Setting Up Crossplay

1. Check what you ordered runs Geyser

GeyserMC is a piece of software, and it has to be installed in a place your server software can load it from. Where it goes depends on the server software you picked at checkout, and 2 of the 7 options we offer have no place to load it. Forge has no official Geyser build, and Vanilla has no loader at all. Both can still be bridged with Geyser Standalone running next to the server, but Standalone cannot host Floodgate, so on those 2 your Bedrock players each need a Java account to log in. On the other 5 it is a normal upload into the plugins or mods folder.

Purpur and Spigot take the same file as Paper because they are all based on Bukkit. If you have not uploaded a JAR to this panel before, our plugin installation guide covers the file manager side.

2. Give Bedrock its own port, and make it UDP

This is where most setups stall, and it has nothing to do with Geyser. Java Edition talks TCP on port 25565. Bedrock listens on 19132 by convention. Older versions talked RakNet there, over UDP only; from Bedrock 26.60 the game uses NetherNet, which needs that port on TCP as well. Java and Bedrock can never share a port, so your server needs a second allocation before Geyser has anything to bind to. Open your server in our panel, which every plan includes and which our features page walks through. There you add a second allocation to your own server, without a ticket and without asking us, and note the port it hands you.

Then open the Geyser config after the first restart and set bedrock.port to that number. Leave bedrock.address on 0.0.0.0. Leave clone-remote-port on false: that option exists for hosts who shuffle your Java port on every boot, which is not how allocations work here, and turning it on will change your Bedrock port without your players knowing it.

From Bedrock 26.60, the update of 27 October 2026, players no longer connect over RakNet. The game uses NetherNet instead: it first contacts the Bedrock port over TCP to find the server, and then plays over UDP through WebRTC. Geyser supports this from build 1237, but it is not switched on by default. Set transport to both and give webrtc-port a second UDP port that nothing else uses. With both, Geyser still answers RakNet on the Bedrock port, so players on an older Bedrock version can join too.

If the allocation you get is not 19132, that is fine, but say so when you share the address. Bedrock clients assume 19132 when the port field is left empty, so with an unusual port a friend has to enter the port by hand, and a friend who does not know that cannot join.

On our hosting you do not have to change anything if you ordered a crossplay plan or added crossplay to your server in the panel. We have already set this up, and your players keep the same address and port. The first time a Bedrock player joins, the game asks once whether to trust the server. That is normal for a server without its own HTTPS certificate, and they can accept it. Did you install Geyser yourself? Then ask our support to set up the extra UDP port, because it has to be forwarded on our network.

Hosting the server on your own machine or network? Then forward the Bedrock port for both TCP and UDP and the webrtc-port for UDP, and allow them in your firewall. Nothing else may use these ports: a voice chat mod, Query or a web map on the same port stops NetherNet from working.

3. The one line that turns crossplay on

Geyser ships with remote.auth-type set to online. On that setting every Bedrock player has to own and link a Java account, which the console and phone players you installed this for usually do not have. Change it to floodgate, keep Floodgate installed next to Geyser, and Bedrock players are authenticated against Xbox Live instead. Your server.properties can stay on online-mode=true; Floodgate is not a cracked server: it is a second way in with its own login check through Xbox Live.

Floodgate writes a key.pem in its own folder on first start. On a single server Geyser finds it by itself. You only ever copy that file by hand when Geyser sits on a proxy and Floodgate on the backends, which is a network layout, not a single-server one.

The last setting worth knowing is username-prefix, a period by default. It exists because two players on two editions can hold the same name, and the prefix keeps them apart. It costs you one of the sixteen characters a Java username is allowed, and gamertags with spaces get those spaces rewritten, so a Bedrock player is not always the name you expected. This affects everything that stores a player as text: whitelists, ban lists, permission nodes, and the LuckPerms groups from our permissions guide. Match on UUID where a plugin lets you, because Floodgate keeps that stable per Xbox account even when the display name changes.

4. Your Minecraft version decides how much extra you install

Geyser translates Bedrock into the newest Java protocol it supports, and it only ever targets one. That is easy to miss because nothing warns you at order time: our checkout offers 16 versions, and only one Minecraft version needs no help: 26.2, the one Geyser speaks, which is also what Latest gives a crossplay server. On the other 14 the server speaks an older protocol than Geyser produces, so ViaVersion and ViaBackwards have to sit in between. Both are ordinary plugins, which means this route is closed on Vanilla and Forge for the same reason Floodgate is.

The two oldest entries need a warning instead of instructions. Getting a current Bedrock client down to 1.12.2 or 1.8.9 means stacking ViaRewind on top of the other two and translating across a decade of protocol changes. It runs, but combat timing, inventory behaviour and newer blocks will not work the same way after the translation. If crossplay is the point of your server, order it on a recent version and use the old ones as servers for Java players only.

5. An Xbox cannot type your IP address

Everything above can be set up correctly and a console player still cannot get in, because Mojang does not offer the same server list on every platform. On Windows, iOS and Android there is an Add Server button: address, port, done. On Xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo Switch that button is not there. The Servers tab on those platforms shows Mojang partner servers only, and there is no field to put yours in.

