Playing minecraft from a server on my phone.
Posted Apr 5, 2023, 3:18 PM UTC
1.3K133
The future kind of sneaks up on you sometimes.
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Kind of, yeah.
Keep in mind your phone runs on eMMC. So world gen is probably going to be slow unless you use Paper, which I dislike.
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Thanks for the advice, this phone the server is running is my old phone so I don't really care much about it, also it technically broken I would of thrown it out if I didn't find another use for it, (the mic is non functional lol)
Oh and also it is running a fabric server so I can definitely add some server mods that help it out with the arm chip.
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Depending on the device you could actually install actual linux onto it
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I did think about doing it that way but I rather not risk damaging an usable device.
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Most devices that you can install Linux on (completely unlocked bootloaders) would also allow you to install TWRP, Titanium and/or nandroid (youll need to do some investigating, it's been a long time since I've had a device that even allowed root access) which allows you to do a full nand backup to restore to if something goes wrong. And I am pretty sure there are also ways to dual boot. You'll want to Google "phone model linux" and make sure there aren't any issues like incompatible drivers but might as well take advantage of what makes Vanilla/unlocked Android so great.
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If you damage hardware with software then there's a very clear design issue.
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That phone looks new enough to have UFS storage which is decent. Not an NVMe drive but fast enough for a basic server.
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I was going to say the same thing. Also, fun fact, UFS 4.0 is actually hitting NVME drive speeds, at least sequential. Really impressive.
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Why dont you like paper?
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Not flexible enough
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Just learn origami
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Thank you for that insightful elaboration.
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Here's a more insightful one:
- Screws with game logic
- Fabric has better support in terms of modding
- Less spaghetto
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Unless you are modding, what's the problem?
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Screws with game logic and feels like it's going to break up on you
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EMMC isn't really a thing in phones anymore unless its a low end china special.
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Then what do phones use now for internal storage?
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Usually standard nand or UFS.
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On top of the already horrible world gen performance of Minecraft.
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People often underestimate emmc. I remember pulling docker images on my phone faster than my laptop and I learned it was because emmc is faster than hdd.
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The more wear, the slower the writes are.
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The future is now old man
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unexpected dewey
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Just out of curiosity, how did you get Minecraft up and running on the Deck? I've tried a few different things but nothing really seems to work.
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Prism launcher, download it from the store login using either mojan or Microsoft and that's it.
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why can't you just go to the desktop mode and run yay -S minecraft-launcher ?
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Steam os , how do I explain it correctly, it's locked down or should I say locked behind developer options so everything has to be a flatpak (correct if I'm wrong.)
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That's not true, you can use pacman. I just tried to install yay though and it didn't work. I've used it to install other things
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pretty sure you can get the default Minecraft launcher from the Discover tab as well without having to use the terminal, but prism launcher is easy easier to setup mods (like adding controller support) and the like.
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Oh okay that makes more sense
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SteamOS is immutable and arch repos shouldn't be used on the deck anyways, takes a lot more work than just yay or pacman
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I mean I got it on yuzu if u want the switch version.
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That’s pretty sick. Was it easy to set up
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Hmm depends on the person, for me yea I know some linux commands so I can get around a terminal but if someone doesn't know it can be a difficult task for sure.
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This is cool but why tho
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I was actually thinking this, heres the scenario,
You are out camping with your friends and everyone has a steam deck (a bit of a stretch lol) and everyone wants to play minecraft together but no one knows how, boom pulls out phone everyone hot spots into the phone and connects and play together, what do you think?
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Assuming you have a network (which would be required for this anyway) why not just use LAN in this case? Minecraft has this built in?
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Hmm, you are right, still the phone would still be needed for hotspot, but no need o create the server
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Or "Essential" mod, works like magic similar to the bedrock "join a friend's world" system.
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You could also just run the server on one of the Steam Decks, though.
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You sir, just became a Mobile lan party.
I love it. Too bad I'm the only one in my group with a steam deck... For now. I saw some of friends eyeing it while I played AAA games on car rides and in a log cabin with no wifi.
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Makes sense to me. Even as a long term server, can it serve as a server that they can connect to remotely? You could just dim the display and let it run indefinitely (or until it crashes or the phone craps out). It'd be a very power efficient server.
I can't say the scenario of "me and multiple friends are in a location without internet and all have Steam Decks with us and already have Minecraft installed and set up" is common, but if that's your plan, this seems like a good solution.
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You definitely can treat it as a normal server, you don't even need to have the screen on, just turn it off and it runs in the background. I actually used the same phone to play modded minecraft with a friend who lives in the UK, runs really well as well as my friend has the worst Internet I know.
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Huh?
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OP is using Termux on Android to host a Minecraft Java server
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It's actually a fabric server but that small detail doesn't matter much, I have tried running modded java before it works okay as long as it doesn't consume too much ram like 4gb max I can do.
