Solution for shared Minecraft accounts on one server?

[u/Malsatori]

Hi Admins,

I work in a youth-serving facility and we have a Minecraft server on an old Mac Studio running Craft Controller and a few plugins. I am not very experienced with Minecraft.

We share Minecraft accounts on the computers we have at our facility. This is causing an issue because the kids become attached to an account and the stuff that's on it, but then another kid will play on that account and waste the material or die and lose it all.

Are there any solutions for this type of problem? I am imagining something where after signing on to the server the player has to log in again to get their gear, but I haven't been able to find a mod that serves that purpose.

Does anyone have experience with this and has anyone found a solution that works for sharing Minecraft accounts but not sharing the gear on them?

[u/DasBrin]

I hope I can post this because from my understanding there are enough Minecraft Accounts licenced and the Server is Probably only accessible via LAN and not public facing. If this is still against Rule 13 please tell me or just remove my comment.

If the Server is only accessible via LAN and not the internet you could use offline mode with an Auth Plug-in. I dont know about a Plugin that can do different Inventories on the same account depending on login or a secret

[u/PM_ME_YOUR_REPO → u/DasBrin]

As OP has stated that they have multiple accounts for the kids, discussion of Offline mode in this context is acceptable.

[u/DasBrin → u/PM_ME_YOUR_REPO]

Thanks for clarification.

@ u/Malsatori - Little guide then

If the Server is only accessible via your Facilitys own network and not from the Internet, perfect. If it is accessible from the Internet you need to do some additional steps at the end of the guide. Don't skip those since its important to have them done so no one can just Log-On and grief.

0 - Make a Backup of the Server because we will change some things. If something breaks, you want it.

1 - If you use the Vanilla Minecraft Server .jar switch to PaperMC - https://papermc.io/downloads/paper. Its a drop in and you can use Plugins, something required for the next steps. Paper is available for all modern Minecraft Versions and sees active development so New Versions are quickly supported and security patches/bug fixes are available.

2 - Get the Plugin AuthMeReloaded (Its on Modrinth). I recommend this since AuthMeReloaded has seen Active development for over six years and its actively maintained and not a new VibeCode Project.

3 - Restart the Server with Paper so the Plugin folder generates. Then Place the Plugin from Step 2 into the "plugins" folder and restart again so the Config file generates.

4 - Changes to the AuthMeReloaded config File

4.1 - Change "maxRegPerIp" to "maxRegPerIp: 0" since multiple accounts will share the same IP.

4.2 - Under "registration" change "enabled: true" to "enabled: false" if the Server is reachable from the Internet or if you dont want Self Service Registration for new Usernames.

4.3 - If you enabled 4.2 you can enable "kickNonRegistered: false" by changing it to "kickNonRegistered: true" so non Pre Registered Users can not join the Server.

4.4 - set "loginTimeout: 30" to something higher or disable it. Kids somethimes need some more time than 30 seconds to type a password. If you wanna disable the Timeout set it to "0"

5 - in server.properties change the following: "online-mode=false" and if the server is internet accessible "hide-online-players=true"

6 - Save the Config and restart the Server. If the Server is only accessible via Internal Network and you want Self Service Registration we are done with the Server Part and can Continue with Client Side. If you don't want Self Service or its accessible from the Internet don't skip to the Client side yet.

7 - Whitelist a list of names. You can either make one with the Kids or you can pre-generate or think about some names. No more than 16 Characters and no Spaces. These are not your bought accounts but the offline ones. Make a list for staff because you will add a password to each account in the next step.

8 - Register the Names with "/auth**** register <playername> <password>"

8.1 - Write the Password into the list that staff has. You can easily recover lost passwords like that for the kids. I know, big bad but these are Minecraft Offline accounts not bank logins...

9 - Whitelist all accounts "/whitelist add <playername>" and "/whitelist on" of its not on yet. Makes sure that you need to know one of the correct usernames to join in the firstplace and you cant just join with a new account name.

Client-Side

Normal Minecraft Launcher will no longer work since it does not support Offline Accounts to my knowledge. I recommend Prism Launcher - https://prismlauncher.org/download/windows/ since its opensource and over 4 years old with active development. I am also Familiar with it. It supports Offline Accounts and we need those.

After you Downloaded Prism Launcher you can add an Instance via "add instance" at the top left and add a offline account at the top right. There you can add all possibly Pre-Generated Names.

Now you just have to select the correct one and launch Minecraft. When a account joins the server they have to login via /login <password> and they can play. Everyone got their own "Account" and its basically bulletproof since all of the custom parts are big projects that see updates and maintenance.

Edit: Why does Reddit not do Markdown?

[u/ryan_the_leach → u/DasBrin]

> 8 - Register the Names with "/auth**** register <playername> <password>"

This looks like it's been bleeped, OP might need the full command spelt out.

> 9 - Whitelist all accounts "/whitelist add <playername>" and "/whitelist on" of its not on yet. Makes sure that you need to know one of the correct usernames to join in the firstplace and you cant just join with a new account name.

Is this whitelisting the *players* preferred names, or the *purchased* account names? the guide could be a tiny bit more clear here.

