With all of the Pokemon Go craze around lately and the general allure of Pokemon some people may not realize that there is an extremely popular Minecraft mod called Pixelmon. For those of you not familiar with Minecrat this is an open world sandbox game that has virtually limitless mod capabilities. The creators here of the Pixelmon mod have done a great job putting together a mod that people can host with the Technic Platform. Technic is a platform is a modded version of Minecraft and many bundles are just collections of dozens of mod in a single cluster. You can find more about Technic here.
My kids spend hours playing various Technic mods but Pixelmon is the one they spend the most time with and they go around collecting Pokemon like creatures (this is an unlicensed Pokemon clone) with their trainer and this game captures all of the basic elements one would expect from a Pokemon game. The beauty is that if you own Minecraft Technic and Pixelmon are free, and Technic is just a simple installer and you install the Pixelmon modpack.
There are currently 637 Pokemon in Pixelmon too at the moment of this article and they did a good job capturing all the generations from First through Fifth generation. The amount of detail and work in creating a Pokemon experience with the Minecraft framework is commendable and highly worth checking out if you are a fan of both games.
See some Pixelmon Vids of the game in action
But that being said, why be just a player when you can host your own modded server? This allows others to play by your rules, play your adventures on your worlds. This is what you get when you host a Minecraft server. And it isn’t that hard to host a Minecraft server though it may be a bit more complicated to setup and configure mods the way you want them to run. You have limitless options and there are thousands of mods from entire adventure mods which are fixed adventures where the map and world are generally static, to creative mode maps where you can edit/alter anything, to survival maps which play like the traditional game mixing adventure plus ability to edit/alter the environment.
One thing to consider when hosting your own Minecraft server is making sure the hosting provider offers you an ample amount of RAM as the amount of RAM you can allocate to your Minecraft server directly affects the number of players that can connect and join your Minecraft host. I would highly recommend 2GB of RAM as a minimum to host a decent Minecraft server as the JVM can be a memory hog. You can probably expect to get 10-16 players on 2GB of RAM. 4GB of RAM and you should be good for up to 48 simultaneous players in your Minecraft server and with Minecraft the more players on at the same time, the more fun and immersive the gaming experience. Hosting your own server also allows you to play with various settings like viewing distance, creating whitelists and blacklists (banned players) and have a more interactive experience with your players with MOTD (Message of the Day) and you can set operators who have permissions to do anything to assist or even act like “gods” in your Minecraft server.
Host yourself a PVP battling Hunger Games type arena, or an adventure like Wrath of the Fallen the choice is yours with Minecraft and this game is still extremely popular even this many years later. The PC version has just so many more limitless possibilities than the console versions with modpacks. So have you ever hosted your own Minecraft server yet? Do you play any Technic packs and which ones are your favorite?