Playing Minecraft Homestead With The Kid

Posted on Monday 10th of August 2026 at 22:01

This has been ⛏crafted⛏ as part of Blaugu-OH SHIT CREEPER RUUUU💥.

A while back we got a computer chair, a keyboard and a mouse for our kid. He's played Minecraft on PS4, then on (my) laptop, exploring different mods, for quite a long time. We thought we'd treat him on his birthday to his own laptop, monitor, and desk. We had all the potentially expensive bits already - older devices and equipment we had moved on from. The only things he needed were the chair, and a keyboard & mouse.

Before his birthday, I cleared out part of the room next to my desk and set up my old desk and the laptop. Running Linux, obviously - gotta start 'em early. Although he knew that you could do split screen minecraft on PS4 to play with others he hadn't realised you could play it together on different screens on PC, so I also pulled together another old laptop, stuck debian on it and set up a minecraft server. At this point I had a great idea to really immerse him in his PC gaming journey - voice chat! I am using a Raspberry Pi 1 for wireguard, but it spends a lot of time idle, so I stuck mumble on that, too. I wanted a self-hosted, non-internet-connected solution, and Mumble worked amazingly years ago so why not give it a whirl? I'm happy to report that it still works amazingly today, even on the old rpi1!

On his birthday, after solving a bunch of riddles as part of a treasure hunt (now a birthday tradition!) he came to find his very own desk with his very own computer, with his very own copy of minecraft waiting for him.

He hadn't played much Survival before, but he was kinda bored with the default experience in creative mode, so I hadn't just spun up a standard vanilla minecraft server, oh no. I instead opted to run a Homestead server, a cozy survival experience that feels just kinda nice to play. I had played a little of it when it first released and really enjoyed it - It's pretty great, if you like the survival side of Minecraft, check it out, it'll make the game feel almost new again, assuming you're a more casual player. Also, and I can't really run them because both my and my kids laptop aren't great, but it comes with built in shaders which really make the game shine. Literally. Shiny reflective water, atmospheric effects, sunbeams. Looks great, here's a screenshot from our world, with more below. Click or tap them for a higher res version.

Sitting amongst bamboo, jungle trees, grass and fence posts from an ancient footpath, with a large stone brick structure in the shape of a villager holding aloft a torch, sits a real good boy. The evening sun shines down from blue skies, sunbeams illuminating the ground as the wolf sits in the shadow of a tree

So, back to his birthday. I had already loaded up and connected Mumble on his laptop, grabbing his headphones from the ps4. He sat down, launched Prism, booted up Homestead and I got him to join the locally hosted server I had set up. After telling him to wait a moment, I then joined too, much to his delight. Then, I spoke into my mic. He had no idea voice chat was a thing, to hear my voice coming through his headphones blew his mind :D Granted we're sat next to each other so there's no need. But it's much more fun this way (if you can ignore hearing each other speak twice - once through the physical world and again after the voice is digitised and transmitted through the network and out of the headphones)

So yeah! We've been having a blast on minecraft! We haven't played too much since setting it up - maybe like, 7 or 8 hours total, but before we jumped in to our second game I set up OBS and have been recording each gaming session we've played together. I'm not uploading these anywhere, they're just for me to keep. In the future, I will watch them back and reminisce about our adventures, exploring and learning about Homestead and minecraft together.

All I need to do now is get my wife to join in! Though she may need to sit in another room, there's no space left in here for a third desk.

An underground farm on the left, only four blocks deep but as wide as you like. My preferred farm layout. Two columns, four rows per unique crop. It's only sugarcane, watermelon, pumpkin, wheat, then others too far in the distance to easily recognise. In front of the crops in the ground are barrels, with a ladder on the right to get back to the surface

A small, narrow, underground room with a wall of barrels, each with a sign indicating contents, such as 'wood', 'tools', 'quest stuff', 'music discs' and more.

back on the surface, the sun illuminates the path heading off into the distance and deeper into the bamboo jungle.

Between the trees and bamboo, a second structure identical to the first is visible behind bright sunbeams. Bamboo is everywhere.

Through weeds reaching down into the water of a lake you can see more clearly the second structure, made home by kid. He has extended it outside with some mossy cobblestone and planks. The bamboo and jungle trees are reflected in the clear water of the lake