Features

Playing with friends

VR Realms is better with people. This page covers the social side: groups, travelling somewhere together, what happens when the person hosting leaves, and how voice and chat work.

Groups

A group is a community you belong to, whether that is a handful of friends or a big crew that meets every weekend. Open Groups from the Home page of the menu to browse them or make your own.

Making a group

Choose Create group, give it a name and a short description, and decide who can join. You can add up to five tags so people can find it, and an announcement that members see at the top. Pick the privacy setting carefully, because it is locked once the group exists.

Joining

How you get in depends on the group:

• Free Join groups let you straight in.
• Groups that ask for requests send yours to their owner and moderators. Your button changes to Requested, and you can cancel it from there.
• Groups that are by invite only need someone inside to invite you.

When your request is approved, a message lets you know you are in.

Inviting someone nearby

Open the player card of anyone near you and press Invite. If you only run one group, the invite goes straight out. If you are in several, you get to pick which one. Owners and moderators can always invite, and members can too if the owner allows it.

The person you invite gets a message, and the join button on your group changes to Accept invite for them, with no waiting for approval.

Looking after a group

Owners and moderators can Warn, Kick or Ban members, and owners can make someone a moderator or take that away again. A warning comes with a written note, and the member receives it in their notifications, so they know exactly what it was about. The owner decides which of these tools moderators are allowed to use.

Groups also earn gold together when members play in the same world. Gold and leaderboards explains how.

Going somewhere together

The easiest way to take a crowd to a world is to drop a portal. Pick the world in the menu, drop a portal to a new instance of it, and everyone in your session can see it.

Anyone who wants to come along presses Queue up. Queueing starts downloading the world in the background, so people are ready by the time you leave. Once you have the world yourself, the portal gives everyone two minutes to join, and each new person who queues resets that clock.

When you are ready, press Go now. It also shows how many people are ready. Anyone still downloading follows automatically when they are done, and for a minute after you leave the portal stays open so latecomers can still queue and catch up.

When the host leaves

In a world someone is hosting, that person keeps the session running. If they leave, everyone else is asked what they want to do:

• Stay With Group keeps you together. The game hands the session over to a new host and you stay in the same world.
• Go Home takes you to your own home.
• Go Hub takes you to the hub.

The new host is whoever has the best connection among the people staying. You come back to the spot you were standing in, and while it switches over you will see a short loading message.

Homes are the exception. A home belongs to its owner, so when they leave, their guests go back to their own homes.

If a trip to the hub ever fails and you land back home, a message explains why: the game and the hub are on different versions, the hub could not be reached, or the connection dropped while the hub was updating. In the last two cases, waiting a minute and trying again usually does it.

Picking a hub

There are three hubs: USA East, USA East 2 and USA West. Everyone starts in East so the room stays busy, and the region button on the Home page only appears once East is full. Then you can pick any of the three, or leave it and you go to East 2.

The Join button shows how many people are in the hub you will join. The hub has more about what happens there.

Voice

Your microphone starts off. Turn it on with Microphone Enabled in Settings. If you are hosting and someone joins while your mic is still off, you get a reminder.

The mic icon on the menu bar shows your state at a glance: white when it is on, green while you are talking, and red when it is off. Name tags above people glow while they speak, so you can always tell who is talking.

• One person too loud or too quiet? Open their player card to mute them or change their volume. Only you hear the difference.
• Need a moment of quiet? Mute All silences everyone for you until you turn it off or start a new session.
• Proximity Voice makes voices fade with distance and sound muffled through walls, like in real life.

If you cannot hear anyone, or nobody can hear you, type /voice in chat. It shows who is in your voice room and what your microphone and speakers are doing. /voice reset puts your audio devices and voice options back to their defaults. It does not turn your mic on for you.

Chat

On desktop, press Enter to start typing. In VR, open the Chat page in the menu and tap the box to bring up the keyboard.

Whispers

To talk to one person privately, type /w followed by their name and your message, or just a slash and their name. You do not need the whole name, only enough of it to tell them apart from everyone else. After that, everything you type goes to that person until you type /all to talk to everyone again. If they leave, you are switched back to everyone automatically.

The chat filter

Chat filters out profanity and slurs by default. Someone hosting their own world can turn the filter off there with Censor Chat, but the hub is always filtered.

Chat commands

If you use full body tracking and something looks wrong, /fbt debug 1 writes extra detail into your game log. Sending a log shows how to get it to us.