How to Play Minecraft With Friends

Getting a friend into your world takes thirty seconds if you are in the same house and considerably longer if you are not. Every route below solves one problem: a machine has to run the world, and everyone else has to reach it.

There are four of them. Open to LAN is free and instant but only reaches your own network. A Realm is a subscription where someone else runs the hardware. A self-hosted server is free software on a machine you own. A rented server is the same software on hardware somebody else keeps online. Which suits you depends on how far apart you are, how long the world must survive, and whether you want mods.

Open to LAN — free, one building only

This is the fastest multiplayer in the game and the most misunderstood.

In Java Edition, load a single-player world, press Escape, and choose Open to LAN. You pick the game mode everyone joins in, whether cheats are allowed, and on current versions the port. Press the button and chat prints the port you are listening on. Your friends open Multiplayer and the world appears by itself under the local network heading. The command /publish does the same job without the menu, but it is a cheats-only command — it works in a world where commands are already enabled, and it takes the same allow-commands and port arguments the screen offers.

It starts a small server inside your running game, which has three consequences people trip over:

• Everyone must be on the same local network. Same router, same Wi-Fi or ethernet. The discovery broadcast that makes your world appear in a friend's list does not cross the internet, so a friend across town will never see it there — reaching them means one of the other routes, or the tunnelling tricks further down.
• Your PC is doing both jobs. It renders your view and simulates the world for everyone, which is where the stutter comes from on a modest machine — our FPS guide applies double.
• Closing the world ends the session. Progress saves into your single-player file, and nobody can play when you are not playing.

If the world never appears for a friend, blame the network rather than the game: guest Wi-Fi and routers with client isolation block the discovery broadcast. Add the server manually instead, using the host's local address — the 192.168 style number — a colon, and the port from chat.

Bedrock does this better. A Bedrock world is visible to LAN players by default, so friends on the same network see it under Friends with nothing switched on, and a Bedrock host can invite friends over the internet straight from an open world — no port forwarding. Consoles generally require whatever paid online service the platform demands for online play, so check that before blaming Minecraft.

Realms — you pay, nobody configures anything

A Realm is a server Mojang runs for you. The owner pays a monthly subscription; invited players join for free as long as they own the game. There is no address to share, no port to forward, no software to install.

• Always online, whether or not the owner is in the world.
• Eleven players at once on Java — a slot reserved for the owner plus up to ten others — with a far longer invite list than that.
• Automatic backups the owner can roll back to, plus world upload and download, so you can bring an existing save in or take it out.
• A closed door. Only invited accounts can connect, which removes the entire griefing problem in one step.

What you give up is control. A Java Realm runs vanilla — no Fabric, no Forge, no server plugins — although an uploaded world keeps the data packs inside it, which covers a surprising amount of what people want mods for; see installing data packs. Bedrock Realms take add-ons and imported worlds instead.

Realms are edition-locked too: a Java Realm accepts only Java clients, a Bedrock Realm only Bedrock ones.

Your own server — free software, your electricity

Download the official server file from the Minecraft site, drop it in its own empty folder, and run it. Two details matter first.

Java 21. Minecraft 1.20.5 and everything after it, including all of 1.21, requires Java 21. An older Java 8 or 17 install refuses to start it, and the error rarely says so plainly.

The EULA. The first run writes eula.txt and the settings file, then stops. Open eula.txt, change eula=false to eula=true, and run it again. The second run is the one that generates the world.

Launch from a command line rather than double-clicking, so you see the output and can hand it memory — along the lines of java -Xmx4G -jar server.jar nogui. A vanilla world for a handful of friends is fine with a couple of gigabytes; modpacks want far more. The main game loop is largely single-threaded, so one fast core beats eight slow ones, and view distance and simulation distance cost more than extra players.

The settings people get wrong

Everything lives in server.properties, and the defaults surprise people:

1. 1.difficulty starts at easy, not normal. If nothing feels dangerous, that is why — our difficulty guide covers what each level changes.
2. 2.spawn-protection defaults to a 16-block radius around spawn where only operators can build — the number one "why can I not break this block" question on new servers.
3. 3.pvp defaults to true. Turn it off if your group does not find friendly fire funny. On versions newer than 1.21 this one has moved out of the file and become a game rule, so check both if you cannot find it.
4. 4.white-list defaults to false. Set it true and add each friend with the whitelist command before you give the address to anybody.
5. 5.online-mode defaults to true and must stay that way. Turning it off to let someone play without owning the game also lets anyone connect under any username, including yours.
6. 6.level-seed lets you start on a world you actually chose — browse seeds worth using first, because changing it later means starting over.

