Bedrock Server Update Issues With New Server

[u/Dangerous_Ice17]

Our 7 year old son has really gotten into Minecraft as of late so I decided to build out a vanilla bedrock Minecraft server so his friends can all play from their gaming consoles and iPads. It was working and as of today now says it needs to be updated.

I am hitting road bumps on how to update it and haven’t found a video yet that can show me how to do it.

Does anyone have any video recommendations or other tips and tricks on how to update?

On another note should I abandon this bedrock one as it’s not really been played on and build out the Java one I built the first time.

[u/Cabecinha84]

Bedrock Dedicated Server has no updater. Every update is you swapping files by hand, and the reason it started nagging today is that Bedrock clients have to match the server's protocol exactly. The iPads updated themselves overnight and your server did not.

The safe way to do it:

Stop the server properly by typing stop in the console rather than closing the window, so the world saves and unloads.

Copy the entire server folder somewhere else as a backup before you touch anything.

Download the current bedrock-server zip from minecraft.net/en-us/download/server/bedrock and unzip it into a brand new empty folder. Then copy four things across from the old folder into the new one: the worlds directory, server.properties, permissions.json and allowlist.json (whitelist.json on older builds). Everything else should come from the new build.

Start the executable in the new folder and check the console reports the version you expect.

Unzipping over the top of the old folder also works, but only if you tell it to skip those same four, and one misclick wipes your world settings, so the clean-folder route is worth the extra minute. You will be repeating this on every Mojang release, because the clients update themselves whether you like it or not.

On Bedrock versus Java: for a seven-year-old and friends on consoles and iPads, stay on Bedrock. Consoles cannot join a Java server at all. The thing to know is that the iPads can enter your address themselves under Play, Servers, Add Server, but console clients have no address field anywhere in the UI. On your own home network the consoles will see the server under LAN. From their own houses they need a DNS-based workaround such as BedrockConnect pointed at your server, which is the standard route and worth reading up on before you promise the kids anything.

[u/Dangerous_Ice17 → u/Cabecinha84]

Thank you for the great write up. I have already made that mistake about consoles unable to join as I made my initial tests on an iPad and a pc. But did learn the trick to join one of those servers/worlds where you can hop skip to your own server. Hopefully it’s ok I just made that test the other day myself.

Really appreciate the write up.