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Realms and Minecraft Realms Plus are two different tiers of the official servers offered by Mojang. The company operates, maintains, and backs these servers up, allowing for 24/7 multiplayer access without needing a host to be online. Even though the basic Realm is cheaper, it has one fatal limitation that might make players want to consider the slightly more expensive Realms Plus.
Minecraft Realms Plus is worth considering for players who have decently sized friend groups and are all looking to play together at the same time.
What exactly makes Realms Plus such a potentially great value is detailed below.
Why Minecraft Realms Plus is worth the cost
Realms
A regular Realm will cost players $3.99 USD a month, with the ability to add infinite members and play online with up to two others at the same time. This is in addition to being up 24/7 and giving three world slots to switch between. This means that players can bounce around between several of Minecraft's best seeds, to keep the game from getting stale.
Minecraft Realms Plus will cost $7.99 USD a month, but it allows for up to 10 players at once and has the same other foundational features.
While an online player cap of 10 might seem low, realistically, having more than that number of people online at a single time on a private server isn't very common. Only Minecraft's best servers tend to get more than double-digit users at a time. This means that the limit is technically there but won't matter to the vast majority of potential subscribers.
However, the default player limit of three is quite low. Many players who would want to play with a friend group would need more than three slots, making the extras afforded by Minecraft Realms Plus very valuable.
Marketplace Pass
Mojang's Minecraft Realms Plus subscription also has a secondary benefit. The monthly payment also gives access to all of the content found within Bedrock's new Marketplace Pass. Or rather, it would be more accurate to say that the Marketplace Pass is Realms Plus without a Realm.
For those unaware, the Marketplace Pass is a monthly subscription that costs $3.99 USD a month and gives access to a catalog of more than 150 different pieces of Minecraft Marketplace content. This ranges from amazing resource packs to skin packs and custom survival worlds.
None of Minecraft Marketplace's new addons have made it to the Marketplace Pass yet, but this could change at any time, especially as more and more addons are added.
Realms Plus essentially combines the two subscriptions into a single charge but also increases the Realm's player cap. Getting this huge range of content for such a cheap price is a great deal, and much of this content could even be used on a Realm to make the experience even more fun and exciting.
Realms Stories and other new Realms Plus features
And to make the $7.99 even more worthwhile, Mojang has recently made Realms Plus even better in three major ways. The first is by giving away a unique set of character creator items each month, separate from those given out as part of the Marketplace Pass. This is admittedly the most minor of these three changes, but extra ways to personalize are never bad.
The second change is an increase in render distance across all Minecraft Realms Plus worlds. There are an extra eight chunks of render distance on top of the base 12. This brings all the worlds on this tier of subscription up to a total render distance of 20. This might be a far cry from Minecraft's best render distance mods, but it's a significant improvement over the past. Hopefully, this trend continues.
The final change to Minecraft Realms Plus is much more significant. This is the addition of Realms Stories. This new feature is almost a new social media site within Realms Plus. It adds a new members tab for seeing who is online and tracking members, a timeline to see who played on what days and at what time, to help schedule meetings at decent hours, and an events tab to track memories.
Ultimately, whether or not Minecraft Realms Plus is truly worth its cost will come down to how much emphasis the player puts on a convenient and official dedicated Bedrock server. The fact that Mojang is actively working to make the service both better and more expansive makes the deal much sweeter, though.
