Setup a Modded Minecraft Server on TrueNAS Scale with CurseForge

If you do NOT have a TrueNAS SMB share setup and connected to your local computer VIA the file explorer, please watch our video here first. Specifically from the timestamps 00:00 - 06:21 (you do not need to follow the rest of setting up Jellyfin.

After completing the SMB share continue on with the following:

Warning Box Example

Now open File Explorer on your machine (windows shortcut ⊞ + E and create a folder on your SMB Share called “Minecraft”

Installing Modded Minecraft With CurseForge Overview

Due to CurseForge being one of the oldest and most popular Minecraft modded methods, this is the one we are going to use in this video. This method is virtually the same for all other modded platforms as shown at the beginning of this article.

You will need to download the CurseForge app here
The mods for your forge server can be found here
We are going to use this pack found here

Setting up Modded Minecraft on TrueNAS

Pick your Mod Pack from CurseForge

The first thing we need to do is pick what modpack we are going to install, we are going to use this one here.

We have four main things we need to pay attention to when picking our modded Minecraft pack:

Select the files tab to see the files for the modpack.
The pack files (this is what we will download to add to the server)
What version of Minecraft this pack supports.
What Mod Loader we will need to select in TrueNAS.

Now select your pack (option 2 as shown above). You will be brought to virtually the same screen as shown below but we have an additional files tab, this is where we get the SERVER side files:

Under this tab, go ahead and download the server side files:

Setup a Minecraft Server on TrueNAS

Go ahead and log into your TrueNAS machine

Select your apps Tab on the far left and then discover apps on the top right. Search for “Minecraft” and select the Minecraft Server (Java) version.

Either click install/install another instance if you already have a version of Minecraft running:

Modded Minecraft TrueNAS Server Settings

Now this is the super important step! We need to ensure that all our settings are correct or our modded Minecraft server will not boot.

Here are the steps (all steps assume you are typing the settings in, I am giving you the title of the box at which you need to fill in):

Application name
timezone
EULA (check the box)
Image Selector (if you install an older modpack that requires an older java version, you may need to google what version of java you need to set this to).
Type (this information is found on your modpacks page, in our case the mod loader is NeoForge).
Version (this is the version of Minecraft required by the modpack, i.e. 1.21.1).
RCON Password (set a password for RCON).

Additional Environment Variables (this page will differ on your modpack potentially but for CurseForge we will need to use two variables, “CF_PAGE_URL” AND “CF_API_KEY”. The page URL will be for your modpack, and the API key will come from your CurseForge profile found here)
We are going to add two more variables called “INIT_MEMORY” and “MAX_MEMORY” where in our case of this modpack are going to be set to 16 gigabytes.

Set Host IP’s to the default under the Network Configuration (you will need to change the ports if you already have other Minecraft servers running on your TrueNAS machine):

Under Storage Configuration, type (set to Host Path), enable ACL, and set your Host Path to a folder on your SMB share called Minecraft, which you created in an earlier step).
ACL Options (check Force Flag)
CPU (set CPU to however many cores you want, we recommend 4 cores for the mod pack used in this example).
Memory (set the memory to between 12 - 16 gigabytes but it must match whatever you set for the variables in step 9).
Click Save/update.

If your server starts to deploy, you can go ahead and stop it on the far right

Now open the SMB share with the location of your Minecraft Server folder and delete any files in there

Now go to your downloads folder and grab the server files you downloaded from CurseForge, right click on them, and extract all

Now open that unzipped folder, see the highlighted items, these are the items we are going to copy into the Minecraft folder on our TrueNAS SMB Share

Now go back over to your TrueNAS dashboard and boot your Minecraft server with the files above inside that folder.

After it starts we can go over to the Workloads section and View Logs well its booting up to ensure we have no issues, if we do, we can take those error codes and ask something like ChatGPT what the issue is to help us get it running.

Adding the Modpack to CurseForge

Now that we have handled the server side of the modded Minecraft server we need to handle our client side. Open the CurseForge app and select Minecraft:

Search for the same modpack you want to use, and click install, let it install. After it is installed you will see it under the My Modpacks Tab seen in the image below:

Hover over it, it will say play, select that and it will ask you to login to your Minecraft account if you have not done so before:

After you login, at the top of the launcher you should see your modded Minecraft version and a play button:

Wait for Minecraft to boot, go to your multiplayer tab, and then put in the IP and port number of your server and connect to your new Modded Minecraft server on TrueNAS!

There you have it, your very own Modded Minecraft Server!