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Fabric is "just" a modding framework for Java.
4GBs for a server is perfectly fine if you don't have mods.
I just didn't know you could do that on Termux
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Okay I had a brain fart I thought he said forge... brain dumb.
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I simple man. I see green button for play I press.
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Huh?
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Huh what?
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Cool concept, especially for a LAN
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Niceeeee
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Wouldn’t the 3D rendering be the “heavy lifting” part?
You can test this by seeing the wattage when using it vs not.
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I should do some testing, the only thing I noticed is that the fans don't spin up when loading into a world, the fans when running a locally stored world would ramp up for the initial loading, on the server I haven't noticed but yes I should do some tests.
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Very unlikely. Minecraft barely utilizes the graphics chip in comparison to the heavy lifting the CPU does just running the game. The logic behind running a voxel world AND sending all that mesh data to the graphics chip far outweighs the actual graphics calculations just because minecraft utilizes very simple shaders (I'm able to run MC @ 4k around 90+ fps with sodium on my steam deck). I would not be surprised if this setup is actually viable (though it will also still be draining the phone battery of course).
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This just feels so incredibly wrong
For me I get about 3 hours and 20 mins battery life anyway, using the fabulously optimised modpack. I guess the best thing about doing a server like this is that you can get a few more chunks of render distance? But neat idea, it might save a bit of battery!
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I'm not sure what the modpack is doing but I get 4 - 5 hours with just default minecraft, I guess the only difference is that my minecraft and the server are run with fabric.
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Huh cool. I guess I'm getting worse battery because I like to have high render distances to see more terrain
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Yea that could be it, default 10 is really all you need it's good enough at least for me.
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I did this a few weeks ago but installed linux first. Is great for coop mc on the go.
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Sadly no, you're probably not saving battery, I'd bet you're losing it. If you are playing on your own, your deck doesn't need to use networking. Turning off wifi (or even just having it idle) will use a lot less power. The tasks you're offloading are managing the game file and world generation most of which will be idle RAM usage that you would need to pull from the network anyway. Those tasks between your storage and CPU on the deck should be cheaper than the networking stack to talk to the phone. Storage doesn't take much power and it needs to be powered anyway. Same logic goes to the CPU; it's already doing things and needs to be on anyway.
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amazing use of termux
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ngl would be better than a lot of budget mc server options rn
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Why would one want to do this?
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Dozens of better options for remote play while disconnected from the internet, but using the tools at ones disposable is invaluable for learning.
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Omg nice what phone
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Some chappy Chinese phone, I don't recommend the brand not good quality.
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i just was wondering so i can compare my old phone's specs lmao
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Helio p70 is the cpu.
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How do you find the controls on deck? I’m using that controllable plugin (I forget the exact name), but it’s a bit janky
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I actually decide against the controller mods it actually felt worse for some reason so instead I found a good controller layout and it's working just fine.
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What are your settings / mods? I’m can’t break 30fps singleplayer
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Pretty much default, I have brightness maxed of course, fancy graphics and I think it was 10 chunks for both settings so low but honestly good enough for such a device.
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Interesting. I’m using fabulously optimized and I’m getting worse fps. I wonder if it’s a problem with distant horizons
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Hi how are you getting those results I’ve used minecraft on deck and it ran great I don’t like looking at fps but it was running at at least 30 fps on good graphics
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I genuinely have no clue. I’ve tried several different preformance mod packs and nothing has given me consistant 40fps, or 30fps without frame drops every five seconds
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It's a neat idea, I didn't even know you could run a minecraft server on a phone. But I don't think you'll save much battery life, unless you really build out the server with automatic stuff maybe. Most of your battery is going to the screen and graphics processing.
There’s also battery drain from having to use WiFi to connect to the server
Honestly it's probably negligible compared to 3d rendering
In java at least, world gen is the most power taxing thing.
You'd be surprised how much less taxing Minecraft rendering is compared to world gen.
That's probably more relevant to a tiny phone battery than the Steam Deck's.
That phone aint so tiny. Idk what's the nominal voltage of the steam decks battery, but the mah is 5313. Bigger android usually has that same mah capacity as well.
Wrong.
Phones battery is measured @ cell voltage 3.7V
Steam deck is measured at 7.7v Double the MAH for a fair comparison.
I've done the same but with a server at home and I get about 35 more minutes by running the server elsewhere. Not only this, it allows my friends and family to connect when I'm not on
Yeah I had a Realms server and connected with my Steam Deck. Battery life was definitely better. Especially with Sodium, the Deck said I had something like 5-6 hours of battery.
One paper yes it saves the cpu usage the server would have used on the client. exactly as if you connect a mobile screen self powered on with the default screen off, you remove the screen usage on the battery. This is just math.
Depends. On world gen the CPU starts taking the most power.
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