fragmentsYou host it together.
The world is cut into regions. Whoever is standing nearest simulates one, and when they walk away it passes to somebody who is. That is the whole idea; the rest of this page is how it behaves when you push on it.
A region is the unit.
512 blocks squareThirty-two chunks by thirty-two, keyed by dimension and grid position. One person holds it at a time — there is no shared ownership and no standby copy waiting to take over.
Holding a region means you decide what happens in it: what writes, what spawns, what ticks. It does not mean you are the only one who has it loaded. Everyone loads what they can see, as they always did.
Most of the world is held by nobody at all, because nobody is standing there. That is the part people find surprising, and it is why an empty world costs nothing to keep.
Claiming, and letting go.
Hover a stepTen seconds after you are clear, it is released. But if somebody else is standing in it, there is no wait at all: it passes straight to them the moment they arrive. That is the case that keeps a world running while people come and go.
When somebody leaves mid-flight.
If they close the game politely, they say goodbye first: two seconds of drain, then whatever they were holding is inherited. Objects mid-air carry on, because the region they are in never stopped being simulated by somebody.
If their machine dies instead, nothing announces it. We wait thirty seconds before taking over — the same pause vanilla gives a player whose connection hiccups — then the survivors pick it up on their own.
Neither path asks anyone to do anything. There is no host to restart because there was never a host.
When everybody leaves.
Every chunk anyone changes is mirrored off-site as an ordinary Minecraft save. When the last person goes, nothing is holding the world and nothing is ticking. A rented box keeps charging you regardless.
Somebody comes back, pulls it down and starts simulating where they stand. There is no queue, because there is nothing to boot.
The saves are Anvil format, which is to say they are the same files your single-player worlds are. If we vanished tomorrow you would still have a world, and you could open it without us.
What it costs your machine.
Peers send each other only what has changed, so the steady figure is small — sixteen kilobits a second per link we keep warm, measured. Ship-heavy physics is the expensive case and we have estimated rather than measured it, which is why it is marked as an estimate below.
The simulation load is the part you already pay for in single-player. You are carrying a slice of a shared world instead of all of a private one.
Where it is rough.
This section exists because you would find all of it out in the first week anyway, and we would rather you heard it from us.
The same evening, on a box you pay to keep warm.
A rented server is priced by the memory the pack needs, and a 500-mod pack needs a lot of it. Fragments is not priced that way, because there is no box to size — the work sits across whoever is online instead of on a machine billed around the clock whether anybody is on it or not.
| Host | 16GB a month | Which tier |
|---|---|---|
| Apex Hosting | $71.99 | Standard listed plan |
| BisectHosting | $48.00 | flat $3/GB standard rate |
| GGServers | $48.00 | flat $3/GB standard rate |
| Shockbyte | $44.79 | Standard listed plan |
| PebbleHost | $36.00 | Premium — their $16 Budget 16GB has no thread guarantee, no backups and no modpack installer, so it is not the comparable tier |
Rent one instead, if any of these are true.
You want it up with nobody on it
A world only runs while somebody is in it. If you need a public server sitting there for strangers to wander into at four in the morning, that is a rented box and there is no way around it.
You are running plugins instead of mods
Paper, Spigot and the plugin ecosystem assume one authoritative server process. That is a different shape from this and we do not pretend otherwise.
More than sixteen of you
Sixteen is a hard cap the coordinator enforces, not a tier limit, and there is no setting anywhere that raises it.
Nobody has a decent connection
The group carries the world between them, so the group needs to be able to. One person on a phone hotspot is fine; everybody on one is not.
The free routes are weighed the same way on their own page: every way to play modded Minecraft together without renting, and the limit each one carries. Without a server →
The things people ask first.
Do you need a server to play modded Minecraft with friends?
Not with Fragments. The world runs across the players' own machines, so there is no server to rent and no hosting bill — and no single person's computer has to carry everyone else.
What happens when the person hosting leaves?
Nothing stops. There is no host to lose: the regions that player was simulating pass to whoever is standing in them, and the switch lands in under a second — 47 ms for the lease transfer itself, measured on our rig.
Does the world stay when everyone logs off?
Yes. Every chunk anyone changes is mirrored off-site as an ordinary Minecraft save, so a fortnight later there is still a world to come back to, and you weren't billed for the fortnight nobody played. One beta caveat we would rather state than hide: when a group has gone fully cold, the person who closed last should be the one who opens next, because coming back out of order can cost the last session. That is the part we are still building.
How heavy a modpack can Fragments run?
We run a 777-mod pack with no throttling. A pack that size boots on an 8GB rented plan and plays properly on a 16GB one, which is $36–72 a month. A rented server's price scales with the memory the pack needs, because you are paying for a box big enough to hold the pack. There is no box here — the work is spread across whoever is online.
Is Fragments free?
Yes, while it is in closed beta. There is nothing to buy, no card anywhere on the site, and no ads. Your machines run the world between them, and we keep an off-site copy so there is still a world to come back to after a fortnight nobody played. If that ever changes we will say so clearly, and well before it does.
How do people join a Fragments world?
The owner shares one link. Whoever opens it sees the pack and its size before committing, then accepts and restarts straight into it. Nobody trades an IP address or matches mod versions by hand.
How many people can play in one world?
Sixteen. That is a hard cap the coordinator enforces rather than a tier limit, so it is the same number for everybody and there is no setting that raises it.
Is Fragments an official Minecraft product?
No. Fragments is a mod made by Vagabonds Studio. It is not approved by or associated with Mojang or Microsoft.