Today’s a really great day for the Minecraft community, as we’re rolling out the biggest update yet to Minecraft: Pocket Edition, Gear VR Edition and Windows 10 Edition beta. You may remember the preview of this update in last week’s trailer, which featured a huge Rube Goldberg build you can now download for free! We’re calling it the Friendly Update, because in addition to a massive feast of amazing new features to enhance your gameplay like horses, pig riding, and pistons, this update is bringing you several exciting options to play together with your friends.

Today, we’re integrating Xbox Live functionality into Minecraft: Pocket Edition on iOS, Android, Kindle Fire and the Gear VR Edition. Each of these versions will have their own individual set of over 1000 gamerscore, which is exciting news to achievement hunters! That’s a super cool feature, but what’s even cooler is the cross-device multiplayer that is now possible with Xbox Live. Starting now, you can easily connect with your Xbox Live friends for online multiplayer games, regardless of whether they are playing on the Windows 10 Edition or a supported mobile device.

In addition to all the new content we already mentioned, today is the launch of the Minecraft Realms service for Pocket Edition, Gear VR Edition and the Windows 10 Edition beta. Over 700,000 people helped us test the service during the Alpha back in April. Realms makes it easier than ever before to play multiplayer with your friends on a dedicated server that’s available to you 24/7. Realms lets you host worlds in the cloud, which can only be accessed by folks that you invite. And, it offers up to 11 players to play simultaneously, which is over twice what we were able to offer before. Minecraft Realms and Xbox Live make it easier than ever to do this. And, because the worlds are persistent, your friends can keep building away, even when you’re not online. No more disconnects because the hosting player had to respond to a text or head offline to eat dinner! Realms also offers you the ability to access your world from multiple devices – start exploring on your phone while you’re out on Wi-fi and switch over to your Windows 10 PC or tablet when you get home. Your world is there waiting for you, no matter what device you’re playing on – play how you want, where you want, on whatever device you want.

Our goal is to bring our huge community of over 100 million players together, and the new multiplayer functionality with Xbox Live and Realms is the first step towards that goal. Then in the next year, we’re working to bring all of these features to players on consoles as well.

The Friendly Update with Xbox Live and Realms is rolling out now on iOS, Android, Kindle Fire, and Windows 10. We’re also offering a free 30-day trial of Realms on mobile and Windows 10 to everyone with an Xbox Live account, so be sure to check it out once you’re in the app!

Happy crafting, and we’ll see you online!