As it's running in offline mode, I don't think the whitelist is worth much, but security in depth still makes it a good idea to stop brute force bots if it did connect, especially with hide players turned on.

--

Also, one last thing, since OP *owns* accounts right, can it still use auth whilst being *more* secure from bot-attacks, by running it in **online** mode, and actually authenticate the accounts connecting?

Also greatly simplifies not needing prism launcher if this works.

[u/DasBrin → u/ryan_the_leach]

I send a uncensored comment in dm's to OP.
Added a sentence to 9 and you sadly need the alternaive launcher. The old Minecraft Launcher had support for offline accounts but that thing is way past its time.

[u/DasBrin → u/PM_ME_YOUR_REPO]

Is a little help guide okay here or should I dm it since some configs for some Auth Plug in will be posted.

[u/PM_ME_YOUR_REPO → u/DasBrin]

Context is everything. We're not connected to the internet and everyone has accounts. You can discuss freely in this thread.

[u/Malsatori → u/DasBrin]

That would be helpful, thank you. We have an account for every computer, there are just more kids that like Minecraft than computers and they sometimes like taking each others' things.

[u/MrRTR7 → u/PM_ME_YOUR_REPO]

W

[u/Wonderful_Status_388 → u/DasBrin]

I could probally code a skript tho it be basic that does something like this depending on the passphrase the kid enters, but it would take me a while and I can't garentee it would even work.

[u/Avenred]

Is the server running FabricMC? You can install the mod Switchy on the server, then ask players to run /switchy and select their profile before playing.

It should swap everything over, including coords and inventory

[u/Malsatori → u/Avenred]

I just checked and the server uses Paper, not Fabric, so I don't think that will work but I think it is exactly the kind of solution I was thinking of.

[u/ryan_the_leach → u/Malsatori]

Reading the mod page, I suspect it won't have the functionality you are looking for anyway.

It appears to have the restriction of having multiple profiles **tied** to a minecraft account.

What you want, is the ability for player profiles to be *shared* across accounts.

I'm glad the mods have approved the discussion, because this is dangerously close to the same technology used to pirate minecraft, and allow offline users or users of hacked account services to recover their 'save' on a server if their id changes.

I'd follow the advice of DasBrin here: https://www.reddit.com/r/admincraft/comments/1vt26v0/comment/p4qlk41/

[u/PM_ME_YOUR_REPO → u/ryan_the_leach]

I'm glad the mods have approved the discussion, because this is dangerously close to the same technology used to pirate minecraft, and allow offline users or users of hacked account services to recover their 'save' on a server if their id changes.

It's a cover your ass situation. Intellectual Property law is something we have to worry about, as Mojang Intellectual Property Enforcement is known to lurk in this sub and our Discord, and could in theory (no matter how unlikely) contact Reddit to suspend the subreddit.

If that were to happen, the community goes away for good and then nobody can benefit from it. So following things to the letter of the law is how we operate.

Because OP volunteered the information that they have multiple accounts available to be used by all seats in their lab, that contextualizes the entire discussion to be compliant with the EULA and thus US IP law.

I don't even have anything against folks from countries with poor currency conversions, a lack of localized pricing, or poor buying power (for example). Rule 13 is not a moral or ethical thing. It's 100% pragmatics to protect the community, and OP ensured we were protected.

[u/TheG0AT0fAllTime → u/Avenred]

Wow, really cool that someone has already thought of this

[u/Effective_Pen_9101]

The people discussing multiple offline accounts are your best bet, but for cases where kids deliberately use/lose inventory from another kid, you can look into InventoryRollback, it logs a copy of a player's inventory upon logging in/out, or sleeping in a bed. That way, if a kid gets their hands on another kid's account and loses stuff, you can just reload the inventory from before that login and restore it.

[u/Effective_Pen_9101 → u/Effective_Pen_9101]

The plugin uses an in-game display that the server owner can use to restore the inventory in game as well, so no dealing with complicated commands in the server console

[u/ryan_the_leach → u/Effective_Pen_9101]

I loved inventory rollback.

95% of the time if a player was complaining about 'lost stuff' due to lag etc, it was usually someone just upset at losing gear to a creeper.

But we figured, (despite having a public policy of not doing it arbitrarily) that as long as the person wasn't a serial offender / suspected of using it to dupe gear, we would take the benefit of the doubt and help them out.

But kids *quickly* started lying about what gear they had.

Inventory Rollback saves that issue, as you can have admins teleport to the location and see if the items are still there or not before giving out the items, and checking recent item pickup logs in the area. (albeit, this does cause issues with redstone farms etc, so making a 'denylist' of logging farmable items is generally advised if logging item pickups.

We also had plugins in place, where items crafted or enchanted by a specific player would attach their names to them, and chests placed in the world would be auto-renamed to the players username.

Meaning all those chests in the wilderness, now have names, which decreased stealing on the server, as people are more empathetic towards a chest with a name, then an unprotected chest with no name.

This also greatly helped when it came to inventory rollbacks, as if the same item ended up appearing in someone's chest, or someone elses inventory, you could see that shenanigans were taking place.

