Realms



Minecraft Realms, also known as Realms, is currently a work-in-progress feature that allows for public servers. Realms provide an easy and faster way to create Minecraft servers and allows more control for the creator. Realms were added in snapshot 13w09b.

This feature was not noticed until when the few selected players noticed the Texture Packs button in the Menu Screen were replaced with a Minecraft Realms button. About 100 players were selected by a computer algorithm to test the first publicly released version of Realms. However, only active or high profile accounts and accounts with strong relations with Mojang were chosen among the random algorithm.

The chosen players can create their own Minecraft worlds, and can invite any other players into the world, whether or not they were originally chosen to test. Players that are invited will have the Realms option appear on the screen, which then the invited players can enter and explore the world they were invited in.

Possibility of Minecraft Realms Being a Paid Feature
In the snapshot 13w09b, by viewing the language files in Minecraft via an editor, these lines can be seen:

mco.configure.world.buttons.subscription=Subscription mco.configure.world.subscription.title=Subscription Info mco.configure.world.subscription.daysleft=Days Left mco.configure.world.subscription.start=Start Date mco.configure.world.subscription.extend=Extend

Also, players chosen to be tested have a subscription to the feature that expires in 90 days. These information suggests that people might have to pay in order to use this feature when it is fully released.

Trivia

 * The Mojang blog closing signature was signed "// The Minecraft and Minecraft Realms teams" instead of the usual "// The Minecraft team" starting with the blog Minecraft Snapshot 13w09a.