nice.

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  • David Eichler

    Hey, Mr./Ms. Minecraft EDU Official person! I realized I got gender specific in my previous post, no offence intended. 

    So you asked me, “What specifically would you need in a server platform?” I am so THRILLED you asked! And remember, you did ask.

    Let’s dream for a moment. I can only begin to imagine the things that teachers could do with a huge server. Imagine the situations and scenarios we could come up with! For example, our 4th grade studies the Civil War, one of the most difficult concepts we have to teach is how terrain can affect a battle. AKA Higher Ground usually wins (Gettysburg). Now what if we make a hill and ask a group to defend and another group to take it. Suddenly it’s REAL! The kids begin to see it. Can I do this with my mini 30-man classroom laptop server? Yes, but 8 Yankee vs 12 Confederate kids isn’t nearly as effective or impactful as the entire 4th grade of 150 kids storming & defending the hill together.

    To small? Not big enough? Ok how about this, imagine an entire grade school, class by class, setting up hidden cities all around the world. As they build their city each class would learn about government, leadership (elections forming a government, constitution), how to make Laws (Congress), how to build a society (Dawn of civilization). We can explore and discover new cities (Columbus and the age of exploration). We could conquer, NON-violently!! (conquistadors) Send out small groups to settle in a new parts of the world (Colonization). We could buy/sell/trade goods with different city/classrooms, and over time create global markets. We could set up trade routes, moving goods from one city to another, and thus the need to defend them from bandits and attackers in the form of Skellies and Zombies (China’s Silkroad).

    What then? We logoff and we read about the explorers, the colonists, the kings and emperors, the indigenous peoples we meet along the way.

    We write about our adventures using personal narratives. We teach others how to do complicated things in the world to other players in informative essays. We have written discussions/conversations about whether we should sign a treaty with Mr. Keating’s class, he’s tricky. This is opinion writing.  

    Then we do the math! Area and perimeter for our house’s and the land we live on. We plan down to the block, how many of each type of rail we would need to build a railroad from Mr. Keating’s city to Mr. Miyagi’s class. Then how much iron we need to mine to get all those rails. Did I mention how much coal to smelt the iron? It’s all about processing those numbers, writing formulas, algebraic expression. And that’s just elementary math. We would learn about cost and profit, as we do the math to figure out how much money I  just made from selling a cart of skins and iron ingots to a bunch of kids in Ms. Crabapple’s class.

    Let’s not forget about the sciences, as we explore different biomes, discover new creatures to hunt for food and skins, and the dangers of overhunting and overfishing a region, ecology.

    Finally in social studies we learn about hard to teach and understand business concepts like supply and demand, market value, and opportunity cost. I could go on, but I see your eyes glassing over. But you see that’s the point. Where my fourth graders eye’s would normally glass over and quickly lose them after about 15 seconds because… BOOOOORING!

    Not now. Now we have a server. Now all of these abstract and uninteresting concepts are real. This is tangible. This is all real. Every single concept above and so, So, SO Much More. The kids care about what they are learning know. They have investment, immersion, and meaning. They are, engaged.  

    I just came up with this off the top of my head. Imagine what I can do over time. Imagine what a community of teachers could do together from around the world, as a community on this forum. This is what I would like to see in a server platform.

     


    So, to get real:

    We need a server platform just like regular Minecraft, that can be installed either at the school district level on private servers, or on a public server hosting company outside of the county firewalls. We need the ability to connect with everyone in our classroom whether they’re at school or digital learning at home, we need to connect with other classrooms, in game, in real time.

    Server Player Size – Big. No seriously, BIG. 1000 would be a nice round number. Enough for a good-sized elementary school to get everyone on one server, enough for the entire sophomore class at a big high school. I know this depends on the level of technology, but to have the option would be awesome! What if Microsoft and Minecraft were able to offer these server services and capacities to school districts, and individual schools… for a small fee? Well that would be cool too. Right?

    Game World Size: Infinite world, Flat world a must

       Wish - I would love to see a Finite World that you could scale according to your needs. From a small 1-mile world up to 1,000 miles? More? I’m not sure the dynamics of how that could or would work.