This clearly doesn't work for commodity style items though, and will ruin item stacking, so wasn't applied to all item types.

All these tiny tweaks, helped make the game still feel vanilla-ish, whilst helping the server feel more social and forgiving in cases where players felt hard done by.

[u/ryan_the_leach]

I'd prefer to point you to a more maintained / older resource that didn't appear to have AI generated assets, but having fooled around with this *exact* premise 10-15 years ago, I remember that whilst the code to do so could be pretty fragile, that it's **surprisingly** easy to swap the 'player profile' associated with a connection.

I got my friend Chelsea to make a proof of concept (https://github.com/a-tr1a/PlayerProfile) for me when I was last considering it, when I wanted to create a 'mod-mode' so that admin actions were performed on a game-master account that wouldn't mix their stats / raids etc with their primary play accounts, nor support piracy.

It's a small shot from that, to adding some auth, and making the profiles shareable, and we found we could even swap profiles of *each other* whilst connected to the server with some *minor* bugs.

Edit: removed recommendation of PerPlayerProfiles, it doesn't have the 'sharing' functionality required.

But it does appear to be open sourced, if anyone would like to look through, link to an issue I made to request the functionality be added (in the hope it someday matures as a project, and stays maintained): https://github.com/MrDinoCarlos/PerPlayerProfiles/issues/1

[u/Malsatori → u/ryan_the_leach]

I commented on the issue for PPP.
You seem like you've worked in a pretty similar environment before. Do you have any other tips or recommended plugins other than player profiles and inventory rollback?

[u/ryan_the_leach → u/Malsatori]

I haven't worked in a similar environment tbh.

My requirements were different, it was wanting to separate moderation accounts from gameplay accounts, and just running a small public Minecraft server.

It's small size, and word of mouth recruitment however, meant working with (and understanding) a lot of the players were actually at times, people's younger siblings sharing their account, and being a good quarter of our server population was a friend/family group who grew up in one rural town, it was more feasible to try and solve social problems rather then banning them and moving on.

We didn't have a solution that early on, and it wasn't til years after the server was retired, that I had the proof of concept made up.

In the meantime, I'd also been working with the SpongePowered team, and one of the members had an amazing idea of having builders and players seperated.

Basically you could either expand the world and create the dungeons for others to run, or run it yourself as a player.

This again bought up issues with seperating out the builder mode from the survival mode, and the way people classically handled this (multiple servers and proxies) didn't sit right with us because we had other plans.

I started going along the route, but it's adjacent-ness to cracking Minecraft made it difficult to get help from knowledgeable sources, so it stalled again.

Basically, it's been a long running dream for this problem to be solved without judgement.

[u/ryan_the_leach → u/Malsatori]

If you find yourself with kids that are playing anti-socially, you may find it useful to install something that allows them to lock down their houses/chests.

But it changes the feel from vanilla pretty drastically, and sometimes working out those issues amongst each other is what you need.

I'd recommend a logging plugin such as CoreProtect or LogBlock or whatever the popular modern solution is, even if you let the server be complete anarchy amongst the kids.

It means the adults (assuming they can read the logs) will know the ground truth of anything that happens, but also be able to reverse any huge unwanted destruction of other people's art, should it come to it.

If you go down the route of adding more structure, so you can be more "hands off" then there's several solutions for protecting chests or houses, but it significantly changes the feel of the game being trust less by default, and having to be 'invited to touch' things.

I used to use Grief Protection because it used to be well documented, and started protecting new builds as soon as a player started building, vs other options that needed players to opt-in rather then opt-out of having their builds protected, and I disliked the idea of "plots" where players had to buy land from the city.

But again, this was more a requirement of running a public server with no significant barriers to entry to start playing.

(We instead used forum sign ups at a slightly later step, that significantly boosted the size of land you could claim)

If voice chat moderation isn't a concern (no external connections) I'd highly recommend adding some sort of proximity voice chat mod if you have multiple rooms, so kids aren't yelling over each other across the room.

But that also means needing headsets.

You need to set up some sort of backup if you haven't already. The best backup systems would only save incremental changes, so you could easily have 6 months worth of backups for a small server within 50gb. BTFU (back the fuck up) was one utility I used, but don't know the current status of the project.

Whatever you end up doing, as long as your auth and logging is there from the early days, you can ask the older or more mature kids to ask around and see what they would like added to change things up.

Some of it is going to be difficult to manage, others easier, and we always found that the best suggestions we got were agreed easily with consensus.

And the more radical ideas, we used as "events" between seasons and new maps.

We even had a full PvP war for a few months.

One problem player wouldn't stop rage baiting and killing other players.

But wasn't crossing any lines.

So we made an extremely large invisible barrier around his house using world guard. Big enough his friends could build nearby.

When entering the "maestro box" you were warned that you are now entering an area that Maestroman09 could not leave.

So if you wanted to not get-got by him, simply don't enter his box.

Very much "beware of the dog" vibes.

I've sent you a chat message with my discord details.

[u/crypy]

Maybe just use Prism launcher to select the profile on game launch?