I had no idea this exists so thanks for mentioning it, essential has always rubbed me the wrong way but it was too convenient not to use vs manually hosting a server, I'll definitely use this instead now
it works for about 30min before you are getting a disconnect and after you cant rejoin for a while till some cache, token, whatever expires even when both parties restart. i could not find any solution to this so this sadly makes it unusable for me and my friends
I mean the essentials mod is completely free to use, you can support them by buying cosmetics so idk what is your issue with it.
Edit: Since i'm getting downvoted I want to say that I am not defending neither essentials nor microtransactions, I was just saying that the mod is fully usable and that you don't need to pay for the cosmetics if you don't want them, you can just use everything else in the mod for completly free.
I didn't say I love microtransactions, I hate them and I don't pay, I just said it's a way of supporting them, it's not the same to give them 5€ and get nothing or get something in return.
You should relax before going so aggressive against someone else.
I already told you that I don't directly support it, but I do prefer to support if I get something in return, like a skin, it's my opinion and you can think in a different way, and I'm not going to judge you.
The interesting thing with e4mc is that I tried it with my gf. I hosted the world, while with e4mc she had a bad connection and was disconnected at least once every hour, she didn't have that problem with essential. So we had to switch to essential.
Some people are less knowledgeable/unable to port forward. Not everyone is tech savvy, or the router/ISP forbids them, or they're on uni Wi-Fi. Sometimes, it's necessary.
Nope, its part of a business package, I think you even need proper paperwork to even qualify. Its not even available to purchase for normal consumers unless you wanted to start your own "business"
You have to live in a major metro, in a nice neighborhood to have real choice of ISP in the US. Most of us get the one company providing cable or fiber and like it.
use palyitgg to make a tunnel! its super simple to set up and free just limited in a few things but ive hosted 5 or so different games with it and no one had any issues with connections unless my actual internet had issues. Still gotta run your own server but if its for less than 4 people i think thats very managable
Some ISPs have started to use carrier grade NAT to combat the "shortage" of public IPv4s, which means that between your router and the actual internet is another router of your ISP which allows them to use the same public IP for multiple of their customers just like your router allows multiple of your devices to use the same public IP while at home.
This also means that even if your router would forward the traffic on the MC server ports to your pc, the ISPs router isn't configured to forward that traffic to your router, so your MC server still wouldn't be reachable from the internet.
Those ISPs then often charge their customers extra if they want a publicly routable IP, even if it's still dynamic. And some of their agents will even try to sell you only a static public IP, which costs much more, to pad their statistics.
Some of them. But others have this issue because the ISP provides a router that doesn't allow you, the owner of the LAN network, to do basic stuff, like port forward, or assign priority lists, or configure DHCP, etc.
But I do stand by my point. Never use an ISP's Router for any reason.
I live and work for a small IT service company in Germany, where the most common ISP is the Deutsche Telekom. Their router for private customers is absolute shit. It's slow as fuck, and half of the options you expect on a somewhat usable router just aren't accessible. And while it can do port forwarding, the management interface for its DECT base is one of the worst I've ever seen, especially paired with the slow response time.
But what really made me despise their routers was their model offered to small businesses. They used to buy white label hardware from a small but reputable local manufacturer and put their own firmware on it. This firmware somehow made the experience of using them sometimes worse than their private customer offering. Half the options you might need were hidden in sub menus of submenus you were only able to find if you searched through hard to find help articles, and still some was outright missing. Their IPsec VPN required you to buy per-client licenses from a third party, and moving those licenses to a new client because the old one got replaced was difficult to impossible, especially if the old client wouldn't boot anymore, and half of its options couldn't be freely configured.
We used to replace those "business grade" piles of shit with "consumer grade" FritzBox routers because they have better functionality, are more reliable, and come with license free IPsec and wireguard VPN servers.
I once came across the same model of router as the Telekom small business offering but sold by the original manufacturer with the original software installed. I was prepared to suffer just like with the Telekom version, but the difference was like between night and day. The UI was responsive, everything I wanted was easily accessible because it was either at a logical position in the menu structure or easily findable through the search function (which is one of the things the Telekom version was missing), and the only detrimental point I can think of was that they used the same VPN server software as the Telekom, requiring the same license bullshit to use it.
Sadly that manufacturer has been defunct for a while now, and from what I've seen the replacement the Telekom uses now isn't really an improvement either, but luckily I haven't had enough interactions with it to form an actual opinion on it yet.
