Minecraft LAN Games (You Are Not My Tech Support Person-filter)

November 5, 2013 9:49 PM

My wife and I wanted to play Minecraft together. Minecraft has that handy "Open game to LAN" button in single player mode. But it's not working.

When I push the button, my wife can see the game in her list, but Java times out when she tries to join it.

When my wife pushes the button, I can't see her game in my list at all.

We've tried doing a Minecraft server and having her using Direct Connect to my IP or adding it to her list of servers, but we run into almost the exact same problem; she can see the game, but can't join it.

Can anyone tell us what is wrong and how to fix it? (We have also already tried turning off firewalls and etc. The specific error message she gets is: "Java.net.connect exception: connection timed out.")

posted by Scattercat to Technology (12 answers total)

Response by poster: We both have Windows 7, as a reference, though mine is "Home" and hers is "Professional," if that makes the slightest lick of difference.
posted by Scattercat at 9:50 PM on November 5, 2013

It's going to be one of two things: A firewall problem or a router problem. You say you disabled firewalls and still had the problem, so that leaves a router problem.


What are the IPs in question? Can you ping them? What kind of router are you using? Are you both connecting to the same router?
posted by empath at 1:05 AM on November 6, 2013

Response by poster: We're both on the same router, and as far as I know everything is functional. I have not explicitly tested my IP or hers because I don't actually know how to do that or what symptoms I would even be looking for.
posted by Scattercat at 1:07 AM on November 6, 2013

What I'm suspecting is that you have two routers on the network and one of them is stopping the traffic in one direction. That was why I asked for your ips, because I thought they might be on different subnets.
posted by empath at 1:11 AM on November 6, 2013

If it's not that, you probably have a firewall on your pc that is allowing outbound traffic from your pc but stopping inbound traffic from her.
posted by empath at 1:11 AM on November 6, 2013

Response by poster: I have typed "ping (IP addresses)" in the cmd thingamabob. Both came back "four sent, four received." My IP came back at less than one millisecond each time. My wife's came back at 108 milliseconds for the first ping and one or two milliseconds for all the others.

Mine is 192.168.1.132; hers is .133.
posted by Scattercat at 1:11 AM on November 6, 2013

Response by poster: I've just got standard windows defense stuff running. What do I tell it to allow?
posted by Scattercat at 1:13 AM on November 6, 2013

Response by poster: I see a couple of Java-y things that are labeled "blocked..."
posted by Scattercat at 1:13 AM on November 6, 2013

Yeah, then the problem is almost definitely a firewall or something on your PC. If it were me, I'd be capturing traffic with wireshark on each pc to see what's going on, but that's a little bit too involved for an askme thread.
posted by empath at 1:14 AM on November 6, 2013

Best answer: You have to allow both minecraft and the java binaries.
posted by empath at 1:17 AM on November 6, 2013

Response by poster: Hooray, it worked!

Now do I need to make sure to turn off all of these things afterward? Like, I guess leaving Minecraft as Enabled would be fine, but I assume Java was disabled to start with for a reason...?
posted by Scattercat at 1:19 AM on November 6, 2013

Eh, you're behind a router, it's probably fine. Just make sure you keep java updated and don't download any strange java binaries.
posted by empath at 1:44 AM on November 6, 2013