Minecraft released into early access in 2009 with the Java edition, and anyone who was around in the pre-historic, pre-Bedrock days, or continues to play the original version of the game, will know what a hassle multiplayer is. Either you buy a dedicated server for you and your friends, with a whitelist to ensure no strangers jump in and blow up the castle you and your brother spent two days building (definitely not speaking from experience here), or you fiddle with the third-party tool Hamachi, allowing online play through LAN servers.
It sounds counterintuitive, especially if you got started with Bedrock, but Java edition never had a friends list, so you couldn't invite people to your local single-player world. Plenty of impressionable kids (again, definitely not speaking from experience) had to tinker with port-forwarding while handing out their IP addresses to people they'd only ever met online. Sorry, dad, I'm not sure why we got DDOSed. Thankfully, Mojang, with all of its Microsoft money, is finally amending that.
The team has announced in a new blog post that, after almost 20 years, Minecraft Java is finally introducing a friends list, allowing you to invite people...
