For new Minecraft players or parents who might be feeling a little overwhelmed already, let us recommend checking out The Parents’ Guide to Minecraft for a great introduction to the game and what it is all about and, for a more in-depth look, the multi-part Geek School series covering beginner and advanced Minecraft play. Even though 99% of my family’s Minecraft play is done in-house on our LAN, for example, everyone in my family has their own account.įor readers ready to dig right in, let’s take a look at how to get multiple clients running on the LAN with very little effort.

Not only will your child have the ability to play on the thousands of awesome Minecraft servers out there and get custom skins for their player character, you’ll also be supporting the development of the game. But it’s a decent way for a family to cheaply allow siblings or friends to quickly put together a Minecraft LAN party without dropping hundreds of dollars on premium licenses.Īll that said, if you do find that your family is getting serious use out of Minecraft and the “clone” client you made for the younger kids is popular, we’d encourage you to buy a full account. It does, however, have one shortcoming: every player will have the identical default “Steve” skin when viewed by the other players. The tweak won’t allow you all to play online, and it won’t give the other users legitimate access to the Minecraft authentication or skin servers. As long as there is one user with a premium account you can effectively “clone” that user and tweak the secondary users’ profiles to allow additional players to join local games. If, however, your goal is to just have all your kids (or friends) playing together on local area network (LAN) at your house, you do not need multiple paid premium accounts to do so. Minecraft servers authenticate each login and each user needs to have a unique and valid Minecraft ID. If you want your children to be able to play online so they can access various Minecraft communities and servers, and they want to play online at the same time, then they will each need a separate premium Minecraft account (which currently retails for $27).

RELATED: Exploring Minecraft Multiplayer Servers

It’s a point of confusion among many parents purchasing Minecraft for their kids: does every child need a separate Minecraft account? The answer depends entirely on what you want your kids to do with Minecraft and what their goals are. You won’t be able to play online, but with a few tweaks to the configuration files, you should all be able to play over the network together at home with no extra accounts necessary. So you want to play Minecraft with your family, but you only have one account.

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