How to play Minecraft for free: the legal ways, and the demo's rules
The official free trial, Minecraft Classic and the Realms trial — plus what the Java demo does, read from its code: 100 minutes, one fixed world and a reset button.
There is no free full version of Minecraft. There are, however, three official ways to play without paying, and one of them is more generous than most people realise. Everything else that promises "Minecraft for free" is not from Mojang.
1. The free trial (the demo)
Mojang's free-trial page offers a trial of both editions:
| edition | trial available on |
|---|---|
| Java Edition | Windows 10/11, macOS, Linux (Debian- and Arch-based) |
| Bedrock Edition | Windows 10/11, PlayStation, Android |
You download the game normally and sign in with a Microsoft account; an account that does not own the game plays the trial. According to the same page it lasts about 100 minutes of in-game time, about five in-game days, allows LAN play but not online servers, and "may vary slightly depending on your device".
What the Java demo actually does
On Java, the trial is the demo mode built into the game, and its rules are in the code (DemoMode):
- The clock is game ticks, not days you live through. The demo ends when the world's game time passes 120,500 ticks — five 24,000-tick days plus 500 — which is 100 minutes and 25 seconds of the world running. Sleeping skips the night outside, but not on that clock — the demo counts its own days in game ticks too — and a paused singleplayer world does not tick at all.
- You get told along the way: "Day Two", "Day Three", "Day Four", then "This is your last day!" and "Your time is almost up!" near the end.
- When it ends, the world freezes for you. You can still walk and look around, but breaking blocks and using items stops, with a reminder: "The demo time has expired. Buy the game to continue or start a new world!"
- It is always the same world. The demo creates one world,
Demo_World, in Survival with commands off and a bonus chest, from a fixed seed: the textNorth Carolina, which Java turns into the seed -343522682. - You can start over. The demo title screen has Play Demo World and Reset Demo World. Resetting deletes the world, and the next Play generates it again — from the same seed, so the same terrain in the same place, with a fresh 100 minutes.
The fixed seed is the useful part. Because every demo player gets the same world, you can plan the 100 minutes before starting: paste -343522682 into the Seed Map, set it to Java, and see where the nearest villages and structures are before the clock starts. The map's newest generator is 26.2's; 26.3 added the dappled forest biome and abandoned camps, so a few patches of the demo world will look different on the ground.
2. Minecraft Classic, in a browser
For the game's tenth birthday in May 2019, Mojang released Minecraft Classic as a free browser game: the 2009 version, with 32 blocks and, in Mojang's words, "all the original bugs". It is still served at classic.minecraft.net. It is Creative-only building with none of the modern game, but it is free and needs no download.
3. The Realms trial
Realms, Mojang's paid server hosting, has a free trial: the free-trial page says first-time users get 30 days free when they sign up for a 10-player Realms subscription. It is a subscription trial rather than a free game — someone in the group still needs to own Minecraft to play on it.
What owning it gets you
Buying Minecraft for PC today gets both editions: Minecraft: Java & Bedrock Edition for PC is one purchase. The same package is also included with PC Game Pass, according to Minecraft's help centre — not free, but a way to play without buying the game outright.