The internet cannot download more RAM into your PC. (Sssh! Don’t tell them! I don’t want the supply to run out!)

That means Bedrock unless you use the Geyser tool someone else mentioned to allow Bedrock to connect to Java but I have no experience with that and am not sure how reliably it would actually work as they are quite different versions of the game. I have no idea how it would handle mods that are not supported by the Bedrock clients for example.

First you need to understand the difference between Bedrock edition and Java edition. Bedrock is for consoles, phones and Windows, it’s the default version that Microsoft pushes now. It’s not compatible with Java clients or Java servers. So if you’re planning to have the kid play on Switch or something like that, it’s not going to work.

Assuming you’re clear on all that, you have a few options for Java servers, you can run a plain jane vanilla server (the one that Microsoft provides) fairly easily but it has some limitations, and it’s not the most manageable solution. Modded servers are much more capable and flexible but also can be a little more complex in some cases. Overall, I’ve found Purpur the easiest and most sustainable choice at least a few years ago when I was looking for the right choice it seemed like most people agreed this was the best option. Fabric is another great option, especially if you want to use mods! Fabric has a huge modding ecosystem, second only to Forge.

However I also need to mention that I’ve got a heavily modded Forge-based server running right now and I really didn’t find that any more difficult to set up than any of the others. Even though people usually complain about forge being “difficult” somehow. So take that for what it’s worth. I think it doesn’t really matter THAT much which server software you use unless you have specific requirements around things like mods, spawn protection, and other kinds of configuration that are probably most useful for large, public servers.

If you do want to run a bedrock server, it gets a little more complicated as you might have to break some things out of the walled garden. I haven’t had a lot of success with that but I understand it is possible.

Yeah it’s like the guy in Wyoming who passed an anti-trans law saying that it’s not required to use preferred pronouns to refer to somebody and then getting all upset when he was called “madam” and whining that his preferred pronoun is “chairman”. That leopard eating your face must hurt.

Even if there were some woman as hellbent on destroying civilization as these guys, then she’s a techbro. And if she gets mad about being called techbro because she’s a woman? Well, how sad for her. “My heart goes out to you”

We’re not trying to make them happy. Fuck them, fuck them all. If it makes them mad to be called a “bro” good, that’s a bonus.

I absolutely would not count on a snapped in half MicroSD to protect the data that’s on it from someone determined to find out what it was. You don’t even know if you actually managed to break the memory chips themselves or just the connections between them, which with time and patience and the right equipment could be reconnected, and even if the chips are broken a great deal of the data on them will still remain intact, etched in silicon for eternity and vulnerable not only to current technology but also future technology.

Your goal is turning the data stored on your MicroSD card into a puzzle. A 2 piece puzzle is likely quite solvable even today. To properly vaporize the card and make it actually unreadable you’d likely need to do some experimentation and try things you would potentially have access to in war like fire, gunfire, explosives or corrosive chemicals, some combinations of which may serve to well and truly annihilate any hint of structure. The question is how many tiny pieces can you break that MicroSD card into, if that number is a human-countable or even human-comprehensible number like the number of pieces a document typically gets shredded into, then it’s probably not safe enough to consider it reliably destroyed.

If people can tape back together shredded documents to get the basic idea of what was written on them, someone can likewise theoretically repair your MicroSD to get a large proportion of the stored data from it if they are absolutely intent on doing so. It’s probably a lot of work, and maybe not even a not-worth-it amount of work depending on how important your data might be, and there might be a substantial amount of data unrecoverable and missing, but it can be done. Unless you make it a puzzle with so many pieces that doing so is mathematically implausible and just as likely to be an incorrect reconstruction of data that might say anything the reconstructor imagines it does, without actually giving them any confidence that it is real and correct. The only thing that’s certain is that 2 is probably not a good enough number of pieces to rely on for that to be the case.

As an alternative to the fire/gunfire/explosives/acid style methods, you might also use sandpaper (would take awhile), or better yet a grinder tool of some sort (dremel, angle grinder, bench grinder) to give yourself some confidence that the card has truly been turned to a pile of arbitrary dust. Even then, I’d still concerns as the data density increases, a single speck of MicroSD dust from a 1TB card shredded into millions of pieces might still contain 1 MB of data – that’s an awful lot of text and even potentially some images if it can be decoded. They really prove surprisingly hard to destroy. Electrical attacks, even Microwave ovens, reportedly have mixed results and don’t sound like reliable approaches either.

If you can get it to a molten state, that’s your highest confidence method. Silicon has a melting point of 1,414 °C, good luck.