       Wish – A Continent World – More alone the size of Austriala vs North-Central-South America, that’s to much. Going back to a huge world server, now instead of a city, each classroom gets a continent. Let the games begin! Kingdoms! Empires! Exploration! First person, meaningful learning.

       Wish – A Cubic world, that is a world that is a Cube – like a sphere, but a cube. Six faces and the ability to round the edge to the next face. This would be epic!

    In Game Elements: Everything that exists in MC:EE should be on the server, i.e. Mountains, valleys, rivers, lakes, oceans, trees, flowers, fruit, veggies, mines, minerals, animals, mobs, tools, crafting tables, chemistry tables, alchemy tables, etc. etc. You know, everything.

    Modes Creative/Survival/Adventure - Yes please!

    Programing – YES! Let’s get that robot blowing the fields!

    Sever Settings: All of the current controls in MC:EE, day/night, weather, PVP, damage, Cheats, classroom settings, all of that.

       Wish – A setting to be able to vary the length of the daytime and nighttime cycle. Thus, we can simulate the seasons. So, if a standard day is 20 min, 10 and 10, to be able to swing that to 15 min of day and 5 of night, or visa versa would be cool. I know there is a big algorithm involved with the functions diurnal cycle of the world, but It would be cool.

       Wish – A Switch to keep inventory when you die, rather than using the /gamerule command. So many teacher don’t know how to do this.

       Wish – A Toggle to be able to speed up or slow down the rate at which you digest food, thus the need to eat. Appetite - Fast (Three meals a day) – Medium - Slow

       Wish – A Toggle to make mines produce A LOT more resources in each location. (Toggle = Huge – A Lot - Normal – Few [hardship])

     

    What would I add to a full server version?

    If I get one wish it would be for locks.

    -  Chest locks that only allow the creator to open the chest, take stuff out of the chest, or destroy the chest. This would solve SO many social issues while playing in class.

    -  Door Locks - That secure the cubic perimeter of a structure (Roof, Walls, Floor) allowing only the creator of the lock to open the door when it's locked, or destroy any block of the building when it's locked down. Creepers excluded, because boom. This would solve another 30 or 40 social issues.

    If I could get a Second wish, it would be for money, gold coins minted at a minting crafting station. This to be used as an official currency throughout the world? Can each city have their own coin? Own currency? Rate of transfer and exchange?  (Math & Economics). With currency we could set up a true market place.

    If I get a third it would be for a store, or vender. That the student could set up to sell their goods to customers. To be able to set my own price (supply and demand), and for it to work even if they're not in the store at all.

    Conestoga Wagons – Think western expansion and the pioneer days, load up with a maximum weight of food and spare parts, a few cows or horses to pull it. Off we go on a literal 1,000-mile ride to a far-off promised land known as, Oregon! Let’s see who survives the trip.

    Horse drawn wagons – to move goods from point A to point B, like in a caravan, or just a solo player trying to make their fortune as a merchant. (Rise of the merchant class in the middle ages)

    New Creature: Oxen – to plow the big fields, to pull the big wagons.

    -  New Creature Stat: Fatigue - big field, heavy load, they should get tired.

    - New Item Stat: Wear and Tear – Clothing should wear out with time and mileage just like a pickaxe wears out with use, and armor wears out with abuse. This is keep up demand for craft items, like clothing. 

    A Clothing Making Station - Yup, the ability to make clothing skins in game as a craftable, tradable, sellable items. Dare I say, designable?

    Plows – To plow big fields quickly, might be cool too.

    BIG Boats – What if we could build huge boats? What if I could take a big boat and ship a 1000 white marble blocks from my mine to a rich merchant in the mesa biome, far, far away? What if we could take 20 people to explore the ocean and see if there isn’t a way to get to the east, by going west! Let’s sail for the great unknown. Let’s begin the age of exploration.

    Campfires – to offer an AOE protection perimeter from mobs and night critters. Making exploration a little less stressful, a little more adventures, and slightly safer, slightly. The campfire should not be recoverable and you need to feed the fire, or it will go out.

    Tents – to offer protection from mobs and night critters to anyone inside it. Limit the number inside. Tents should be able to be build and taken down. Crafting component, bigger the tent, the more mats and experience to produce. Tents should degrade with use, not so much damage.

