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Family Game Server Guides

Guides for the adult who ends up running the family game server, whether that is on a machine in the spare room or hosted here.

Every household that plays together hits the same wall. One person hosts, so nobody else can play when that person is out or the laptop is shut, and the world lives on one machine that nobody backs up. Fixing that part is well covered elsewhere on the internet. What is not well covered is the second half: once the server is always on, it is always on at bedtime too, and it is reachable by anybody who learns the address.

These guides cover both halves, and they are written to be useful whether or not you host with us.

The ElfHosted parent panel, showing who is playing right now, playtime per child today, and a bedtime schedule with separate school-night and weekend hours

The panel our Minecraft and Terraria servers ship with. The players are made up; the panel is not.

Start here

Guide What it answers
Minecraft parental controls What Minecraft gives you natively, what it does not, and how people fill the gap
How to set a bedtime on a Minecraft server Closing the world on a schedule, without kicking somebody mid build
Playing together on Xbox, iPad, Switch and PC Why the two editions cannot normally see each other, and what changes that
How to set up a Minecraft server for kids A start to finish walkthrough for a parent who has not run one before

What we host

Two game servers, both built around the same idea: the person who pays for it can see who is playing and close it when they need to.

  • Minecraft, at $9/mo. Console, phone, tablet and computer players in one world, a panel showing who is playing and for how long, and a bedtime that closes the world on its own.
  • Terraria, at $9/mo. The same panel and the same bedtime, for the PC crowd.

See Minecraft for Families See Terraria for Families

Is hosting worth it?

Not always, and it is worth being honest about when it is not.

Running it at home is fine if one person plays most of the time, everybody is on the same network, and nobody minds that the world is only available when that machine is switched on. A spare laptop and twenty minutes will get you there for nothing.

Hosting starts to earn its money when the players are in different houses, when you are tired of being the reason nobody can play, when you would rather not forward a port from the internet to a machine on your home network, or when a world somebody has spent months on lives on a drive with no backup.

The guides above assume nothing either way. Where a step is genuinely easier because somebody else runs the server, we say so and then explain how to do it yourself anyway.