Life with two children: Renting realms

[andrewducker]

About a month ago Gideon watched a bunch of videos about Minecraft, asked if he could play it on her tablet, got a few pointers from me to get him going and then dove in and started building stuff. At an impressive rate considering that he can't read any word more than 4 letters long.

Yesterday I mentioned Minecraft to Sophia, and she showed interest, so I set her up on my desktop and she got stuck in. She's asked for more help than Gideon has, but has been happily building herself an underground house. And just now I wanderd into my office to see her on the desktop and Gideon sitting on the floor with his tablet, with the two of them intermittently showing each other cool things that they'd found.

So tonight, after they're asleep, I'm going to set them both up for online play, and rent a realm*, so that they can be in the same world with each other.



*I am totally willing to pay £3.99 per month to not have to maintain my own server.

Comments

[reverancepavane]

Definitely the way to go.

[fub]

That's a good price for a managed service, though I don't know how involved running a Minecraft server for 2 players is. Having it running on a machine in your own network (if you have a spare desktop lying around...) might have its advantages too.

[andrewducker]

I don't have a spare desktop.

I *do* have a NAS. And that would probably be fairly easy. But just not having to worry about upgrading it to latest versions, or deal with it if it's gone wrong in some way is probably worth £4/month to me.

Now, if Jane wants to play too then we're up to £8/month (for 4-10 players), at which point it might well be worth me installing it on the NAS.

[fub]

Yeah, you definitely don't want to have to invest in hardware and know-how to run it at that price.

Is it possible to download the state of your instance so you can upload it elsewhere if you want to switch services and/or want to self-host later on?

[andrewducker]

It is!

[fub]

That keeps the options to the future open, that's smart.

[anef]

£3.99 a month sounds like a good price for some peaceful hours with your children playing happily together.