    Programable compass – To be able to set it to a destination (Map coordinate). So, in a huge world you could set 0.0.0 as a kind of magnetic north to use as a central point of reference. Or you know, your house, because lost.

    Student Mapping – To be crafted! A student’s path is tracked across the world with an X amount block radius on a map that they can follow to get from place to place. Crafting such maps could be exponentially based on experience and materials, more radius = more mats and exp.

    Huge World Map for Teachers – So teachers participating in a large world server can pull up a full map of the known world, somewhat zoomable, where other cities, and points of interest can be pinpointed across the world. This would help in maybe pointing explorers in the right direction, measuring distances between cities for planning and building purposes. I wouldn’t dare to dream, but the ability to track students on the map who may have wondered off, way off, could be fun. Rather than teleporting we could give them a push in the right direction.

    In closing, this was what I came up with, over about an hour of brainstorming. What we need a server to do, what such a world could do, and what meaningful lessons it could facilitate through the grade levels.

    As a final thought, if you are looking for a game designer who understands how Minecraft can be used in the classroom from a student and teacher perspective, can create a great many more possibilities of where to grow the game educationally, explain to programmers conceptually how it could work, and teach teachers how to implement these lessons, well I might know a guy. Just saying. 😊

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  • Bump this - This is the now - Corona Pandemic - the most needed functionality to be able to teach Minecraft EE online. 

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  • Christoph Peters

    This must work. Every game on Steam can be played multiplayer with 000 issues. The technology is there for a long time already Microsoft Studios, you can do it if you want to. We teachers need classroom tools that work 100% but multiplayer MC:EE does not. Not in a pandemic situation. This must be addressed soon because if the experience stays as it is rather stressful, teachers will turn away. The need to organize classrooms in a server lobby and open up dedicated servers just as you can do in many multiplayer games is BIG. Local classroom are fine and it works but that is not the default use case anymore.

    8
  • Minecraft EDU Official

    With respect, we need some serious engagement from the Minecraft Education Edition team on this dedicated server question, along with a separate space where long-standing Minecraft educators can engage with the internal team on the development of a significant feature set for M:EE.  It has been years since the Azure pilot now, with no update or new developments. 

    Having used the original @TeacherGaming #MinecraftEDU platform with my students from 2012 through to 2018, I’m sad to note that M:EE still has not reached feature parity with a product that was released almost a decade ago. At that time we hosted multi-player, multi-school servers that allowed simultaneous access by multiple classes for province-wide and even international participation, and here in 2021 M:EE is hobbled with a “30 participants” functional limit and a same-tenant requirement that really doesn’t support at-a-distance collaborations. 

    I am a big fan of the CodeBuilder/MakeCode functionality that exists with M: EE, and it is positive to see the work done in extending the Camps and Clubs licensing option that arrives with 1.14.60. Imagine the kinds of collaborations that could happen with a persistent server that allowed educators and their classes to join with students from communities in other parts of their province/state/country/world. 

    8
  • Andrew Forgrave

    Kyle M  Bryan Sanders (archived) David Eichler 

    It’s wonderful to see this conversation taking off again after a two-year hiatus. I have been speaking with Minecraft EDU Team recently about a project that I am working on. (For years I have acted as moderator/admin on a number of different Java-based Minecraft servers for educators. There are so many wonderful plug-ins that can be used to provide for a very safe and creative space for teachers and kids — But those don’t exist with M:EE/Bedrock.)   In the short term, I want to be having educators doing some coding projects within a shared world, and of course with COVID we will all be working remotely. I had thrown out a question maybe 10 days back asking if anyone had used Windows 10 Edition, Code Companion, and a Bedrock server to get around the tenant restrictions imposed by M:EE — but it sounds as if that isn’t workable. I couldn’t get the Code Connection working with a hosted Bedrock server  – – although I don’t know if the answer is as simple as configuring the ports differently?  maybe the Microsoft/Mojang techs to get that going, but it looks as though there will be an option for us to use some M:EE demo accounts so that everyone can be together on the same server for the duration of our training session. 

