Players Cannot Connect to Your Bedrock Server

Someone cannot get onto your Bedrock server. Nearly every case is one of five things, and you can rule them out in a couple of minutes. Work through these in order.

1Is the Server Running?

• Log in to your game panel and open your Bedrock server.
• The status next to the server name should read RUNNING.
• If it is offline, press Start and watch the console until it settles.
• If it starts and then stops on its own, read the last lines before it stopped. That is where the reason is.

2Is the Port in the Right Box?

This is the most common cause by a wide margin.

• The panel shows your address as one string, 31.56.25.106:19132. Bedrock wants it as two.
• Server Address takes the part before the colon. Port takes the part after it.
• Pasting the whole thing into the address box fails every time. See how to connect to your Bedrock server.

3Do the Versions Match?

• Bedrock updates itself through the app store, so a player's game can update before your server has.
• Your server updates when it starts. Press Restart on the Console page and try again.
• This is worth checking first whenever everyone could connect yesterday and nobody can today. A Minecraft update is usually the reason.

4Are They on a Console?

• Consoles have no way to enter a server address, so a console player failing to connect is usually not a server problem at all.
• Test from a phone or a Windows PC first. If that works, your server is fine.
• See joining on Xbox, PlayStation or Switch.

5Are They Blocked?

• Allowlist. If the allowlist is on, anyone not on it is refused. It is the Bedrock equivalent of a whitelist and lives in allowlist.json, with the switch in server.properties.
• The server is full. max-players in server.properties sets the cap.
• They are on Java Edition. A Java client cannot join a Bedrock server. See Java or Bedrock, which server do you need.

Good to Know

• One player or everyone? If only one person cannot join, it is their client, their version or their platform. If nobody can, it is the server.
• Ask what the screen actually says. "Unable to connect to world" is usually the address or the port. A version message is a version problem. "You are not allowed" is the allowlist.
• Restarting fixes more than it should. A restart both updates the server and clears a stuck state, so it is a reasonable first move before deeper digging.

Finished

If you have been through all five and players still cannot connect, open a ticket with your server address, the exact message the player sees, and whether anyone at all can get in.