Welcome to our updates website! Come back regularly to find the latest Hive updates, or subscribe by email to get (important) updates delivered to your mailbox.

Join The Hive this Halloween (Start of October 31st - End of November 2nd) and get an exclusive Hub Title! 

It will never return, so make sure to visit The Hive this Halloween.

• Custom Servers are now available on all regions. A batch of new options is releasing soon - we'll update you when they release
• Added a Custom Servers Invites toggle to /toggles - this allows you to turn off incoming invites
• Fixes for the 365 day costume reward ("Time Owl") not being granted
• The behaviour of /pc (party chat) and /p (party menu) is now consistent between regions
• Added support for all the new Minecraft blocks and items introduced in the last few versions - you'll see why soon!*

*: No, we are NOT adding Netherite weapons and armor to any existing games.

We're constantly releasing improvements and fixes for Custom Servers. Here's 2 much-requested features, releasing today.

Role and Team Selection

Gain full control over your lobby and manually set the role (or team) for each player! 

Invite All Friends

Got a lot of friends you want to invite? Simply invite every online friend with one button.

A toggle to turn off incoming invites is coming soon.

These features are now live on Treasure Wars and Murder Mystery custom servers, and soon on all games.

Games

All games are now available on our North America region.

Limits

The limits have been increased to:

45 minutes of gameplay AND 3 rounds played.

For an in-depth explanation of limits please read our support article.

We're looking into a paid option for players to gain access to unlimited custom servers. We'll post an update once we have more information on this.

Options

We're going to continue adding more options to Custom Servers. The best place to share your ideas is on our forums.

We are starting the Custom Servers: Hive Plus Beta.

For now, the beta is only live on North America.

Please refer to the following support article for more information on available games and limits: Custom Servers Beta.

As the support article states, we will rapidly expand the game availability.

Some of you may have noticed we've been testing Custom Servers! In this update, we'll elaborate a bit more on them.

We're currently ironing out the bugs we're finding during the custom server testing. Currently, Hive Staff and Hive Partners can create custom servers, and invite any players to them. If you want to join in, there's an #bedrock-custom-servers channel on Discord.

Future Plans

We'd like to get these features in the hands of players as soon as we can. Once we're confident we've fixed important outstanding issues, we're expanding Custom Server access to our Plus members.

The following limits will apply during the custom servers beta period:

Regular Members

No creations (can join other players servers)

Plus Members

No more creations are allowed after BOTH these limits are met:

• 2 rounds played
• 30 minutes of gameplay (this excludes any lobby, warmup, endgame)

Every day at midnight UTC, the limits reset. 

Please note these limits are counted against the host. Participating in someone else's Custom Server does not impact your limits.

Partners and Staff

No limits

These limits exist to protect the stability of our networks. When you're in a custom server, you're taking up above-average resources compared to regular gameplay. We hope to loosen these limits over time. However, we currently have no plans to allow Regular members to create Custom Servers.

We'll post an update once we're entering this next stage of Custom Servers. Until then, keep an eye out for those hosted by staff and partners!

The following changes are in testing on our North America region only at the moment:

Party Chat

The /p short command has been restored to it's previous functionality.

To access party chat:

• Use "/pc" (without a message) to toggle between party chat and global chat.
• Use "/pc your message here" to send a single message in party chat.

VPN/Proxy rule

It is no longer allowed to use a VPN- or proxy service to play on The Hive. Learn more HERE.

Privacy Enhancement

We no longer store raw IP addresses, even if this option was left untouched in the privacy control settings. Previous data has been removed. This also removes the "Store Country" data and setting.

We are continuing the rollout of our previous update to our North America and Europe regions.

As we are combining this with other backend maintenance, the entire network will be down for maintenance.

We have no set end time for this maintenance.  

UPDATE: The below now applies to ALL regions.

As we get closer to our SwarmTastic Update, we are starting to introduce parts of it to our public network. We're starting today with a rollout to the Asia region.

Custom Servers - Staff / Partner Beta

In today's update, live only on the Asia region, we've introduced the required changes for Custom Servers. These servers, which will be initially launching with Swarms, allow you to control many aspects of a game. For example, you will be able to tweak (or disable!) the Leap delay in DeathRun, the shop prices in Treasure Wars, set the theme in Just Build, and much more.

Custom Servers will be in staff beta until testing finishes. After this, we will grant access to our Hive Partners. General availability will come with our Swarms update.

Party (& Swarm) Chat - Generally Available

This update also contains our Group Chat backend, which in turns enables Party Chat. We want to stress that party chat is not, and should not be used as, private chat. Most notably:

• Party chat is only available in parties of 3 and more
• Party chat is subject to the exact same rules as game chat
• Party chat is monitored by the exact same filtering & monitoring system as game chat

Final Notes

This update might not seem like much (yet), but this is one of the biggest hurdles out of the way for our upcoming Swarms update: it contains most of the (backend) code it relies on. Because of the complexity of the changes, we will be closely monitoring this update. If all goes well, we hope to bring the above changes to the other regions next week.