    I’ve also wondered if there would be interest in a shared M:EE server for Minecraft Mentors to meet on and collaborate? I think this would be a wonderful mechanism to gather feedback about future requests and also beta test them prior to releasing them as part of an M: EE server platform. 

    I don’t understand why it isn’t possible to establish an M: EE capable server. I get that there is an interest in making the technology as simple as possible for beginning/novice educators to hopefully scale the implementation of Minecraft in education, but we had a great collection of educator features in the #MinecraftEDU modded Java plug-in eight years ago (not to mention other plug-ins that could be thrown in like World Edit, for example), and it’s a shame that Microsoft/Mojang can’t see their way clear to support a Java-based education plug-in. It would make things so simple to host servers, keep the learning spaces safe for kids by managing access using whitelists, using plug-ins to protect claims, etc. It could be trivial to import a class list from excel into a whitelist! 

    however, assuming that a Java-based education plug-in isn’t in the works, we need some serious movement forward on an M: EE server. I’m keen to be involved in helping to move things forward in anyway possible. Let’s keep the discussion going, and keep the pressure on so that this gets addressed! 

    7
  • David Eichler

    We NEED a server platform for MME. So many counties have firewall issues, mine included, it makes even a regular shared world (30 kids) impossible because of firewall restrictions. Teachers are at school, students are at home, and the firewall won't let us play together. This isn't a wish, this is a MUST! 

    We have hopefully experienced the power of bringing your entire classroom into one world for a group project or challenge. Imagine if you could host the entire grade of 150-200 kids in one world. Imagine the power and engagement of hosting the entire school 500-1000 people. You are missing a crucial ingredient in the evolution of MEE as a classroom necessity, instead of a classroom treat. 

    Please make this happen soon!

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  • David Eichler this is incredible! Thank you SO MUCH for taking the time. We might just need to host an upcoming focus group for sure!

     

    Also adding in

    Elina Ung - putting your post here so others can see!

    Pls add servers! They are SO fun! I even made words like a minigames world I call mc.minigames.net I made it that it has skiyblock, skywar, bedwar, parkour, housing, spleef, and LOTS more. I made other worlds too like how-to survival. Also, PPLLLLSSS add mods! I was about to do a gt project on minecraft edu but i has no mods bc I want chairs and devices. anyways, Add servers and mods PLS! I know lots of people ask and tell you this but that means you guys should add them! 

     

    -ELina

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  • David Eichler

    Minecraft EDU Official - I would love to do a focus group on server design. Sign me up!

    5
  • Andrew Forgrave

    Bryan Sanders (archived) --  The current tenant-based authentication removes the classroom teacher from the decision-making process as to who their students will interact with. 
    1) the limitation on tenant means teachers can't support collaborative projects with students from another jurisdiction.
    2) the symbol-based authentication leaves kids open to peer-to-peer host simply by sharing a code with anyone else on the tenant -- it could be a friend in another classroom, another school, etc. 
    3) there is no whitelist facility that allows a teacher to be directly responsible for which accounts access an M:EE world hosted from within their classroom.  

    In my 8+ years of using Minecraft with elementary-aged kids, I have always been very conscious of my responsibility as the educator for supervising my students when they are interacting through Minecraft.  As a long-time proponent/champion for the use of Minecraft, I've been especially conscious that leading the way brings along the extra responsibility of ensuring that care is taken in setting positive precedents. 

    With the original Java-based #MinecraftEDU, it was possible to set up the clients such that they were only able to connect to ONE specific server: 
    1) The server was live/accessible when it was time to work on our Minecraft work and I was supervising.
    2) The serve was closed/inaccessible when we were focussing on other learning.  Students might launch the client, but without the server present, they couldn't distract themselves with a self-hosted world. 

    The ability to complement the original @TeacherGaming Java mod with other Java-based mods like World Edit, DynMap, etc. provided a much richer feature set even then (7 years ago) than we have now within M:EE.  

    When Microsoft has been promoting Mystery Skype for years -- a classroom-initiated activity in which teachers reach out and connect their students with classrooms all over the world (without any restrictions imposed by tenant) -- the legal ramifications argument RE: Minecraft doesn't stand up to inspection. The problem lies in how it has been implemented -- and the financial motivations that lurk behind the license model. Sorry.   

