Is it possible to have a dummy player in SMP?

Question

Me and my friends are playing on a multiplayer server. We have a nether wart farm in the Nether, but it only grows if there is a player in the Nether. We are mainly building a castle so we are not in the Nether very much.

We would like to have some kind of dummy player in the Nether that just does nothing but standing there. Is this possible (without a computer running multiple instances of the Minecraft client, we can't handle that)?

Answer 1

Yes it is. First, you'll need a Bukkit server. If you dont have one already, the setup is well documented and relativally straight forward. I'll also link you to their website. http://bukkit.org/

Then, you'll need to install this plugin: http://dev.bukkit.org/server-mods/citizens/

I won't be able to help you as well as their own wiki in game, so I suggest you stick to that, but as far as I know, that is the best way to spawn NPC's.

Hopefully this helps. Have fun.

Answer 2

You can install the Buildcraft mod (client and server) and then the Additional Pipes add-on. The second one contains a block called ChunkLoader, the recipe for it is just four iron, shapeless.

You can place it in any part of the world, and the chunk it's located in and all four neighboring to it will be loaded all the time, even when there is no one playing on the server. Make sure that the farm is fully covered by pressing F9 and observing blue squares hanging in the air - they indicate chunks, which are forced to load.

However, be careful, don't use too much of them, these limitations there are for a reason.

P.S. ChunkLoader recipe may work without Buildcraft, but I don't know for sure. Try without it first (but you do need to install ModLoader, ModLoaderMP and MCForge, which are mentioned in the Buildcraft installation guides).

P.P.S. Alternatively, you could use the ForeverALoad, a mod for the Bukkit.

Answer 3

The environment only gets simulated around players, otherwise it's stored to disk. You'll have to have a player in the area you want simulated. That means having a client connected and standing in the area you want.

The simplest way to achieve this is just to leave your character standing there when you're taking a break from playing. For example, leave them standing there while after you go to sleep. Things should be nice a grown up when you wake up.

Answer 4

We have had luck with this, but it requires modifying your server config and turning off authentication (where your server calls minecraft servers to see if the login is legit).

You can start up a second instance of minecraft, cancel the login screen and play multiplayer. You will connect as "Player" and you can use that 'dummy' account to sit in your grinder or netherwart farm.

There are additional things you can do with this (a friend wrote a perl proxy to modify the "player" string to change the playername to your computer's hostname).

As of note, if you were using whitelisting, it just went out the window. This worked for us because we had our server on a VPN and it was not publicly accessible.

You may have better luck just idling in the nether.