Introduction

If you haven’t heard of Minecraft,

“Minecraft is a sandbox video game created and designed by Swedish game designer Markus “Notch” Persson, and later fully developed and published by Mojang. The creative and building aspects of Minecraft allow players to build with a variety of different cubes in a 3D procedurally generated world. Other activities in the game include exploration, resource gathering, crafting, and combat.” -Wikipedia

What’s even better is that since it is mostly written in Java, It works cross-platform i.e it is one of the few games that works natively on Linux.

Also, it is architecture independent, ie it can run on Arm… almost. Although the game itself is portable across architectures, LWJGL isn’t. LWJGL provides a lightweight OpenGL extension for Java and that is what Minecraft uses for its graphics rendering since it’s not architecture independent, we need to compile it from source.

Let’s get (Mine)crafting

Step 1: Operating systems

You should be running Debian build 17.09

Make sure it is updated:

  sudo apt update
  sudo apt dist-upgrade

Step 2: Dependencies

Install the following dependencies:

  sudo apt install gradle openjdk-8-jdk libx11-dev xorg-dev

Soft link libjawt

  sudo ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-8-openjdk-arm64/lib/aarch64/libjawt.so /usr/lib/libjawt.so

Setup zram swap

Step 3: Compile LWJGL

Download source

  git clone https://github.com/LWJGL/lwjgl

Compile

  cd lwjgl
  ant generate-all
  ant compile_native

Copy Binaries

  mkdir -p ~/.minecraft/natives
  cp ~/lwjgl/libs/linux/liblwjgl.so ~/.minecraft/natives/
  cp ~/lwjgl/libs/linux/libopenal.so ~/.minecraft/natives/

Setup environment variable
```
  export _JAVA_OPTIONS='-Djava.library.path=/home/linaro/.minecraft/natives/'
```
to make this permanent add the above line at the end of ~/.bashrc file.

Step 4: Play Minecraft

Download Minecraft, jar from https://minecraft.net/en-us/download/
Make sure you have a Minecraft Login ID
Launch for the first time:
```
  java -jar <path to>/Minecraft.jar
```
Launch Minecraft consecutively:
```
  java -jar ~/.minecraft/launcher.jar
```
Note 1: if there are performance issues, turn every graphics settings to minimum and keep in mind the Snapdragon 410E is a mid-range mobile SoC with a mid-range GPU.