Minecraft community’s latest tool randomly connects players to one of over 3,000 servers

Running into a room full of strangers is not something I would advise in the real world, but that’s what video games are for.

Minebored is a new community-created tool that enables Minecraft players on PC to randomly join one of over 3,000 live multiplayer servers. It is as simple as entering “play.minebored.com” into the block-building survival game’s “Server Address” field and then hitting “Refresh.” Minebored will then quickly return a joinable game. If you don’t like what you find, just go back and hit Refresh once again. This could enable Minecraft players to start discovering fun (but lesser known) servers populated by other people. It’s also an example of how Minecraft’s fans have kept the game fresh with new features that even developer Mojang and publisher Microsoft are not working on. In a gaming market worth $99.3 billion, that kind of community support is what sets apart a forgettable release from a phenomenon like Minecraft.

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“The goal [with Minebored] is to be able to discover new servers — small, medium, and big — without ever leaving your launcher,” Reddit user and Minebored creator Unsquarables wrote in a post. “It’s still in early beta, but works pretty well overall.”

Minebored will move forward by adding new servers to its lists. The project may also even remove some of the more well-known servers to increase the likelihood that people will come across something smaller and new. But that will require a lot of manual work because the team responsible for Minebored has not built any automation tools.

“We don’t currently have any way of submitting new servers to the database,” wrote Unsquarables. “But you can message me any new ones, and it will be added in the next update.”

Finally, Minebored will also get more options in the future. Instead of just any random server, players will have the option to use something like “pvp.minebored.com” or “factions.minebored.com” to only get player-versus-player and faction servers, respectfully. Again, that will require some extra work by the Minebored creators.

“We will need a lot of help curating those and keeping them clean,” wrote Unsquarables.