Guide to setting up a minecraft Server (windows and Mac)

Minecraft Multiplayer Tutorial

This is a complete guide to actually setting up the server from start to finish.  There are two different types of servers. I will be going over them in detail.
It is best to set up a server on a completely different computer than you are playing on.  I am assuming that you have downloaded minecraft already in this tutorial.

Local Server (no port forwarding)

Minecraft has been updated with automatic Local server capabilities.  This means that the method is super easy now.  Just open up a minecraft single player game on COMPUTER1.  In the Game menu is a new option called "Open to LAN".  If you select this, it will start your game as a server.

Then if you open minecraft on COMPUTER2 and navigate to Multiplayer

It will automatically search for LAN Games.  If the first game is on and in online mode, it will connect.

Note: You cannot be logged into the same account on both computers, one way to bypass this is 

1: buy a new minecraft username (this is not practical at all)

2: Play offline on one of the accounts.  This can be achieved by entering the loggin information wrong at the beginning of minecraft and then choosing play offline.

Server

A local server is a server that is located on your home network.  Each computer running Minecraft is called a client.  Only clients connected to your router or home network can access the server.

Server setup

Open up an internet browser and navigate to www.minecraft.net  and download the minecraft_server.exe (Or if you are on a mac download the mac version)

Mini-break to find out system information:

Right now we are going to find out what ip address your computer is.  click the start button and type in "cmd" without the quotes.  Open cmd.exe.  You should see a screen that looks like this:

now you are going to type the following in without quotes: "ipconfig"

There are two things that we need to remember, the default gateway and the ipv4 adress.  Mine being 192.168.0.1 and 192.168.0.101  We will use these later.

Back to server setup

I like to place the minecraft server software in a folder that i create in my home folder called MCServer.

Open the application and this should appear.

The first time that you do this, you will have a bunch of errors.  That is just saying that files are missing, it creates these files though so its not an issue.

After you get this message"

[INFO] Preparing spawn area: 97%

[INFO] Done (10.354s)! For help, type "help" or "?""

Now close the Server Application.  Navigate back to the MCServer folder, you should see a lot more files that are there.

Now we are going to open up the "server.properties" file.  If you haven't ever opened a ".properties" file before, windows will not know what to open the file with.  We are going to use notepad, so just right click on the file and choose open with notepad.
We are going to change one or two values, depending on your setup.

Server ip: This is going to be the ipv4 address that we looked up earlier in the tutorial.  Mine was 192.168.0.101 so, obviously that's what I set it as.
Online mode: Sometimes I play minecraft with friends that haven't paid for minecraft but have the game.  Setting this as false allows me to play online with them even though they haven't paid for the game.  However, it has a security vulnerability; I haven't had a problem with this though.

Port Forwarding:

Now for most people, this seems like the most daunting task, however it is actually fairly simple.  

There are three parts that you need to lookup for port-forwarding:

We already have the ipv4 address and we set the server ip back in the "server.properties" file.  Now the easiest way to lookup your Full ip address is by going to this website:  cmyip  

Now that we have all of our information ready, lets go ahead and port forward our server!

open up an internet browser.  Remember when we wrote down that "Default gateway"  now we are going to use that.  Just put in that number in your browser.

 Now you are also going to need the login information to your router.  I know mine personally, but you might need to call your service provider.  Hopefully not though.

I am going to show the port forward on a Qwest q-1000 router.  However, most routers should be able to do this.  Just look around in the setting and try to find a port forwarding option.  After you have found it, its pretty straight forward.

Navigate through the advanced setting page and on the bottom in security is a page labeled Port Forwarding.

We are entering the following values in for the options.  

ipv4 address ----    LAN IP Address

Server Port ---- Starting and Ending Port

Some routers support more than one protocol.  In that case, recreate a port forward with the same information, just switching out the protocol until all protocols are covered.

Click save and you are finished!  Easy as that.

Testing:

Now whenever you are running the server on your computer and give anyone your full ip address (router world ip address) if they connect using that ip address followed by a colon and then the port, they will be able to access your server! simple as that!