Inside the servers we track
Which game modes hold players, when people are online, how quickly servers move to new versions, and how big a typical one is — measured continuously across our own catalogue. This describes our sample, not Minecraft as a whole; the note below explains the difference and why it matters.
These figures describe the 2,358 servers we track, not Minecraft servers as a whole. We find servers by crawling public listings and platform APIs, so the sample reflects that method rather than the game's true population.
1,291 of them (55%) run on free hosting platforms such as Minehut and Aternos, because those platforms publish machine-readable server lists we can import in bulk. Those servers are typically small, short-lived, and all sit behind the same shared infrastructure — so mixing them with the 1,067 servers on their own domains would distort every figure below.
Everything on this page is therefore reported separately for the two groups. Where a single number is shown, it refers to self-hosted servers.
Which game modes hold the players
Server counts tell you what owners build; player counts tell you what people actually play. They are not the same, and the gap between the two columns is the interesting part.
| Game mode | Share of players | Servers | Players | Avg when populated |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Survival | 782 | 89,257 | 253.6 players | |
| Skyblock | 36 | 17,800 | 712.0 players | |
| Prison | 28 | 17,291 | 960.6 players | |
| SMP | 160 | 13,568 | 176.2 players | |
| Factions | 16 | 11,695 | 1,299.4 players | |
| Creative | 20 | 8,496 | 708.0 players | |
| Mini Games | 19 | 4,356 | 544.5 players | |
| PvP | 48 | 3,000 | 107.1 players | |
| Anarchy | 33 | 2,505 | 125.3 players | |
| Lifesteal | 21 | 2,020 | 144.3 players | |
| KitPvP | 10 | 1,816 | 363.2 players | |
| Bedwars | 6 | 914 | 182.8 players |
When players are actually online
Average players per online server, by hour of day in UTC, across the last 14 days. If you run a server, this is when to schedule events — and when nobody will notice a restart.
Peak at 18:00 UTC, quietest at 5:00 UTC — a 2× swing between them.
Version adoption
Which Minecraft version online servers are running. Servers behind a proxy advertise the newest version they accept, so this reflects what a player can connect with today.
| Version line | Servers | Share | Players | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 26.x | 540 | 38% | 60,497 | |
| 1.21.x | 165 | 12% | 25,134 | |
| unknown | 107 | 7% | 14,903 | |
| pre-1.10 | 50 | 4% | 5,113 | |
| 1.1x (legacy) | 24 | 2% | 410 | |
| 1.20.x | 18 | 1% | 1,214 |
How big is a typical server?
Most Minecraft servers are much smaller than the handful everyone has heard of. If you are starting one, this is the realistic picture.
| Empty right now | 422 | 30% | |
| 1-4 | 163 | 11% | |
| 5-19 | 134 | 9% | |
| 20-99 | 89 | 6% | |
| 100-499 | 52 | 4% | |
| 500+ | 31 | 2% |
| 99%+ | 775 | 54% | |
| 95-99% | 82 | 6% | |
| 80-95% | 104 | 7% | |
| 50-80% | 366 | 25% | |
| under 50% | 116 | 8% |
List it free and we'll track its uptime, player curve and peak hours the same way — measured, not estimated.
How this was measured
Every server on this list is pinged continuously using Minecraft's own server-list protocol. Each check records whether the server answered and how many players were on it. This page draws on 2,951,543 such checks collected over 153 days.
Hourly activity is averaged per online server, so a single very large network cannot drag the shape of the curve. Uptime figures require at least 200 checks per server before that server counts.
Game-mode and version figures are shares of the tracked catalogue, not growth rates, because the catalogue is still growing as discovery widens — a raw count would describe our crawler rather than the game. They also cover self-hosted servers only. We previously blended free-platform servers into these figures; since those are bulk-imported from platform APIs and are small, short-lived and uniformly configured, doing so distorted every distribution on this page.
No sampling correction is applied and none is claimed. We do not know what the true population of Minecraft servers looks like, and neither does anyone else — there is no registry. Treat everything here as a description of one measured sample.
Player counts come from what each server reports in its ping response. Some networks report aggregate figures across sub-servers, and a small number misreport deliberately; we publish what they advertise.