The reliable way around it is the Friends tab. A player on Windows or a phone adds your server, joins it, and the console player joins that friend from the Friends tab. It costs one person on Windows or a phone, and after that it works every session. There are also third party DNS redirect services that show your server as a featured one; they do work, but they sit between your players and us, they break on console updates, and we cannot fix them for you. Tell your community the Friends route first.

Give people the two addresses separately and label them. Java players need the hostname and the Java port. Bedrock players need the same hostname and the Bedrock port, entered in the port field rather than added to the address after a colon, which is how Java players are used to entering it and what Bedrock does not accept.

6. What still differs once they are inside

Geyser translates between Java and Bedrock. It is not a port, and a handful of features have no direct equivalent in the other edition. These are worth knowing before someone reports them as bugs.

Resource packs are the biggest difference. A Java pack is invisible to a Bedrock client, no matter what your server.properties says, because the formats are unrelated. If your server leans on a custom pack for item models or a font-based interface, you need a Bedrock version of it as an .mcpack in Geyser's packs folder, and you now maintain two packs. Servers that style their menus with custom model data see this immediately; servers running standard textures are not affected.

Most menus work as expected. Anything a plugin draws inside a chest is a chest to Bedrock too, so shops, kits and vote menus carry over. What changes is text input: where Java asks you to type into a sign or an anvil, Bedrock gets a pop-up text box instead. It works, but it does not look like the Java version or the screenshots in your wiki. Spectator mode has no Bedrock equivalent and is approximated, and some particle effects render differently or not at all.

Everything a plugin does to a player rather than to their screen goes through unchanged, because by the time it reaches your plugins a Bedrock player is just a player: economy balances, permission groups, claim regions, chat formatting, playtime tracking. That is the main reason for bridging on a Java server rather than running a second Bedrock one. You keep one world, one economy and one set of plugins, and the second edition arrives as extra players instead of as a second server to administer.

Setting this up is worth it for the groups that already play on different devices: a friend group where two people are on a console, a household where the parents are on a laptop and the kids on tablets, a classroom set of shared devices, or a public server that would rather not turn away the larger half of the player base. If everyone you play with is on a PC, crossplay adds nothing for you and you can skip it.

7. When it does not work

Crossplay fails in a small number of ways, and each one has a distinct symptom. Start from the symptom in the table, not from the plugin list.

8. What this costs you in resources

Geyser holds an open session per Bedrock player and rewrites every packet in both directions. That is CPU work rather than a memory pool, and it scales with how many Bedrock players you have, not with how many you allow. In practice you need headroom on the CPU, not a bigger plan: a box already at its limit with Java players will show the load first on the Bedrock side, as rubber-banding around chunk borders.

Our smallest plan, Starter Performance, is 2 vCPU and 8 GB at €9.11 a month, with 30% off your first six months in Poland, and it runs Geyser and Floodgate without problems. The step up, Standard Performance, adds 1 vCPU and 4 GB over it, which is the margin to buy if Geyser is going on top of a server that is already carrying plugins. The requirement that actually matters is the one from the first section: pick software that can load plugins.

Choosing which edition to build on in the first place is a separate question, and Java vs Bedrock answers it. For plans and pricing on a crossplay-ready server, see Bedrock hosting, or compare every option on server types.

9. Or let us do it

Everything above is yours to run, and Geyser and Floodgate cost nothing. The work is in the parts this guide just went through: a second port, the build that matches your server software, and a config that stops working the day one of them updates.

That is what a crossplay plan is. We put Geyser and Floodgate on your server and set the port before you get it, and once a month we send a real Bedrock ping to your own address to see whether a phone or console player can still join. If the answer is no, we fix it, and you hear it from us instead of from your players.

Or have the Copilot set the crossplay up

Everything on this page can be done by hand and every step is written out above. If you would rather not, the AI Copilot does the same job from one sentence: Geyser is in the vetted list it installs from, it resolves the build for your server software and Minecraft version at that moment, it writes the config file, and it reads your startup log back to see whether the port really opened. The long version, the one that takes hours of clicking by hand, is what the Quasar engine is for: up to 30 steps in a single message, each step reading the real answer from the server before the next one starts. It still cannot restart your server without your click, and one button under the message takes the whole thing back.

Questions people ask about crossplay

Two protocols inside one tick

Geyser translates every Bedrock packet into something the Java server understands, and that translation happens on the same core that runs the world. With a handful of players nobody notices. With a full server it is real work, and it lands on top of everything else. Crossplay exists on the Performance line too, on an AMD Ryzen 9 5900X in Germany or an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X with DDR5 RAM in Poland.

Starter Crossplay Performance, 8 GBStandard Crossplay Performance, 12 GB

A dedicated thread against a shared vCPUHow TPS and MSPT are read

Console players and Bedrock worlds

Console players need a couple of extra steps on their own side before they can join a Java server, and How to Let Console Players Join Your Java Server goes through them. Moving an existing Java world over to Bedrock is a separate job: How to Convert a Java World to Bedrock Format.