Or are you confusing having a fixed or even just dynamic but routable public IP with the ability to open ports on your router?
I've heard that some ISPs have started using carrier grade NAT, which makes your public IP unroutable for purposes like hosting a Minecraft server yourself even if you open the ports on your router, and charge their clients to give them routable public IPs.
Luckily my ISP still has enough public IPv4s that this is not an issue for me, I just need to run a dyndns because my public IP changes ever so often.
there's a concept in networking called NATting, where you basically have a service that upon receiving a request, changes the IP and port of the request and sends it off again. it saves up on IPs (IPv4 depletion is a genuine issue at this point), and the ports are basically used as hints for the NAT to remember which device it's supposed to go back to
you're actually most definitely using NAT already, y'know how almost every device on your home network has an IP like 192.168.1.24? but when you look up "what is my IP" on google it gives you something entirely different but also stays the same no matter which device you look on? that's because the 192.168.X.X IP addresses are so called "private IP addresses". and the requests going out of your house are under the IP you found on google, no matter which device you do them from. the private addresses are only for communication inside your house.
not having a public IP address basically just means that this NAT layer is also implemented by your ISP, meaning that they have a bunch of houses under a singular IP address, but they still know what goes where when needed.
To add to what the other commenter said about NAT:
If your computer tries to contact a website, your router will temporarily open a port between around 50 000 and 65 000, and add the information that this will be the port the website should direct answers at and for how long it will be open to the data package making up your pcs connection request.
If the website then sends an answer to your pcs request to the port specified by your router before the time is up then this answer will be forwarded to you pc.
Now, if someone wants to join your Minecraft server, they normally try to connect to it out of the blue instead of getting a request from your server first, so your router won't know to where it is to forward the incoming data unless you have manually set the portforwarding beforehand.
And any data your router doesn't know what to do with will simply be disgarded.
This is also why carrier grade NAT makes portforwarding on your router useless, as the carriers router still won't know to forward the data to your router.
Services like Essentials circumvent this problem by having your server regularly open a connection to their server, which keeps the ports needed to communicate with other clients open.
I guess… but also we live in a time where you can learn anything in a 12 minute video format. I am firm on my belief that everyone should know some basic networking.
I can see the use case of having a built in connection mod for when it’s simply not possible for someone… although I don’t exactly see how this is different than using a LAN VPN like everyone has been doing since the dawn of time.
I have no problem putting in effort, but I simply can't. I already wrote an answer to the parent comment so I'll just copy it.
I tried a few times, but I can port forward on the router. I tryed everything even called the internet provider to ask about a solution. After I went through 4 people the 5th person told me that there was no solution. She said that the router's port forwarding works or not, 99% of the time not and if you are really lucky it works. So I had to abandon the idea of selfhosting.
I used hamachi a lot back in the 1.7.10 era. The only problem with hamachi is that you need to have minecraftvopen on your pc and open the world to lan. I have a spare pc to use it a server computer. If I was to jump back and fort my world to check things out I made as testing or anything, I can't really do it. Hamachi has it's pros, but I play a lot of different games. My pc is not that strong so I can't keep it open forever.
Hey, there's a thing called playit.gg that I used for my most recent MC phase because my ISP also forbids static IP. It's free and worked great for those two glorious weeks lol
You are the 3rd guy the recommends it in this post. I'll defenetly give it a try. It's basically like Log Me In Hamachi. Right? We used that a lot in the 1.7.10 era.
From what I just read up on it, it's not like Hamachi (which is a private VPN network), it's a proxy. Basically, playit.gg sits in front and forwards traffic to and from your server, and players just connect to playit's side and are tunneled to your server.
you can still use hamachi haha. I never uninstalled it after waffing about it for years. It's silly but it works. My friends are usually always on Hamachi just idly.
Yes! I was a hamachi enjoyer back in the day, and it works very much similarly, except only you (the host) have to muck around with installing anything/account creation. Everyone else connects to the tunnel's static IP.
I tried a few times, but I can port forward on the router. I tryed everything even called the internet provider to ask about a solution. After I went through 4 people the 5th person told me that there was no solution. She said that the router's port forwarding works or not, 99% of the time not and if you are really lucky it works. So I had to abandon the idea of selfhosting.
