HACKER Q&A
📣 warner25

How do I help my kid get started with Minecraft?


I have a nine year-old daughter, and I'm trying to figure out how to get her started with Minecraft. I mean she's interested, but she needs help installing the software, creating an account, connecting to a server, etc. Personally, I'm puzzled by the sprawling Minecraft ecosystem. There appear to be many different editions. Are they all interoperable? Are some notably better? Do they all have a cost? Should I expect a one-time cost like the old shrink-wrapped, boxed PC games that I bought as a kid, or is it a subscription like everything else these days?

Last year her school work involved doing things on a computer for the first time, so I'm guiding her through the earliest stages of computer literacy. I declined the Chromebook offered by her school and instead set her up with my old laptop running Fedora. At some point I introduced her to simple classics like SuperTux, tetris, and a lunar lander game that are available from Flathub. Just searching Flathub for Minecraft, I see half a dozen different flatpaks(?). Then it looks like I can download a .tar.gz from minecraft.net and maybe build something from source(?). Help me out.

  👤 Kon-Peki Accepted Answer ✓
Oh dear. It started out as a Java game and the biggest ecosystem remains around the Java edition. But the writing is on the wall: the future of Minecraft is Bedrock edition. This is what runs on Android and iOS. This is what runs on Windows, Xbox, etc.

If you want to get her into Minecraft, I recommend avoiding the Java community altogether and focusing on Bedrock. The easiest way is to buy an iPad and then buy Minecraft from the App Store, because the Apple rules dictate that you must be able to play it without a Microsoft account. To connect to a server, create a free Microsoft account (you probably already have one, somewhere), and the Apple version will connect to all the servers and online stuff.

For your Fedora laptop, you can supposedly get the Android version to run. It's on the list of things to do with our Ubuntu game machine.

But seriously: the Java edition "community" doesn't want a nine-year old girl in it, and they also would rather quit than play Bedrock. So win-win.

👤 akerl_
Step 1, go back and get that chromebook. When your daughter is first learning to use a computer isn't the time to have her living a parallel separate experience to all her classmates, and to what her teachers can support.

Step 2, https://www.minecraft.net/en-us . Don't think of this as "how do I get my daughter the computer experience I remember from old, shrink-wrapped boxed PC games", get her access to Minecraft as if you're a non-techy, let her figure her own way out.

Once she has a basis for her tech skills, and is curious about technology, that's the time to start showing her things under the hood.

👤 smoldesu
> Just searching Flathub for Minecraft, I see half a dozen different flatpaks(?)

This is the one you want: https://flathub.org/apps/com.mojang.Minecraft

👤 tshirttime
I'm trying to figure out how to get her started with Minecraft

Said no one ever? Would be like asking how to get started on crack.

👤 tuga
You need to help your daughter on physical activities, not virtual bs games