How To Set Up a Hexxit (Minecraft Mod Pack) Server on Ubuntu 14.04

Introduction

Hexxit is a Minecraft modpack, i.e. a collection of Minecraft mods. While the original game has its roots in freeform exploration and building, Hexxit puts an emphasis on adventure and battle. The 54 mods included with Hexxit add a large variety of new monsters to fight (including bosses), new structures to explore, and lots of rare and useful loot!

Prerequisites

To follow this tutorial, you will need:

• One 1 GB Ubuntu 14.04 Droplet at minimum, but 2 GB or more is strongly recommended.
• A sudo non-root user.

Because of the quantity of additional content in the pack, Hexxit can be rather resource intensive — especially if you intend to have a lot of other players on your server. The more memory you can dedicate to running Hexxit, the smoother it will be for everyone playing.

Step 1 — Installing the Necessary Packages

In this step, we will install Hexxit’s dependencies.

First, update the package list.

sudo apt-get update

Next, install Java, screen (a window manager which will allow you continue running Hexxit even when you’re not connected to your server), and unzip (a tool to decompress ZIP archives).

sudo apt-get install -y default-jdk screen unzip

Step 2 — Installing Hexxit

In this step, we will download and install Hexxit.

Because Hexxit has a significant number of files, we can avoid cluttering your home directory by creating a new directory for Hexxit.

mkdir ~/hexxit

Change into the ~/hexxit directory.

cd ~/hexxit

Next, download Hexxit. At the time of writing, the most recent version is v1.0.10, but you can double check the most recent version via the Hexxit homepage. Copy the Server Download link for use in the command below.

wget http://mirror.technicpack.net/Technic/servers/hexxit/Hexxit_Server_v1.0.10.zip

Unzip the Hexxit files.

unzip Hexxit_Server_v1.0.10.zip

You can now remove the original .zip file.

rm Hexxit_Server_v1.0.10.zip

Step 3 — Running Hexxit

In this step, we will launch Hexxit in a screen session, so it will continue running after you disconnect from the server.

First, create a new screen session. You can specify the name of the screen session, which will make it easy to identify and reconnect to it in the future. Here, we’ve called it hexxit, but you can call it whatever you like.

screen -S hexxit

Next, we’ll start Hexxit. In this next command, specify the amount of memory you want Java to use with the -Xmx and -Xms flags. -Xmx is the maximum amount of memory it will use; -Xms is the initial amount of memory it will start with. Here, we use 1 GB for both as an example, but you should customize this based on the size of your Droplet. Note that these values must be multiples of 1024, like 1024M, 2048M, etc.

java -Xmx1024M -Xms1024M -jar Hexxit.jar nogui

You’ll see a lot of output. After a moment, you’ll see a line that looks like this.

2015-05-07 13:23:59 [INFO] [Minecraft-Server] Done (1.767s)! For help, type "help" or "?"

This means your Hexxit server is up and running! You can now press CTRL+A D to detach from your screen session, and then disconnect from your server. Hexxit will continue running.

If you want to connect to your screen session again to allow you to see Hexxit’s output and enter mod commands, use the following with the screen name you chose.

screen -rd hexxit

You can detach again as before, by pressing CTRL+A D.

Conclusion

You now have a Hexxit server running and can connect to it using your server’s IP address. Happy exploring!