    This reflects, in part, my recent question related to Bedrock servers and Code Connection. If it were possible to fire up a Bedrock server and have my students connect to it and code collaboratively, it would work around the tenant limitation. Sadly, that hasn't seemed to work in my tests, and it appears no one else has looked at it? Add to the fact that Bedrock seems to be ignored for the Mac platform (why is that? Bedrock is based on minecraftPE, which was out on the iPad loooong before W10 edition, and M:EE can be released for the Mac) and we are back to needing to use M:EE.

    I know that softwares have roadmaps that make them less nimble than we might like -- but maybe if a team were to backtrack to where the road hived off from Java and start a new path forward along that route we might get to where we would like to be a lot more quickly ...  

    5
  • richard hainsworth

    Hi Fergus

    Great suggestions. I have asked them the same thing a few times. The limits that they have placed on MEE are at odds with what happens in a classroom these days. Its a bit sad.

     

    I recon the more of us teachers that ask the more chance it will happen.

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  • Christoph Peters David Eichler thank you for this insight! We'd love to hear any features you would want in this, and the impact it would have on your students. Keep sharing as we keep exploring!

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  • Christoph Peters

    Thanks Sander Jong, de for putting this back on the table. 

    I need to add and stress that a "Can't connect to server" message equals to: "Sorry, you cannot enter this school". This disqualifies MC:EE since accessibility to schooling is guaranteed by our laws. 30 students need to enter the class. If only 5 of those students have issues about port forwarding, firewall rules or waitlisted URLs this is a complete deal-breaker. This is survival of the fittest which is forbidden in education. And no, I as a teacher can't be the one who configures and troubleshoots parents routers in their households. And in the meantime while I explain to parents how to configure port-forwarding on their local router the student plays Among us with his friends. Actually they think I made a wrong decision highlighting this technology!

    4
  • Ability to play with others outside of one's organization

    FOLLOW
     
    Garry Strait
     

    I have some friends who play MCEE, but are outside of my Organization. Could you please add the ability to play with other players outside of the organization?

    Thanks,

    Garry Strait

    4
  • Beard Rob

    Hey folks,

    Just wanted to upvote this.  We started using MineCraft Education Edition in late 2019 and I didn't realise that the pilot of the Azure server was an option until after the pilot had finished.

    Our Minecraft club was going really well when it started, it was bringing kids together, including a couple of kids who were shy or had learning difficulties who really struggled to make friends and were lonely.  Suddenly having a club where they all had a common interest they could play together which really made a huge difference for the kids, some of who didn't have access to a computer at home or perhaps were so isolated at school and didn't have any friends and this was a way of helping them socialise and improve their mental health.

    However, then the pandemic happened and caught everyone off guard.  Our school was closed to all but a handful of students, one student even asked if he could come into school so he could still play Minecraft (from experience of my teenage kids, they'd do anything they could to avoid going into school, so kids asking to go to school was an amazing surprise, and something I put down to the availability of Minecraft Education Edition in school).  Over the pandemic a couple of the kids would e-mail me to ask if there was any way they could play together at home, but sadly running Minecraft:EE on a school computer and allowing the kids to connect from home wasn't an option, we just weren't able to open up the firewall.  Having something on the outside Internet (on Azure, on a hosted VM or something) would have been ideall, but cost was a factor too.

    I even looked at the possibility of running Minecraft:EE on a computer at home like Bryan Sanders (archived) is doing by opening ports up and allowing the kids to connect in to my computer, but despite having a 200Mbit down/20Mbit up connection at home I gather the bandwidth used would probably saturate my upload speed an make it impossible to still work from home... sadly while I have the option of a faster connection I can't afford it and I know the school wouldn't fund it.  There's also the issue of power availability, I have occasional power cuts which would mean downtime (I'm going to add a UPS to my home router and switch when I can afford it, but right now when the power goes off everything else does too).

