Why does Plug for Minecraft need a VPN?
Plug For Minecraft provides commands by connecting into your Minecraft game and waiting for you to type commands. When it receives those commands it uses a number of methods including a simulated player to fulfil those commands. For example when you use the 'give' command, a simulated player drops items for you to pickup. Plug software controls that player so don't worry no human third party connects into your game at all.
This same connection also manages multiplayer, grief protection and invites etc.
Due to some changes in iOS it is no longer possible for the Plug app itself to make the connection into Minecraft. This means the connection has to come from our server instead. Because most home networks use something called NAT the only reliable way to connect to Minecraft from our server is to use a VPN.
Why are commands only available online?
Because the connection now originates from our server you need an internet connection for our server to reach you.
Can you monitor all my traffic and watch what I am doing?
NO! not at all.
The app uses an 'In App VPN' or a 'Per App VPN'. This is setup so only traffic to our server goes through the VPN and nothing else. That means only Plug traffic travels through the VPN and none of your other traffic. You don't need to take our word for it, here is a simple test as proof!
- Restart your device to make sure Plug is not running at all (or uninstall it completely).
- Open Safari and type 'what is my ip' into google.
Google will show you your public IP address. This is the IP address that google sees your traffic coming from and is in fact the IP address of your internet router. That means all your traffic is originiating directly from your router to google.
- Open Plug For Minecraft and let the VPN connect.
- Open Safari and type 'what is my ip' into google.
You will see the same address as above because your traffic is still taking it's normal route and traveling from your router to google. As you can see only Plug traffic goes through the VPN.
If all traffic were going through our VPN the path would be as follows:
You > Your router > Our server > Google.
And so google would show traffic as coming from our VPN address, and show you our VPN address as your ip.
Also bear in mind even if we did try to route all traffic through our server there would be several tell tail signs:
- Netflix, spotify and other location based services would be very confused and show your location as being in London (where our server is based)!
- We would accumulate hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of internet charges.
- There would be massive slow downs when viewing videos or music.
- There would be no way to hide our server address as the originating IP from services like google.
- Our IP would probably get banned around the world as users did silly/illegal things through our VPN.
DO YOU COLLECT ANY INFORMATION, AND IF SO WHAT DO YOU DO WITH IT?
NO! not at all. Since only Plug traffic goes through our VPN we can only see traffic from your Minecraft game and nothing else. We do not log this, share this or inspect it at all. There is also no way to personally identify you, and no VPN identifiers are stored or logged.
If you still have any questions please send us a message from our home page or by tapping the Contact icon on the top right of the Plug for Terraria App.