Nothing like spinning your wheels for *hours* trying to diagnose networking issues.

There is a lot of great community content on connecting Minecraft *locally* to local MCP servers, running node.js applications using the Mineflayer APIs.

The information gets a lot more cryptic when you try to connect to cloud based services and Minecraft server edition.

After spending hours trying to diagnose connection issues (and not even sure what I was trying to achieve was even technically possible), I really felt the wheels spin.

Why would it work one way and not another?

Even to the point I had to dig deep in the toolbox for old tools like Telnet!

It turns out, it was a minor case of finger dyslexia which was the cause of the problem.

IP address 24.5.6.7 is not the same as 20.5.6.7…

1 digit, 20, NOT 24… hours lost. tears shed. swears muttered.

Once that was resolved I was unstuck and back to making progress, only a few hours behind.

D’oh!