I run all of this minus home assistant on a Lenovo IdeaCentre 310S with a Celeron J4005 and 4GB RAM. To be fair this is running Minecraft Bedrock but we run with the same number of players (4-8 players typically).
For Minecraft Java, it's going to be all about the IPC. On the cheaper end, grabbing an OEM SFF with something like an i3 8100T would be great for your purposes whilst still being relatively cheap and low on power consumption.
I run all of this minus home assistant on a Lenovo IdeaCentre 310S with a Celeron J4005 and 4GB RAM. To be fair this is running Minecraft Bedrock but we run with the same number of players (4-8 players typically).
For Minecraft Java, it's going to be all about the IPC. On the cheaper end, grabbing an OEM SFF with something like an i3 8100T would be great for your purposes whilst still being relatively cheap and low on power consumption.