Minecraft

First you need a Modded Launcher, Prism is the recommended one, though there are others like Modrinth, and the worst one because it has ads, but it has some exclusivity with mods on its own site, CurseForge. If you don’t know what this means:

• For maximum ease of use: Curseforge
• If you hate ads: Prism

Now you just need to download a modpack. You can browse for one from the different sites like Modrinth and CurseForge, or make your own by choosing a version, a modloader, and choosing compatible mods. You have to be playing the same modpack as your friends to play together, so normally the person hosting the server will just tell you what to download.

Once you’re ready, launch the modpack, it will have you sign in to your normal MC account if you haven’t yet, and then it will launch like a normal MC game, though it may look different. Once you get in game, you may want to configure a few settings first, like enabling your Shaders, customizing FOV, render distance, etc.

Security

In the server.properties file, make sure you have online mode enabled, the whitelist enabled, and you change the port to be non-standard. Anything from 25566-65535 is much safer.

Most routers have an app or something nowadays. Look up how to port forward for that router, then follow the instructions to forward your server’s port to the PC the server is being hosted on. The default is 25565, but you should change it to something else to make it more secure. You might be able to see the PC’s name, so you may recognize it like that, but you might also need its IP or MAC address, which you can find by typing ipconfig in a cmd prompt.

Via cPanel:

1. From the “Domains” section, click on “Zone Editor”.
2. There you should see your domain. Click the “+ A Record” button.
3. Enter whatever you want the subdomain to be, ex: “mc”. Afterwards, hit enter and it will fill in the rest of the domain.
   • mc -> mc.bradleylaishley.com
4. Then in the second box paste the MC server IP address.

That’s it! Within an hour or so, and a PC restart, it should propagate and work in MC clients.

HOWEVER!! If you use a non-standard port (recommended), then there’s a second record to create:

1. In the “Zone Editor” from before, click “🔧 Manage”
2. On the top right of the table, click the down arrow to the right of “+ Add Record”, and select ‘Add “SRV” Record’ from the list.
   • Name: _minecraft._tcp.mc.bradleylaishley.com
   • Leave TTL and Type as 14400 and SRV
   • Priority: 0, Weight: 5, Target: mc.bradleylaishley.com
   • Port: whatever port you picked for your server
     • should be between 25566 and 65535

And that’s it for real this time! You won’t have to share the port of the server with anyone, since they will be able to connect via url.

You can point this at any server, which is how we have kyle.bradleylaishley.com 🙂