How do you make a local (LAN) server in minecraft? – Arqade

start a single player world

The first step, if you haven’t already done so, is to create a single player world. Pretty simple, in the “single player” tab, select “create world” and then select your game options.

There is no specific set of settings for your world; this will not affect your friend from joining the game later.

open to lan

after you’ve started your single player world, press “esc” on your keyboard (for pc), and the pause menu will appear.

then in the bottom right corner select the “open to lan” button, customize the multiplayer options and lastly select “start lan world” in the bottom left corner and a 5 digit lan number will appear in the chat . make sure you remember it.

find your ipv4 address in the configuration

how to find your windows and mac ipv4 address if you’re not sure what this is or how to find it, there are many helpful articles and videos on the web (it should look something like ‘192.168.x.xx’, numbers will vary) .

“direct connection” to the server

image of the direct connect button in the multiplayer tab now call your friend (or whatever you use to communicate with them) and have them select the “multiplayer” option on the home screen. Next, they should click the “direct connection” option at the bottom of the screen.

after they have the direct connect screen open, tell them to enter their ipv4 address (dots and all):

when they have written it character by character, add a colon directly to the end of this character string.

after the colon, you should enter the lan number you produced earlier; after selecting “open to lan” (there should be no spaces between any of the numbers or characters).

When you’ve completed all the steps above, tell them to select “join server” at the bottom, and watch the magic happen!

troubleshooting

Often times, while attempting to play with your friends via LAN, you will be confronted with an error message that looks something like this. This can be very annoying, as this has happened to me too many times. There are a couple of ways to try and get around this roadblock;

First, after opening “direct connection”, please wait at least 45 seconds for it to load completely. i know, you can’t tell it’s loading due to the absence of a loading sign, however, if you enter all the information and try to join your friend’s game before the “direct connect” page finishes loading, it will. it gives you an error.

Secondly, especially if you’re on windows, your firewall can play a big role in preventing you from playing with friends. try turning off your firewall and try this again.

**** remember to turn it back on afterwards! ****

Lastly, you may want to try reinstalling minecraft. the main reason this doesn’t work is that after “directly connecting” to the server, your computer pings the host; if you find them, great, you can join them. however if no computer or user is found with this lan number/ipv4 address then you are out of luck. by reinstalling minecraft, you can restart this process.

You can find a more detailed description of this process here.