Server is also in Java? Requires GPU as well? Open source servers also exist? What is griefing?
No idea about any of this never played Minecraft.
Edit: Typos and open source
No federation. For either version of minecraft you have an account you register with microsoft, which among other things provides you with a UUID, allowing users to be identified and authenticated across different servers. The various UUID authentication utilities are not necessary to set up a server, they are just offered for security.
Minecraft servers store world data, NPC states, and player inventories. All server data is unique to that server (e.g players cannot take an inventory from one game server and transfer it to another, or access worlds from different servers)
There are two versions of Minecraft: Java (written in java, only available on PC) and Bedrock (available on all platforms, and also allow cross play between platforms). PC players generally prefer Java as it was the first version and supports modding. The server side of minecraft Java is also written in java. Not sure what the GPU part is referencing.
Minetest in particular is open source, by the fact that the underlying game engine can be modified to create new functionality not available in the base game. In regular Minecraft there is restriction on what exactly a Minecraft server can do and what client-side modifications can be made.
Griefing is basically trolling in game: destroying other player's buildings, repeatedly killing them in game, etc. Some server moderators will allow this, some don't.
Hope this helps :)
Bedrock its just "Minecraft" and includes all the other platforms
Usually, Minecraft is sped up by using more clever algorithms(OptiFine), not switching to different languages.
For how Minecraft has performed, in every sense (including on hand-me-down laptops of 6-year olds), java has served well. Of course, using C or C++ might have sped it up by a factor of x2-x5, but it has not been a pain point, to my knowledge.
One of the places where I believe the Minecraft code falls down hard - it allocates and deallocates tens (maybe hundreds) of MB per second. Basically the kind of "first draft you'd write before optimising things" code.
Things like OptiFine help out by (IIRC) making certain things mutable and cutting down the alloc/reallocs.
> Performancewise java actually isn't bad.
Yeah, I should probably clarify that I don't think Java itself is bad but the way Minecraft uses Java and how Microsoft have put basically zero effort into optimising things (because their cash cow - Bedrock - is written in C++) since they've owned it.
When mods like OptiFine and Sodium that are monkey-patching the bytecode can improve things greatly, it's a strong sign the base is not optimised.
By GPU I meant if server also requires some GPU but seems like from your description that it doesn't.
Thank you again for the detailed answer.