Realms



Minecraft Realms, also known as Realms, is a work-in-progress feature that allows for paid public servers hosted by Mojang. Realms provide an easy and faster way to create Minecraft servers and allows more control for the creator. Minecraft Realms are not intended for large public servers but for groups of friends or as a family server.

Minecraft Realms have been in development since Minecon 2012, when Mojang revealed that they wanted to host their own servers.

About 100 players were selected by a computer algorithm to test the first publicly released version of Realms. However, only active accounts were chosen among the random algorithm.

The chosen players can create their own Minecraft worlds, and is optimized to allow up to 10 people into the world, whether or not they were originally chosen to test. Only one server can be made at a time if hosting. 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.

Minecraft Realms will be hosted by Multiplay Gameservers on the PC and via Amazon for Pocket Edition.

Subscriptions


Minecraft Realms are not free. Rather, players have to subscribe to use the feature. The 100 beta testers have a subscription which lasts for 90 days. By viewing the language files in Minecraft via an editor, these lines can be seen:

Settings


If you are one of the 100 beta testers, or have been invited to join a realm by a beta tester, you will see a Minecraft Realms button on the main menu screen. The "Minecraft Realms" button is in the same place as the "Texture Packs" button (removed earlier in ). Clicking on it brings you to the screen above. The screen is very similar to that of the Multiplayer menu, with a few differences.



Clicking on "Configure" brings you to the configuration menu. To the left, you have the Name and Description. To the right, you have a list of all the invited players.

Source information
Minecraft Realms contains the following classes: GuiSlotOnlineServerList, GuiScreenOnlineServers, McoServer, GuiScreenCreateOnlineWorld, GuiScreenConfigureWorld, McoClient, McoOption, McoOptionSome, McoOptionNone

GuiSlotOnlineServerList
As the title says, this is the online browser for all of the servers, it uses a link generated by $ID, $NAME, $LOCATION_ID to check if a player can access the given server, from https://mcoapi.minecraft.net/ it creates a list and sorts with $ID and $NAME. For example: https://mcoapi.minecraft.net/worlds/$ID, https://mcoapi.minecraft.net/$NAME/$LOCATION_ID and through those links it adds the basic HTTP requests like ?motd= and other variables that contain data.

GuiScreenOnlineServers
GUI that holdes GuiSlotOnlineServerList and has other GUI's like GuiScreenCreateOnlineWorld, GuiScreenConfigureWorld and a button that redirects towards http://minecraft.net

McoServer
This is the container of the server, that is shown in the GuiSlotOnlineServerList and it uses parameters like: ID, Name, MOTD, State, Owner, Invited, IP and Expired. The parameters are self-explanatory.

GuiScreenCreateOnlineWorld
This is the GUI to create an online world, this takes your session ID and Username and attempts to create a new world using a name and MOTD of your choosing. It will connect to https://mcoapi.minecraft.net/ if it is able to validate your access it will create a new folder where your server will be stored. If all of this fails it will return an Invalid session ID, as seen in this URL: https://mcoapi.minecraft.net/worlds

GuiScreenConfigureWorld
This will also validate your credentials with https://mcoapi.minecraft.net/ and will return Invalid session ID like in this URL: https://mcoapi.minecraft.net/worlds if its fails. This allows you to edit your server configuration as you would the normal SMP one.

McoClient
This class is used to validate whether you are a Minecraft Realms (PRE_ACCESS) owner or not, this class connects to the sites listed in GuiSlotOnlineServerList.

McoOption
This class is small and encrypted. Best guess: This class contains the future options for the Minecraft Realms client.

McoOptionSome
This class is also small and encrypted. Best guess: A setting allowing only some options to be configurable for the Minecraft Realms client. Looks to be connected to McoOption, McoOptionNone.

McoOptionNone
When supplied with a NULL value returns a "crash". Best guess: A setting turning off options for the Minecraft Realms client. Looks to be connected to McoOption, McoOptionSome.

URL's that were found in the Minecraft Realms package: https://mcoapi.minecraft.net/ https://mcoapi.minecraft.net/worlds/$ID https://mcoapi.minecraft.net/worlds/$ID/join https://mcoapi.minecraft.net/worlds/$NAME https://mcoapi.minecraft.net/worlds/$NAME/$LOCATION_ID https://mcoapi.minecraft.net/mco/available https://mcoapi.minecraft.net/payments/unused https://mcoapi.minecraft.net/worlds/$WORLD_ID https://mcoapi.minecraft.net/worlds/$WORLD_ID/invites/$USER_NAME https://mcoapi.minecraft.net/worlds/$WORLD_ID/$NAME https://mcoapi.minecraft.net/worlds/$WORLD_ID/open https://mcoapi.minecraft.net/worlds/$WORLD_ID/close https://mcoapi.minecraft.net/worlds/$WORLD_ID/reset https://mcoapi.minecraft.net/worlds/locations https://mcoapi.minecraft.net/subscriptions/$WORLD_ID

The above information is incomplete, because most of it was encrypted and could not be deciphered.

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.