Minecraft Bedrock/iOS and SmartRG SR516ac - Connection Problems

Internet access discussion, including Fusion, IP Broadband, and Gigabit Fiber!
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by ritalin » Fri Jun 12, 2020 2:30 pm
Hi,

We just installed Sonic fiber and are very pleased with it, except for one problem. Our kids play a lot of Minecraft on iOS devices (iphone/ipad), which uses a slightly different version of Minecraft, called "Bedrock edition" (this is formerly known as "Minecraft PE"). On our new Wifi network (with a SmartRG SR516ac), the game simply doesn't work -- it will hanging opening any world, including ones running locally on the device. Because our old internet service is still operational for a few more days, we have been able to test that by switching back to the old wifi, the problem instantly goes away. Switch back to the SR516ac network, and the app breaks again.

To be perfectly clear, I am *not* trying to run a Minecraft server exposed to the outside world. I am trying to play Minecraft, single-player, on an iPad.

I have a suspicion that Minecraft Bedrock does something funny with the network, and the router is blocking it. Here's what I know so far:
  • Minecraft Bedrock is designed to function both as server and its own client, since you can play a world locally on your ipad but also anyone on the same wifi network can see and connect to it. The PC edition of Minecraft uses UDP multicast for this discovery feature (224.0.2.60:4445); I don't know if Bedrock uses the same protocol or not. In general, Minecraft uses UDP for most of its communication between clients.
  • If I start Minecraft on the iPad and try to open a world on the device, it will hang loading the world. However, the "NAT - Virtual Servers Setup" page on the SR516ac will register a new Virtual Server entry automatically. An example looks like this:
    Server Name: Minecraft
    External Port Start: 51014
    External Port End: 51014
    Protocol: UDP
    Internal Port Start: 51014
    Internal Port End: 51014
    Server IP Address: [address of the iPad via DHCP]
    WAN interface: eth4.1
    I'm not sure how or why this is happening automatically. A new entry like this is created every time a device tries to run Minecraft Bedrock, using a different port in this high range (trying it again just now, I got the same thing with port 55950.)
  • Minecraft Bedrock now wants to authenticate with XBox/Microsoft, and requires it for multiplayer connections. Logging out of the Microsoft account and then logging back in sometimes fails, even though logging into the account works fine from other devices. When it fails, I can remove the Virtual Servers entries from the SR516ac configuration as described above, and then retry -- this will make the login succeed.
  • Minecraft on the PC, which has a different implementation, works fine, both for local and remote play. (Unfortunately, the worlds aren't compatible, so the kids don't want to just stop using the ios devices, which they've spent a lot of time building worlds on.)
I've seen a couple of previous posts about this, but I haven't seen any solutions posted. My working theory is that Minecraft is using something (multicast?) that the SR516ac is interpreting as a control signal, which causes it to automatically modify its virtual server configuration. This somehow interferes with some stuff that Minecraft tries to do to magically appear on other devices in the same LAN, and as a result it hangs starting up.

Any ideas, leads, or wild theories appreciated.
by spindle79 » Tue Jul 07, 2020 8:22 pm
I'm having the same issues with Minecraft on iOS. Unfortunately, I don't have any solutions, but wanted to subscribe to the thread in case you come up with something. If I find a solution I'll be sure to post it here as well.
by ritalin » Tue Jul 14, 2020 5:22 pm
We ended up switching back to our old wifi router, which works fine :/
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