Minecraft wiki entry for Server, associated text: Minecraft servers allow players to play online or via a local area network with other people. Internally, the game runs a server for single-player games, this was done in order to make the single-player game experience consistent with the multiplayer experience and make it so that changes made to the game such as bug fixes apply to both single-player games and multiplayer games. Official server software is only available on Java Edition in the release state. The Bedrock Edition server software is currently in Alpha.