[MCPE-99977] Cannot Join Friends At All.

Hi, throughout the year I have been experiencing an extremely difficult and irritating problem when joining friends online in Minecraft Bedrock Edition.

I have all privacy settings checked to allow multiplayer connectivity.
My NAT type is open, my Xbox Live connectivity is connected, my firewall is on.
Minecraft is enabled on my firewall within inbound connections by default.
I have restarted my router, restarted my PC, and used mobile data to test if it is my network or device.

All of this and I still have problems connecting to my friend's worlds.

I have tried everything that has been recommended to me, even signing out of Xbox Live and signing back in. I have spent 8 hours in total trying to troubleshoot and fix the problem. If I am lucky, I manage to join my friend for about a week with no problems, they can't join me though, not at all, even after the procedures. I have found that if my friend launches Minecraft first and loads into the world, I have to then launch Minecraft and then I will be able to join.

This is our process or procedure, it has been working for over a week, until today.

I wanted to play with friends today and somehow it stopped working completely. It was working fine yesterday, with our procedure, only I could join my friend. I also found out that: If I do our process and play in my friend's world, if my friend decides to change worlds and I try to join, it will not let me connect, it will say "Unable to connect to world". We then have to redo our process and it works fine, until today. I tried the whole process for about 2 hours now and nothing. We both decided to use mobile data and nothing worked, we both checked all settings, restarted our PC's, the whole lot of troubleshooting, and still nothing. I got frustrated and decided to report this.

Hopefully I will be able to receive some help, this has been an ongoing issue for me that only gets fixed sometimes if I'm lucky, which proves, that it is not mine or my friend's device, network or settings causing the issues. It has to either be a bug or an issue with Minecraft or Xbox services and its networking.

Comments 16

Jack Johnson 2020-09-14T06:15:34Z

yeah dude the new 1.16.40 bugged online play, bought skin pack, the marketplace, severs, and realms. hope they fix it soon 😞

user-189af 2020-09-14T06:36:13Z

Duplicate of MCPE-36190.

Piotr 2020-09-14T11:25:45Z

No, it is not a duplicate. That issue refers to multiple devices and their connectivity, mainly iOS. Mine is a different issue with connectivity issues relating to PC.

Jonathan Lewis 2020-09-14T19:15:01Z

I have had no issue with connecting to LAN games until 1.16.40.

I play on Windows 10 and my sons play on Kindle Fire devices. As our devices updated to 1.16.40, the ability to see each other's worlds over LAN has disappeared. These issues were not present when we were playing in 1.16.20.

I have tried every possible fix that I have seen online and nothing seems to work. Right now, it doesn't matter who is hosting the world we want to play in, the Friends list is empty. The issue did not go away with the 1.16.40 hotfix.

Jonathan Lewis 2020-09-21T21:35:07Z

So further update, I've opened up all my security settings to the lowest that they can go on the router, and it seems that I can get it so that I can now see and join games hosted on Android devices (in this case, Kindle Fire) on the same LAN from my Windows 10 laptop. But, they still cannot see games I host on my Windows 10 laptop (i.e. I open up a world on my Windows 10 laptop, and any Android device users cannot see the game in their Friends screen even though we are on the same LAN).

6 more comments

Jonathan Lewis 2020-09-27T00:41:48Z

An un-numbered update pushed through yesterday that has seemingly fixed this issue for me. I hope that others that were having LAN connection issues have had them resolved.

Iaroslav Vlasiuk 2020-09-27T00:57:10Z

Are you connected to Wifi?

Jonathan Lewis 2020-09-28T21:19:18Z

@ Iaroslav Vlasiuk - I don't know if that question was directed at me or not, but yes I am connected via wi-fi.

[Mod] Umija5895M 2020-10-01T12:07:14Z

(Piotr) Are you still experiencing this issue? Specifically this question is directed at players who were previously able to connect in a specific network environment and then could not. As was stated in several comments, this is different from MCPE-36190, which generally applies to never being able to connect due to network restrictions, account settings, etc.

Piotr 2020-10-18T20:43:42Z

@Umija5895M, I am still experiencing this issue. I can only join my friend, they cannot join me. I have port forwarded all related ports and my friends have done the same. Still no luck. 😞

Jonathan Lewis 2021-01-17T04:20:52Z

This bug has resurfaced after the Windows Update KB4598242 was downloaded and installed yesterday. I am running Window 10 and my sons run on Kindle Fire tablets. They can see me in their Friends list when I am in a world and they can join normally, but I cannot see any of their worlds when they load them. We are on the same network and nothing else has changed other than the windows update. We've been running on 1.16.201 for a little while with no issues until just today.

Note that the last time I had this issue, it also coincided with a Window Update.

I've already implemented all the various fixes that are recommended by MCPE-36190 (such as having an open NAT, etc.).

Jonathan Lewis 2021-01-31T07:33:39Z

Yesterday I was updated to the 1.16.201 hotfix that has seemingly fixed this issue for us (both Kindle Fire and Windows 10 users). Thanks.

TheTamedWolf 2021-06-11T02:01:09Z

I can't join my friends world anymore. It was working yesterday. She changed some settings like from classic to pocket and it prevented me from getting on. Then she switched it back and I was able to join. That doesn't seem to work the second time.

[MCQA] v-magwar 2021-06-17T12:28:29Z

Is this still an issue in the latest version? If so, can you add it to the affected versions?

TheTamedWolf 2021-06-20T14:52:29Z

It seems to be working for me now. I think it was a windows update that made it work. Not sure on that..

Piotr 2021-06-20T18:17:03Z

@Magdalena Wardak. The problem has been fixed for me. It has been fixed for some time now, but I did not respond as I kept on seeing updates within my post, meaning there were other issues as well. The main issue I had was with my old router. It seems to have had either corrupted settings, or some problem within it that prevented my NAT from being moderate or open, it was always on strict. Since the router replacement before April 2021, all has been fine. I can now join my friends and they can join me, with no problems. It may have been the router and other issues on Microsoft's side, but I cannot be certain about the latter. My advice to all experiencing my problem would be to get a new router, as that fixed the problem for me, from what I could tell and what made the difference.