My young daughter is enjoying Minecraft, but somehow the vanilla game doesn’t cut it anymore. I am a gamer and a techie, which motivates me to find ways to spice up my own Minecraft experience while joining her in a game.
For her, the answer (on Java Minecraft at least) is to catch and train up Pokemon in the context of Minecraft. This makes the game way more fun for her, and makes it a more interesting challenge for me. Particularly since my client of choice is a Meta Quest 3, and I play Minecraft in VR via QuestCraft.
Not only that, but we had been utilizing Aternos for free servers, and while they are a solid choice for trying out Minecraft in multiplayer, they decidedly aren’t the right fit for a long term server. So I invested some time in finding a free solution that would be reliable and easy to maintain.
I resolved all of my pain points with the following architecture.
QuestCraft! It’s awesome and I highly recommend subscribing to their Patreon. To emphasize a point they make many times over, you need to own Minecraft Java Edition in order for this to work, and you need access to your Microsoft login in order to log into Minecraft.
The basic installation instructions are available at https://github.com/QuestCraftPlusPlus/QuestCraft . You will need to follow these instructions and start a single player world on version 1.21.1 first in order to have the folder created that you need to place the mod jars into. You will also want to download this jar file https://files.xrcraftmc.com/QuestCraft/Cobblemon-fabric-1.7.0%2B1.21.1.jar which is the fixed Cobblemon mod which ONLY works with Minecraft version 1.21.1 . Make sure your server is running Minecraft version 1.21.1 as well, they have not yet released a more current patched version. Everything Minecraft 1.21.1!
Drag the jar files you downloaded earlier into this folder:
Cobblemon-fabric-1.7.0 1.21.1.jar from the QuestCraft folks
Fabric API at 0.116.9
Quest Rebound
owo-lib
Now you should be able to connect to a Cobblemon server!
How to Battle Wild Pokemon and other Cobblemon Stuff
You will quickly find that Cobblemon relies on keybinds that are unavailable in QuestCraft. Worry not! You can use Quest Rebound to overcome this barrier.
Instructions on using Quest Rebound are quoted from the modrinth website:
Quest Rebound – Rebinding Instructions
Add this mod to your QuestCraft instance as normal and start your game. In the game, you can go to Options -> Controls -> Open VR Bindings Menu to change your keybinds.
To reset your keybinds, delete the interaction_profiles directory from your instance root.
You *must* restart your game in order for key rebinds to take effect.
Specifically for battling wild Pokemon, you can rebind “Throw Selected Pokemon” to your left controller’s x key. Make sure to uncheck its current function checkboxes before checking the Cobblemon function box.
Personally I find the left x button a good choice because its default function is to dash forward a bit, which I do not need as much as I need to battle wild Pokemon.
You could try binding the Throw action to your radial menu, but the problem is you have to interact with a Pokemon to trigger it, and left clicking the radial menu while you’re facing the it will harm the Pokemon!
So instead, bind the action to your x key, then when you want to battle a wild Pokemon, face it and press x on your left controller, and you will get the battle menu.
The “Open overlay” and other controls are fine to bind to the radial menu. To do this, click “Options”, then “VR Settings” then “Radial Menu”. Click the number that appears in the center and you will get more blank radial tiles. Click one of these tiles and you will get a bunch of actions you can assign to the tiles, including Cobblemon-related actions.
To use the radial menu once you’ve assigned it, click the y button on the right controller and it will open.
Happy Cobblemon’ing! I’m in the QuestCraft Discord server, user “saranicole1980” so feel free to ping me there if you have any questions!
