Realms



Website: https://minecraft.net/realms

Minecraft Realms is a work-in-progress feature that allows players to create and manage servers hosted by Multiplay through Mojang. Realms provides an easy and faster way to create Minecraft servers and allows the owner to manage their Realm from inside the game. Realms are not intended for large public servers but for groups of friends or as a family server.

Minecraft Realms has been in development since Minecon 2012, when Mojang revealed that they wanted to host their own servers. At the release of Snapshot 13w09b (released in March 2013,) about 100 active players were selected by a computer algorithm to test the first alpha version of Realms. Later on, with the release of Minecraft 1.6.4, new Alpha Testers were chosen. Also, if you went to Minecon 2013, you received a Minecraft Realms prepaid card, which could be redeemed on Mojang's website for one subscription to Minecraft Realms (the length of the prepaid subscription has not been stated.) Finally, on December 18th, 2013, Minecraft Realms Beta was made available to the public of Sweden.

As Minecraft Realms is to the PC edition, Minecraft: Pocket Edition has a similar service, Pocket Realms, which is supported by Amazon and currently is a free limited version available to anyone.

Subscriptions
The Realms service is not free. Rather, players have to subscribe. The selected 100 beta testers have a subscription which lasts for 90 days, while each MINECON attendee has a subscription which lasts for 30 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 went to MINECON 2013, 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 was before (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.

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.
 * In game code, there is a link to a probable future site, where you order your servers: realms.minecraft.net.