    It would really make a difference to the kids in the school I work at, I was so excited to see that Minecraft:EE was now available on Chromebooks (I'm having issues deploying this, but that's going to be a separate support ticket), a lot of the kids at the school have borrowed Chromebooks for home learning, so if a server was available on Azure (or even just a server application that could be installed on a basic Windows, Mac or Linux host that could run headless with a separate management client or web interface for administration, or even just a GUI that we could access via a Remote Desktop or VNC session) would be amazing.  It would make a huge difference to the kids, they're feeling pretty isolated right now and we want to do what we can to make the isolation more bearable so a dedicated Minecraft:EE server that is simple to connect to from a Windows, Mac, iOS, Android or Chromebook client from a kids home would be amazing.

    Minecraft EDU Official I see there's a new client available that is required to continue playing, does this suggest that perhaps something could be possible?

    Rob

    4
  • Aleece Landis
    Bug Zapper Beacon of Knowledge Super Star

    Still waiting for an update from Minecraft Education Edition Team Official about Progress on the Dedicated Server for Minecraft education edition.

    For those who might not really know as much about the geeky computer side of minecraft in general.  Education Edition is built on the cross platform Bedrock edition.  Java edition is the Original Minecraft.  Java edition has had the most done as far as servers and server plug ins and has the most complex ability to control permissions of players on servers.  Bedrock edition has server software too but it seems it is a little more difficult to carefully control players on bedrock servers the way it can be done in Java.  And I'm wondering if THIS lack of fine control might be PART of the reason a MC:EE server has not been rolled out ages ago.

    I'm sure they also have the added issues of how education edition is set up to host games AND only allow multiplayer within the same tenet but it really seems that should not be a complete stumbling block.

    Please, even if the initial EE server is JUST the basic Bedrock Edition Server software with the added EE security features so only people in the tenet can join and it is still limited to only 30 students at a time that will still be a HUGE bonus for most people who are asking for a dedicated server.  If those teachers have more than 30 students or more than one class, then they can have multiple servers running and they can leave them running and use the logging features to save the logs as needed.

    Once the Basic server is up and running and in testing.  Then, see if a way can be figured out for all the additional stuff people are asking for.

    For those wishing to do the cross institutional collaboration, I suspect the easier path to this, might be to create an organization which can include membership from all over and the organization would need to get the education account and tenet then anyone participating in the organization would be able to collaborate within Minecraft Education Edition.  I realize it is a pain and more complex to do it that way, however, I'm not sure that Minecraft EE or Microsoft for education is likely to take on the complexity (liability) for you.  They are expecting the organizations to police their own tenets as to who has access.  If they start letting people cross tenet lines how do they know that people from one tenet are following the same rules as another tenet?  I'm guessing Microsoft doesn't want to get in the middle of any disputes.

    4
  • Grant Pusey

    I'm only posting to try to add weight to the argument - I'm beyond thinking that I can make any difference to the devs - I've done this dance before.

    I've been looking for the dedicated server for too long and have essentially given up on MS doing anything about it. I've spent countless hours working around this and other problems that don't get fixed (e.g. 30 max users).

    I find that I use Minecraft: Education Edition about 20% as much as I used to with MinecraftEDU, despite the potentially great new features.

    When you consider how much other products have grown in the COVID climate, Minecraft: Education Edition had no extra developments over the last couple of years.

    What a missed opportunity...

    4
  • John Vincent

    how are there technical difficulties? the server is embedded in the client! plus there are already dedicated bedrock server files! why make it cloud only? you realize there are a LOT of IT people watching this and involved in these deployments? a locally hosted server option is NOT a bad idea.

    3
  • Just did read this article about Mojang moving cloud services from AWS to MS Azure and wonder if there is something in the making for MC:EE cloud servers??:

    https://www.engadget.com/minecraft-microsoft-azure-193642521.html

    3
  • Sander Jong, de

    I fully agree to Christoph Peters David Eichler 

    Here in the Netherlands we also desperately need a cloud based Minecraft server environment.

    As we move with our IT infrastructure in the cloud and have no local servers anymore we want also for our students a Minecraft environment for anyplace, anytime.

    So no firewalls or client isolation restrictions or the depending of a teachers laptop.

    At this moment they restrict us from widely use Minecraft in our school.

    In my opinion it should be something like https://www.minecraft.net/nl-nl/realms-for-java  

    But extended with the possibility for a teacher to manage several worlds.

