Manycraft: Scaling minecraft to millions

Abstract

Minecraft is a popular game with more than 20 million paying users and many more playing the free version. However, in multiplayer mode, only a few thousand users can play together. Our measurements show that, even reducing the landscape, i.e., the map, to a uniform flat land, a server cannot host significantly more users. For a common use case, when players cannot modify the map, we have designed and implemented Manycraft, an architecture to scale the number of users. Minecraft protocol messages are of three kinds: control, entity and map. In our approach, Kiwano, a distributed infrastructure for scaling virtual worlds, takes care of the entity related messages while the others are processed by a Minecraft server assigned to the player.