Pre-release Multiplayer was first added to
Minecraft on May 31, 2009, in update 0.15 during the
Classic phase of the game. The first server mods quickly began to arise around this time. On September 3, 2010, work began on hMod, a notable mod which implemented an
API for plugins which ensured they would remain compatible with each other provided they were using hMod. Several notable projects were created around this time for hMod, such as
WorldEdit, some of which remains maintained for more modern platforms to this day. Multiplayer for
Minecrafts survival mode was released on August 4, 2010. Following stagnation in the development of hMod, a spiritual successor called Bukkit would be created by a group of hMod developers: Nathan 'Dinnerbone' Adams, Erik 'Grum' Broes, Warren 'EvilSeph' Loo, Nathan 'Tahg' Gilbert, and sk89q. The project would begin work on December 21, 2010, and officially release in 2011. The project consisted of Bukkit, licensed under
GPL, and CraftBukkit, licensed under
LGPL. Notably, the licensing was not legally permissible due to the inclusion of proprietary code from Mojang. In May 2012, a server implementation called CraftBukkit− would be created by a team including developer md_5. The name was a parody of its upstream project, the recently defunct fork of CraftBukkit called CraftBukkit++. The implementation would be rebranded to Spigot on January 15, 2013, as the project grew in size. Unlike a standard server, only invited players can join Realms servers, and these servers do not use IP addresses. Since 2016, Realms have enabled
Minecraft to support
cross-platform play between
Windows 10,
iOS, and
Android platforms. It is a subscription-based service, allowing for either three or eleven players in the realm at once depending on the subscription tier. While Realms can also be purchased on the
Java Edition of the game, it does not enable cross platform play with
Bedrock players. On 14 June 2014, Mojang began enforcing the
EULA of
Minecraft: Java Edition to prevent servers from selling
pay-to-win items in
microtransactions, which many players thought unfairly affected gameplay. After this change, servers were only allowed to sell cosmetic items. Many servers closed shortly afterwards. On June 23, 2014, the Paper project (originally PaperSpigot) would be launched by Z750 and gsand as a fork of Spigot following increased reluctance of Spigot to accept community contributions. The project would see many improvements in performance compared to Spigot. On August 24, 2014, EvilSeph would announce the discontinuation of the Bukkit project citing the legal grey area of the project as well as Mojang's new enforcement of the EULA. This would then be rebutted by Mojang employees over Twitter, who stated that the Bukkit Team had transferred their rights to the project to Mojang as part of their employment for the company. Developers Dinnerbone and Grum stated they would update Bukkit to the next version of
Minecraft themselves, clarifying that Bukkit still was not going to be an official modding API. The project never received another update, effectively shutting it down. On September 20, 2017, the "Better Together Update" was released for Bedrock codebase-derived editions of the game, which added cross platform multiplayer support, along with four featured servers: Lifeboat,
Mineplex, InPVP and CubeCraft. On July 27, 2022, player chat reporting was added as a part of "The Wild Update", 1.19.1. This allowed players to report abusive chat messages sent by other players directly to Mojang, and players could be banned from playing on multiplayer servers, including realms, as a whole for violating Microsoft's community standards. On November 7, 2023, Mojang Studios, in partnership with GamerSafer, opened the official server list of
Minecraft. Servers listed on the site can earn badges showing, for example, their commitment to safety and community management features, which are designed to give parents an indication of which servers offer the highest standards. ==Management==