Is Minecraft Cross Platform?

Minecraft is a sandbox game developed by Mojang studios. After many early private testing versions, Minecraft was first made public in May 2009 before being fully released in November 2011. Since then, it has gone on to become one of the most popular games in history. Minecraft has been ported to many other platforms and is the best-selling video game of all time, with over 300 million copies sold and nearly 167 million monthly players as of December 2023. But is Minecraft cross platform? Let’s find out!

minecraft

Minecraft is a procedurally generated 3D world with almost infinite terrain.

In the default Minecraft survival mode, your goal is to extract resources to craft tools and items and build structures and simple machines to help you progress through the game where the end goal is defeating the ender dragon. On the way, you’ll encounter hostile creatures such as Zombies, Skeletons, Creepers, Spiders and more. That’s putting aside the farm animals you can use for resources too!

Why is Minecraft so Popular?

Minecraft has become more and more popular due to the modding world.

Thanks to mods invented by the Minecraft player base, the game has unlimited potential. From simple mods for cosmetics to some extremely advanced mods such as skyblock and hexit, the game is growing more and more. Alongside this, Minecraft is a very simple block-based game that just on its own has unlimited replayability. There really isn’t a goal that you need to complete, so you can just keep playing. 

Source: Minecraft

Is Minecraft Cross Platform?

Yes! Minecraft is available for cross platform play.

Cross platform is when gamers can play a game on one platform with and against players from other platforms. For example, you can play on a PC with your friend who is playing on an Xbox.

The gaming world is evolving, and people want to play games with their friends more often, meaning crossplay is becoming more of a necessity. This is because they don’t really want to buy a new console just because their friend plays a game that they can’t play with them on. In the case of Minecraft, there are two different versions, Bedrock and Java.

  • Minecraft: Bedrock edition is playable on Windows 10PCs, Xbox One and Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, Playstation 4 / 5, IOS and iPadOS devices, and Android devices.
  • The Java Edition is much more restricted. Java Edition Minecraft is the original version. Because of this, it is not available for console or mobile and is the only version available for Mac and Linux users.

How to Crossplay on Minecraft

If you play the Bedrock Edition, you can simply add and play with friends cross-platform as long as they are also playing the Bedrock Edition too. This puts Minecraft up there as one of the best crossplay games

Playing multiplayer on Java is a little more complicated. You’ll need to:

  • Either use a public server or create your own and invite friends using the server IP.
  • You can use Minecraft realms, which is a Mojang-hosted multiplayer server for you but it does cost.
  • You can also play together by sharing a local area network, or LAN. This means you would all have to be connected to the same internet.

With all the information we have, Minecraft has much better crossplay than you get with Stardew Valley crossplay or Terraria crossplay.

Source: Minecraft

How to Add Friends On Minecraft

To crossplay in Minecraft, you’ll need to add your friends. To this simply:

  • Launch Minecraft
  • Sign in to your account and load into a new or existing world
  • Open the in-game pause menu and click “invite to Game” on the far right
  • Select the option to “Find Cross Platform Friends” on the next screen
  • Find your friends using their Minecraft ID (Gamertag) and select “Add Friend”

Friends added and available to play multiplayer will appear under the “Online Friends”. Check the box beside their gamertag and click “Send Invite”. Once accepted, they will load into your world.

Minecraft also has a different type of game which is a 2d story-based game called dungeons, now, is Minecraft dungeons crossplay? Yes, it is! Minecraft dungeons is 2-4 player online multiplayer and allows cross-platform play between Nintendo Switch, Playstation 4 and 5, Windows PC, and Xbox.