Operators, granted with the op command or in ops.json, bypass spawn protection and can run commands — give it only to people you trust.

For mods or plugins, swap the vanilla file for a Fabric, Forge, NeoForge or plugin-capable build. Everyone connecting needs the same loader and the same mod list, minus purely client-side mods — see installing mods for the client half.

The port forwarding question

On your own network nobody needs to forward anything. Friends in the house type the host's local address and connect.

For friends elsewhere, the server must be reachable from outside, which is what port forwarding does: reserve a fixed local address for the host machine in your router, forward the port to it, and give friends your public address. Java uses TCP port 25565 by default; a Bedrock dedicated server uses UDP port 19132.

Then there are the four reasons it does not work:

• Carrier-grade NAT. Many mobile and fibre providers no longer give each customer their own public IPv4 address. If the address your router reports does not match what an address-checking site says, forwarding is dead on arrival.
• The firewall. Windows prompts once to allow Java through and half of everyone clicks the wrong button. Allow it for private networks at minimum.
• A changing address. Most home connections get a new public address periodically; a dynamic DNS hostname turns that moving target into a name that keeps working.
• The local address moved. Reboot the router, the host picks up a different local address, and the rule now points at a smart plug. Reserve it.

If forwarding is impossible or unappealing, two kinds of tool sidestep it: mesh VPN software that puts every player on one virtual local network, so a plain LAN world works, and tunnel services that relay a public address to your machine. Both have usable free tiers, both add a little latency, and neither touches your router.

Renting a server

Paying a host removes the hardware, the uptime and the port question at once: a control panel, one-click installs for vanilla, plugin and modded builds, backups, and a subdomain to hand out instead of your home address. Judge hosts on the boring things rather than advertised player counts, which are meaningless.

• How much RAM, and is the CPU shared? Price tracks memory, but a cheap plan on an oversold machine lags whatever RAM it lists.
• Where are the machines? Pick a region near most of your group. Latency is geography.
• Do you get full file and FTP access? If you cannot download your world, you cannot leave.
• Monthly, not annual, to start. Most Minecraft groups lose interest in about six weeks. Find out whether yours is the exception before prepaying for a year.

Free hosts are fine for testing, but they typically sleep when idle, restart on their own schedule, and cap memory below what any modpack needs.

How Java and Bedrock cross-play really works

Settle this before anyone buys anything, because it is where most group plans fall apart.

Java clients connect only to Java servers and Java Realms. Bedrock clients connect only to Bedrock servers and Bedrock Realms. No setting bridges the two editions.

Bedrock is genuinely cross-platform: Windows, consoles, phones and tablets run the same edition and play together freely on a matching version. Java is PC-only. Two things soften the split:

• Buying Minecraft for PC gives you both editions in one purchase, and anyone who bought one before that change was granted the other. If your friends are on consoles, you may already own the Bedrock copy you need.
• Open-source proxy software can let Bedrock clients into a Java server. The server owner installs it, it does not work on Realms, and it is a translation layer rather than magic: combat feel, some plugin menus and heavily modded content do not always survive the trip.

Worlds do not transfer between editions either — there is no official converter and third-party ones are approximate at best — so a mixed group should decide which edition the world lives in on day one. The Bedrock versus Java comparison covers the differences that should drive that call.

Version matching, the mistake everyone makes first

A client can only join a server on the same version. If the server list shows a red cross and an outdated client or outdated server message, nothing is broken — somebody is on 1.21.4 trying to reach a 1.21.1 world. Check the launcher profile before touching a router setting.

Mods follow the same rule: identical loader, identical mod versions at both ends, minus the client-only ones. Data packs do not. A data pack lives in the world folder on the server and reaches everyone connected without a single file on their side, which is exactly why it is the only content a vanilla Realm will take. Resource packs are similar in spirit — cosmetic, per-player, and offered by the server on join with nothing installed in advance.

Which one to pick

• Same house, tonight: Open to LAN, free and half a minute of work.
• Scattered friends, vanilla, nobody technical: a Realm.
• Mods, plugins and full control, with a spare machine to hand: self-host.
• Mods and uptime but none of the admin work: rent one, monthly.
• A mixed group: pick the edition first, then choose from that edition's options.