Or, how to play without internet connection.

So I am having a LAN party in a few weekends and one of the things we are planning on playing is Minecraft. For those of you that have played it, you'll know they have added an 'end' to the game... you have to defeat a dragon.

But we want to play it locally and without connecting to the internet. Thus, here is a way to do it.

First things... each player will need to download the Minecraft executable. Easy enough. Once it has been downloaded, each player will need to log into Minecraft once with a valid account. This allows each player to download all the content needed.

Once that has finished, you can log out and kill the internet connection. Of course, you'll need to stay on a LAN if you want to play with others. But with the internet down, log back into the game and you will get an error stating there is no connection and a "Play Offline" option will appear. Simply click that and you are good to go.

To hurry this process up, I am going to already have the files necessary already downloaded and on my server for each person to grab. Once they do that, it is a simple matter of players changing their login name to whatever (disregarding the password) and then they can log in locally.

To get the lan started, one player just needs to create a world, go into their options in game and select "Make LAN". Then advertise their local IP, (192.168.1.x) and other players join multiplayer to that server.

Wha-lah.