Minecraft friends!

I’ve been trying to get MineCraft on our PlayStation to work with multiplayer for ages without any success.  I could see friends, but my kids couldn’t see or add friends and couldn’t join any remote multiplayer games.  They kept getting messages like:

“You need permission.  You cannot add friends because of how your Microsoft account is set up.  This can be changed in your privacy and online safety settings on aka.ms/accountsettings.“

It was, in a word, frustrating.  However, after a lot of searching and setting fiddling, I finally got it to work.  Basically, a parent needs to create accounts email addresses for kids, then PlayStation accounts for those kids, then Microsoft accounts for them as well.  Then the parent sets up a “family account” and adds the children.  In any case, even after setting up all these various accounts…  once the parent is logged in they need to adjust their “Xbox” settings from within their Microsoft profile!

The process that eventually worked for me was this:

1. Go to: https://account.microsoft.com/account/privacy
2. Scroll down to other privacy settings, next to the Xbox icon look for:
   1. “Adjust your Xbox privacy settings on either your console or by signing in to Xbox.com” there should be a hyper text link that will take you to online safety and privacy
3. Under Xbox one/Windows 10 online safety, check the setting
   1. “You can play with people outside of Xbox Live” make sure it is set to “Allow”

Even after doing all this, it still didn’t work. I still had to fiddle with additional Xbox settings to “Allow mutliplayer” and then log in/out/restart.  I had to log the kids out of the Playstation and Microsoft accounts on the laptop, log the kids out of their Microsoft accounts in Minecraft, restart Minecraft, and log their Minecraft account back into the Microsoft account.  I’m not sure which of these were strictly required – I just know that it took one or more of these steps to get this to work.

I hope this helps someone else.