My friends and I love to play Minecraft occasionally, but it often happens to be in the middle of nowhere, with no internet. The setup can be more interesting than the actual playing.
We typically begin by sharing the latest Minecraft binaries and setting up an ad-hoc wifi network. Then, someone boots servers and we're all set... NOT!
Minecraft generally performs DRM and verification with the Minecraft website.all about video games For the server, this could be turned off by setting the online-mode to false in server.properties, but with the client, you're out of luck.
In the beginning the solution was sending a smartphone user out to locate an open WiFi network. It was possible to fake the login server before the launcher. Recently I did however discover a way to play offline on the client.
Spoiler alert: Minecraft is The Matrix.
That's it. It was imperative to say it. Let's hack Minecraft Matrix.
You will be kicking each other in the event that you click "Play Offline" after a failed login.
Now, start your terminal, and switch the directory to the bin folder of your Minecraft directory3.
Now, I'm unable to read and write Matrix like Mouse4 However, the GNU toolchain can. We'll substitute some instances of "Player" by any string of equal length.
The first step is to extract the Jar. It turns out that the jar works well as directories and is more user-friendly.
Now we need to figure out which files need to be modified. Beware of Deja vu!
Some experimentation shows that MinecraftApplet.class is the one that matters. Now you need to use sed to replace "Player" with a different name that is of the same length5.
Mac users will require GNU sed installed, since BSD sed corrupts the binary file beyond repair. I used brew install with gnu-sed however Macports and Fink might also work.
