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.
Server side:
A Kubernetes cluster on the Oracle free tier, with the itzg minecraft chart installed and modded with Fabric and Cobblemon, all applied using Terraform
Client side:
PC-side – Modrinth client for my daughter (playing Java edition Minecraft on an Ubuntu PC) also modded with Fabric and Cobblemon
Meta Quest (VR) – Sideloaded Questcraft with the patched Fabric installer
And for good measure, I also discovered how to battle wild Pokemon in VR with this mod https://modrinth.com/mod/quest-rebound (which needs this mod https://modrinth.com/mod/owo-lib as a dependency).
Want to try your hand at this yourself? Check out this three part tutorial series!
Create a Kubernetes Cluster on Oracle Cloud for free using Terraform
Create a Modded Minecraft Server on a hosted Kubernetes Cluster