What Minecraft servers actually look like right now
Which game modes hold players, when people are online, how fast servers move to new versions, and how big a typical server really is — measured continuously across every server on this list.
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 | 504 | 304,554 | 1,022.0 players | |
| SMP | 79 | 41,532 | 943.9 players | |
| Mini Games | 21 | 22,456 | 2,495.1 players | |
| PvP | 40 | 16,369 | 564.4 players | |
| Anarchy | 19 | 11,127 | 794.8 players | |
| Lifesteal | 12 | 6,685 | 835.6 players | |
| Prison | 13 | 4,273 | 388.5 players | |
| Skyblock | 14 | 3,728 | 338.9 players | |
| Economy | 24 | 3,280 | 298.2 players | |
| PvE | 5 | 3,247 | 1,082.3 players | |
| Parkour | 7 | 3,243 | 463.3 players | |
| FTB | 5 | 3,215 | 1,071.7 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 7:00 UTC — a 2.9× 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 | 436 | 72% | 385,214 | |
| 1.21.x | 73 | 12% | 24,112 | |
| unknown | 72 | 12% | 221 | |
| pre-1.10 | 13 | 2% | 232 | |
| 1.1x (legacy) | 8 | 1% | 444 | |
| 1.20.x | 5 | 1% | 481 |
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 | 200 | 33% | |
| 1-4 | 135 | 22% | |
| 5-19 | 89 | 15% | |
| 20-99 | 40 | 7% | |
| 100-499 | 22 | 4% | |
| 500+ | 121 | 20% |
| 99%+ | 272 | 67% | |
| 95-99% | 30 | 7% | |
| 80-95% | 17 | 4% | |
| 50-80% | 21 | 5% | |
| under 50% | 65 | 16% |
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 1,464,861 such checks collected over 108 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 expressed as shares of the currently tracked catalogue rather than as growth rates, because the catalogue itself is still growing as discovery widens — a raw count would describe our crawler, not the game.
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.