LAN Support Coming Soon to Minecraft

[News Portal]

Mojang have added the ability to open up your single-player Minecraft game for friends on your LAN connection to join, in one of their weekly snapshot preview builds. This is still very much a work in progress, so there are a lot of kinks to work out, but no doubt it will become a permanent feature before too long. You can check it out here for all the details, and to grab the preview version for yourself.

Source: mojang.com

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[iambeanie]

Didn't minecraft already have LAN support? As in, the creation and joining of games over a LAN? The only thing that was missing was the ability to make it LAN only but a password solves that. Or is this a new tab which will search for lan games and such?

[vcatkiller]

I think it's more the ability to take an already established single player game and open it up for LAN support. That's what it looks like anyhow. Never tried setting up a multiplayer server so if that was already available I never realized.

[coatsy22]

You can already copy over any map for use in MP, including your SP map.

This honestly just sounds like the addition of dedicated buttons on the main screen for peeps that dont get how the 'net' works.

Given how hoggy the netcode is (Europeans with T1 all over the place always always write shite netcode - doubt they can even test slow connections properly), you pretty much need to be on a lan to host yourself anyway, or have a proper server with tons more bandwidth than a home connection

[Clontarf[X]]

Pretty sure they mean in-game server starting (as opposed to running a dedicated server). So the client runs as a server. Good times ahead.

[DoHo_]

Pretty sure they mean in-game server starting (as opposed to running a dedicated server). So the client runs as a server. Good times ahead.

If that's what you're talking about - i.e. drop-in support, turning every singleplayer game into a multiplayer game at will - that would be awesome. Since the 360 has it I would be happy if Pc got it, but I'm not so sure. He's hoping though!

[Clontarf[X]]

I don't know if it'll be drop-in. If it was then you're right, that's pretty awesome. I think it's more ala Multiplayer -> Start LAN Game.

[CJGordon]

You can now use “/publish” to open your single-player game for LAN friends to join.

Judging by that, I assume it will go along the lines of:

1. Host logs into his Singleplayer game
2. Host types /Publish to show his game through LAN
3. friends and other's join game via: Multiplayer -> Join LAN -> select hosts game.
4. ??????
5. Profit.