Help me to help my kids with Minecraft

[Homerboy]

So my 9yr old daughter and 11yr old son are in love with this game.
She's more into the "building" aspect of it *building towns and buildings and such) Whereas he is more into the chasing zombies and watching cities burn etc. Though neither is exclusive to those aspects of the game.

They play locally (no remote servers).

I'd like to get them some mods and such to make their enjoyment even more. Though, once I started diving into the options out there... I was overwhelmed with the possibilities.

Does anyone have any suggestions for good mods for my kids? What about playing on servers? Is it "safe" for them? Is this a side they will enjoy?

Educate me a little if you will please.

Thanks in advance.

Edit: and are there any good "recipe" sites out there they can use?

 

[Wyndru]

For single player, the only mod I have installed is this "single player commands":
http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/94310-146-single-player-commands-v44-official-download-spc/
It has a bunch of options that make single player more customizable (such as turning player damage off, setting spawn points, various "cheats", etc...)

Other than that, there are a lot of neat "theme" mods out there if your kids would like to change the look of the game.

Playing on random public servers might not be completely safe, mainly because of the chat feature. As far as I know, minecraft doesn't have a adult filter, so anyone can pretty much say anything in there. There is an option to disable chat completely though. Other than that it's fairly harmless, but there is some griefing that goes on, so it's possible that after they build something, someone might destroy it.

Also, I'm not sure if they have done this yet, but now you can share a single player game locally so that both of them can play on the same map if they want. In a single player game, just go to the game menu and choose "open to lan" and then someone else on the same local network can join it.

Here is a site for the recipes (as well as a ton of other info):
http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Crafting/Items

 

[Jodell88]

Welcome to the overwhelming world of minecraft mods!

You should check out the Feed the Beast modpack which allows you to setup a modded server with ease.

For recipes there's Not Enough Items (NEI) that allows you to look up any item recipe in the game, both vanilla and modded.

EDIT: If you do decide to go the FTB route disable the Gregtech mod. Gregtech makes Industrialcraft much much harder.

 

[mizzou]

I was under the impression even the single player game is now "multilayer server" maybe he can build a protective area for her to build in and he chases zombies/spiders

 

[Homerboy]

what are the hardware requirements for a local server?
on a related note, I have an old P4 machine with 512 RAM. If I bumped up the RAM could it play Minecraft (instead of them fighting over the one desktop we have)

 

[Jodell88]

If you add more ram then it should be able to run the server without issues. I would say one gig minimum.

 

[sandorski]

Mo' Creatures

 

[Homerboy]

If you add more ram then it should be able to run the server without issues. I would say one gig minimum.

What about using it as a client?

FYI trying to get this Fear the Beast to run, and it's having issues connecting to download or something. I don't have the patience for it right now though...

 

[Wyndru]

Here are the system requirements

http://help.mojang.com/customer/portal/articles/325948-what-are-the-system-requirements-

Minimum Requirements:

• CPU : Intel P4/NetBurst Architecture or its AMD Equivalent (AMD K7)
• RAM : 2GB
• GPU : Intel GMA 950 or AMD Equivalent
• HDD : At least 90MB for Game Core and Sound Files
• Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 6 or up is required to be able to run the game.

Recommended Requirements:

• CPU : Intel Pentium D or AMD Athlon 64 (K8) 2.6 GHz
• RAM : 4GB
• GPU : GeForce 6xxx or ATI Radeon 9xxx and up with OpenGL 2 Support (Excluding Integrated Chipsets)
• HDD : 150MB

This game can be a memory hog, but you should be fine as long as you have 2gb or more. Regarding graphics and CPU, you can always lower the render distance, lower the particle density and change the graphics to fast and FPS to max fps.


Servers can suck up a lot of memory too. I run my minecraft server on a box with 10gb and it usually uses around 2gb per server (I'm running 3 maps and it uses 6gb total). Occasionally I see one of the servers hit close to 4gb, but that is usually on a big map with more than 4 people on.