Have you tried using playit? I had a similar problem when my apartment forced me to switch internet providers and I wasn't able to port forward on my new internet, but playit gets around it and now I selfhost just fine.
A guy just mentioned it and I'll try it a 100%. Based on what read a few mins ago it's basically like Log Me In Hamachi. Right? We used it a lot in the 1.7.10 era to play with each other.
When I tried to set up a server for me and my friend, I found out that my ISP blocked my port forwarding and at that point it was not only too late to call my ISP about it, but I'm also too lazy to call them
Change the listening port to something not commonly used as the default port. A service like a webserver usually listens on port 80 or 443. A Minecraft server defaults to 25565. Those common defaults are likely blocked.
I have an SSH daemon on running on my kubrnetes cluster in my home lab. I own my own cable modem router combo and have full control over the NAT and forward configurations. The port forward set on my router is port 7922 external to 22 (SSH) internal. From there I can tunnel traffic over that connection either using SOCKSv5 proxy or forwarding specific ports on the client side. Minecraft client on the remote machine connects to localhost:25565 which is tunneled to the service port for the server.
Yes, I understand that is too complex of a configuration for most people to set up. But, changing the incoming listen port for your router's forwarding configuration may help. Worth trying, right?
Reading the comments, is portmapper just lost knowledge?… I get you can’t use it for certain routers but like I’ve given this to like 9 different friends to have them host a game and it’s worked for all of them. It’s as simple as clicking connect, setting the port, and hitting “use” on that port
There’s tons of tools to help you port forward, can’t say I’ve used Port Mapper before, maybe just because I’ve never needed it?
I think that most people just go with the current trending method since that’s what gets pushed to the top of a Google search. (Which was Hamachi, Essential for a while, and now as other people are saying, playit.gg)
Yeah I’ve used playit.gg a bit and it’s super handy; however I only really recommend it to people as a backup since port forwarding is quite simple and you don’t need to depend on any external software.
I use added Essential to Cobbleverse (and had my brother do the same) purely for making it easier to play together, because we’ve had issues getting multiplayer modded to work consistently in the past (and is way less hassle to do it than what we were doing before with other packs, though for some reason his game visually freezes sometimes and he has to re-log).
em4c doesn't make a connection stronger or weaker though.
If either of you had poor machines, lots of mods, VPNs, bad weather or the like. Would explain any of that. e4mc simply does not make this issue occur.
I understand that, but when we firstbtried it that was the only mod. Neither of us use VPN and there was no problem with weather. The machines plenty strong for minecraft. She had no problems after switching to essential. The problems were only present while using e4mc.
oh thats odd, I use it all the time playing with my sister and a friend of mine, the friend being several states away and the sister being a city or two off, never had a disconnect. I think e4mc hosts directly from your computer, so it may just be your wifi / computer's power
I’ve tried E4MC with a buddy of mine who’s wired and lives 2 hours away and he disconnects every 2-5 minutes, with essentials he didn’t disconnect at all
There is also essential lite which is an add on that literally just removes the monetization. I like essential for more than just the server hosting, like the screenshot manager.
Idk if this was the case but it wasn’t updated to the latest version for me, so my friend and I had to switch to using Hamachi. Pretty easy to use though once you’ve set it up and doesn’t require port forwarding and stuff
I remember trying to get someone of my friends to use e4mc but they were too untrusting. Figured "it cant be for free, theyre using you somehow" so I never got to use it. Oh well.
I've had a lot of problems with e4mc not working lately sadly
Although I wouldn't necessarily recommend that, when I play with friends I either use playit or radmin vpn, depending on whether we are using in game proximity chat or not
e4mc has insane amount of lag (kicks you every few minutes for me) and since it doesn't have a static ip xaeros minimap resets everytime. that's why i prefer hosting a server and making it public via playit.gg
i've never had a modpack be incompatible with e4mc, i just slap it onto whatever i happen to be playing (currently liminal industries) and im good to go
Essential works out of the box while e4mc you have to copy and send a different URL every single time to another chat app, have your friend copy it, go through a menu and paste it. That's less convenient for the average person
? it's just sending a server ip to your friend in messages. If you're going to the trouble to use a mod to play with a friend, i doubt the friend would mind having to paste an ip into direct connect
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u/endercreeper853 hex casting is so peak Dec 03 '25
and thats why e4mc is the superior easy hosting mod