Anyone have experience with Minecraft Realms?

June 18, 2014 1:53 AM

I'm considering purchasing Minecraft Realms for my sons and their friends, but I have a few reservations. Looking for tales from early adopters.

For background, I've been playing since early beta, and I've run servers for my son and his friends before (bukkit). Frankly, running a server really sucked. I have very little free time and just could not keep up with version control, whitelists, handling griefers etc.

It looks like Realms solves the complexity problem (albeit at the cost of texture or resource packs, but I'm fine with vanilla). I'm concerned, however, because no where does Mojang (or the wiki) delineate exactly what commands are available to Ops. For example, could I as Op work in Creative to build cool dungeons for the players working Survival? If everyone is tired of our world, can I just start up a new one or are you stuck with the first one out of the gate?

Anyway, all experiences, tales of woe or joy much appreciated!

posted by digitalprimate to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (7 answers total)

I have not personally used Realms, but I would point you to this post at punchwood.com and this post at the Minecraft forums. The first includes screenshots that address your questions about opping players, resetting realms, switching types, automatic backups, etc. The second covers more specific limitations imposed by Realms, such as no access to the server properties config. Some of this information is slightly out of date, as I believe that Mojang has exposed a few more vanilla features since these reviews were posted.

The main upshot is that this thing is pure vanilla with extra limitations. No command blocks, for instance. They claim that "most" op commands are supported, but when I looked into Realms I was never able to find a definitive list of banned/disabled commands.

Realms is still in development, though, so I wouldn't necessarily consider these limitations to be set in stone for all eternity.

I'm not sure what to say about your son's friends being griefers. I mean, they're his friends, yeah? Why are they griefing each other? As the server admin, you will still be responsible for managing the whitelist. Only the latest released version of Minecraft is supported, so the headache of managing bukkit and doing version control evaporates with Realms. But you also lose the ability to run bukkit's anti-griefing plug-ins, so that might be a wash for you depending how much time you spent dealing with griefers.
posted by xyzzy at 3:01 AM on June 18, 2014

I have been using Realms for a little over a month. It is extremely easy to set up and use. Op commands are limited, but you can set certain players to creative while others play survival. You can hand out items or xp. You can reset the world whenever you like. Backups are made automatically at least once a day and multiple backups are kept for you to restore to. User session information is stored, so you can see who has been online.
It's a great solution for people that like vanilla Minecraft.
posted by Akke at 3:55 AM on June 18, 2014

Let me know if you have any other specific questions.
posted by Akke at 4:47 AM on June 18, 2014

Actually, I was wondering how the invitation process works - it is by username or email?

Thanks for both answers, very helpful.
posted by digitalprimate at 5:00 AM on June 18, 2014

Invitation is by username.
From within the Minecraft program, the administrator adds the username to a list of approved accounts.
Once a user has been invited he will get a message at the top of his screen in Minecraft.
Also, on the main menu, he wil get a new option: Minecraft realms, that will take him to a server selection menu. It's all very nicely integrated in the application.
posted by Akke at 6:11 AM on June 18, 2014

An update was released yesterday that allows you to start using Command Blocks on Minecraft Realms, this opens up a lot of opportunities to give perks to certain players without making them OP.
The update also allows you to upload your own map, another good feature that was missing.
posted by Akke at 11:38 PM on June 18, 2014

Many thanks again - I bought it just as the update came online!

If anyone stumbles across this, the inter-webs showed me this amazing seed: 4031384495743822299. It has almost all the biomes within a day's walk. Details here. Great for either creative or survival.
posted by digitalprimate at 11:49 PM on June 18, 2014