    In the Netherlands there is a community of several schools who use Minecraft EE as a learning environment, so enough customers i think....

    3
  • David Eichler

    Mr. Minecraft EDU Official, with all due respect, please stop exploring and get coding. We need a server platform more than ever before.  :-) 

    I love MC:EE, I love using it in the classroom. It is very difficult to do this in our current COVID world. OH! and if you need Alpha/Beta testers, I would gladly volunteer my services and my students as well.

    3
  • David Eichler we hear you! Exploration and needs analysis are a must before coding - there are many different scenarios and needs to uncover before arriving at a solution. We'd love to capture your needs! What specifically would you need in a server platform?

    3
  • Aleece Landis
    Bug Zapper Beacon of Knowledge Super Star

    I've had to reserve an "extra" student account to use as a HOST account so I can use a computer to act as a server.  Only drawback being the Host is pretty much AFK and if it is a survival challenge sort of thing that AFK host doesn't let them sleep through the night.  If this could be a dedicated server software it wouldn't have to burn an account to host it and it would make logging easier.

    3
  • Andrew Forgrave

    I would like to challenge current same-tenant model that limits the ability for M:EE collaboration with educators and students from schools from other jurisdictions.  

    Java Minecraft servers have employed a whitelist mechanism for many years that I believe should be incorporated into an M:EE server. If teachers can manage slash commands in M:EE like /weather thunder or /tp @a @s, then they can manage /whitelist add ...  

    3
  • Christoph Peters

    How about using Azure virtual servers inside the school tenant to install minecraft server. This would require a MCEE server version of course. Im wondering if such a software is in development. That would be awesome!

    3
  • Andrew Forgrave

    I've been doing some recent testing with remote access for participants to an M:EE peer-hosted world sitting on an Intel NUC. So far, folks have been able to connect from various physical locations without issue. I've not had enough folks active yet to test out the functional upper limit to the number of simultaneous connections, and that is something I'd like to try out. I've kept the world open for days, looking to see what kinds of issues might exist -- it appears that the join code times out after a couple of days? I just did a search and found a recent post by Andrew L about this.  I've been able to exit and reconnect from multiple machines for a day or two before needing to refresh the code at the "server" host.  I understand that the current implementation is not designed to run for long stretches -- but an option to whitelist players versus the join code option would be a step in the right direction. 

    3
  • Mic D

    I've skimmed this whole thread and there still is not a definite answer about a server option for MEE. These discussions and wishlists have been going for over 2 years and it would have been very benficial last year during lockdown (as well as now). 

    Can someone official please put the real answer on the forum and maybe pin it to the top so we can find it easily?

    Thanks! Love your work!

    3
  • Bug Zapper Beacon of Knowledge Super Star

    Still interested in a dedicated server for Education Edition.  Even if it is only for a "class" worth at a time.  Heck the Java and bedrock dedicated servers are light weight enough to be able to run on just about any machine if you are not expecting it to handle huge numbers users at one time.

    With Whitelisting it should be easy enough to provide security over who is allowed to log in and with logging it should actually be easier for schools to track what is done/said  in the worlds.

    Please, any updates on this?

    3
  • Minecraft EDU Team

    Server Hosted Multiplayer

    FOLLOW
     
    Travis Gottsch
     

    Are there plans for server-hosted multiplayer?  My school has different networks for teachers and students making it extremely hard for teachers and students to interact.  Server hosted multiplayer would solve this issue for us.

    3
  • Specifically as a result of this ongoing question, last summer I took a look into the state of Bedrock hosting, and at the time it was very much in preliminary stages compared to what has been available with Java. Given the continued protracted challenges arising out of licensing and server hosting with M: EE, for my work this summer I’m back to developing educational programming focussed on the Java platform, where there are tools, server facilities and plug-ins to provide the flexibility that currently does not exist with M:EE.  

    On one hand, Minecraft is incredibly broad and deep, and there is plenty to explore within the Java platform. On the other hand, however, given that we are approaching 18 months since the arrival of Covid, it’s a shame that there has not been a server-enabled version of M:EE to better support remote learning during this time. 

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