Hi, I'm wondering if anyone's done the legwork to compare a bunch of the "LAN-Style World Hosting" mods that exist. There's quite a lot of them, and it's hard to choose which to use. Some friends and I are currently playing a smallish 1.20.1 Forge modpack we put together- we started using Essential because it was familiar, but started having weird bugs and disconnects which we learned was likely due to Essential (we've had problems hosting other modpacks through it before so wasn't a surprise) and we don't really like Essential anyway for other reasons (won't get into it here)
So we switched to using e4mc. It works quite well, though we've just started having some problems with it too. It seems sometimes all the relays will get overloaded and we just can't connect. At least through searching that's what we assume is happening since the error messages are wholely unhelpful and nothing else seems to fix it. Another issue is that two players are in Canada, and another two are in Brazil (including the host), and all of e4mc's relays seem to be either in the US or EU. I'm not sure if you remain connected to the relay once ingame, but the connection speed and ping are definitely worse than Essential. It's also annoying needing to send a new IP each time the server starts.
So… Does anyone have experience with other hosting mods? I'm curious what they're like in comparison, in terms of ping, ease of use, and reliability. I know it's unlikely, but has anyone compared a bunch of these, seen how well they work? I know e4mc is the gold-standard but it just isn't reliable right now, so others I've looked into are:
Luna. I had no idea Luna Pixel Studios had a proprietary world-sharing mod until a few minutes ago. I know they don't have a good track record for modpacks, but how is the world sharing from Luna? I see they reccommend e4mc as an alternative when not using their modpacks, but does Luna work standalone too? I've heard it stops you from playing if you have Essential or e4mc which feels kind of scummy but putting that aside I want to know how well it functions.
I've also heard some good things about World Host, and I think we tried LAN World Plug and Play once in the past? There's also WAN Party, EasyLAN, and OpenToPublic. Most of these seem to work in similar ways admittedly, so I wonder how much of a difference there would be… Any insight?
by IdrisQe