What could be better than building and exploring? Build and explore with friends and family! Let’s see how you can easily share your Minecraft experience on LAN and how to stand out from the crowd in the process.
Building and exploring together in Minecraft is a lot of fun. We’ve been here for a few hours playing together, overcoming the odds of survival, making huge creations, and otherwise enjoying a lot of fun playing together.
One of the nice things about co-op is not only that it spreads the load, but because Minecraft is such a flexible game, it allows each player to do what they are most interested in doing.
For example, when we all play Survival Minecraft together, each of us has a specialty or interest. Some may enjoy roaming around in search of new resources and biomes. Some people like to build a base and farm (we have the happiest pigs in the Minecraft universe). Still others are fond of mining and are left alone with their devices, completely excavating every last inch of the world.
If you’re lucky enough to have friends and family in a Minecraft game, then it’s foolish not to link your games together and share the experience. One Minecraft-loving family even turned Minecraft together into a fun YouTube channel. YouTube user Chrisandthemike has hundreds of videos detailing his family playing survival mode games, exploring game mods, and otherwise having a great time sharing the Minecraft experience.
In addition to multiplayer, we’ll also look at how to update a player’s skin so everyone in the game isn’t identical.
Opening your game
If your friend is on your local network, sharing them with Minecraft is very easy. Let’s say you downloaded the «Mountain Sky Village» map from the previous section and really wanted your roommate, spouse, child, or other Minecraft buddy to take a look at it.
The very first consideration, first of all, is that the other party is also using the same version of Minecraft. If you’re showing map version 1.6.4, they must use profile 1.6.4. If your client and your friends’ clients don’t match, they won’t be able to connect.
With this important detail in mind, you need to activate the LAN functionality by pressing «ESC» to open the in-game menu and then pressing the «Open in LAN» button.
In the Open to LAN menu, you have some simple options to choose from.
You can switch the game mode between Creative, Survival and Adventure, as well as turn cheats on and off. In this case, cheats mean if the other player has access to console level commands like /tp to teleport or /weather to toggle the weather state on the map.
Once you’ve made your choice, click «Start LAN World» to open the game to other players on your local network.
Connecting to an open game
On the other hand, your friend must launch Minecraft and select «Multiplayer» from the main menu.
Minecraft will automatically scan your local network for available games and list them. If this scanning system fails, you can manually enter the IP address and port number of the remote computer where Minecraft is installed.
Have your friend select a world and click «Join Server» to sneak into your world and find you for a little exploration and fun.
There we, as seen from another computer in the hallway, entered our map. One thing we haven’t talked about yet is skins. See us in the image above? This is the default skin for Minecraft. The skin is known simply as «Steve», the standard default hero that the player uses as their avatar.
When you play by yourself in first person, it doesn’t matter what you look like because you can’t see yourself. However, when you’re playing with other people, it’s nice to customize the look. Before discussing access to remote multiplayer servers, let’s see how to get a new skin so we’re not one of the thousands roaming around Steve.
Changing your skin
Video game appearance customization is a fun way to personalize your game and stand out in multiplayer.
In Minecraft, it’s easy to customize the look by changing the player’s skin to a different one. Skins are simply image files that are overlaid on the player model in the game. For example, the default cover art for «Steve» when opened in an image editor looks like this:
Giving the player model a whole new look is as easy as replacing the «Steve» skin with an alternate skin. Don’t worry, you don’t have to manually edit your skin to give yourself a new look (although if you have the talent and the time, feel free to do so). Just like there are tons of player-made Minecraft maps, there are also tons of player-made skins.
