Passage is a Minecraft network transfer router to send connecting players to their corresponding servers and act as an entrypoint to the network. While traditional Minecraft networks relied on proxies like BungeeCord, Waterfall or Velocity, Passage is only an entrypoint and initial router and drops the connection to the player right after the routing, improving performance and reliability in the process.
This is possible through the transfer packet of the official Minecraft: Java Edition [protocol]. Passage validates connecting players, handles authentication, resource pack installation and status pings and then redirects the players to any dynamic backend server. Since the transfer packet was only added in Minecraft 1.20.5, Passage can only handle Minecraft clients starting from this version.
Despite the universal success and reliability of conventional proxies like Velocity, Waterfall and BungeeCord, the general concept of a proxy that transcribes all packages brings a lot of problems with it. Since those problems are inherent to the concept itself, this cannot be solved by patching the existing proxies, but instead a new kind of network has to be created.
Traditional proxies need to transcode all Minecraft packets and adjust the contents to be consistent for the player's connection. Switching servers is simulated by switching worlds. This means that proxies need to be updated for each iteration of the Minecraft protocol and new versions are only supported after said update. Additionally, this transcribing limits the possible throughput and requires additional computing resources as well as a slightly increased latency.
Another problem with proxies is the scalability. Running a single instance is easy and will suffice for most networks, but once a network has enough players, the territory of multi-proxy setups needs to be explored. This comes with its own set of problems and complexity. But even if one proxy is able to host enough players, there are still risks of using only a single proxy. Having no replication creates a single point of failure and all connections need to be dropped, if the proxy is restarted, disconnecting all players in the process.
Finally, conventional proxies have problems to preserve the Mojang chat signature chain because they need to transcode all messages and inject their own messages into the chat. While there are a few rumors around chat signing, there are many good reasons to support chat signing. While it is not entirely impossible to use chat signing with proxies, there is just a lot of inherent complexity and lots of things that can go wrong. With a transfer based approach, chat signing is supported out-of-the-box.
You can find a detailed comparison with more aspects on our website.
- Connect your Minecraft network without any proxy or permanent connection with excellent reliability and performance, ready within seconds.
- Route your players to dynamic servers using Service discovery and an algorithm of your preference.
- Stay always online and drop no player connections during your maintenance or partial outages.
- Authenticate and validate your players with custom logic, to prevent any load from your backend servers.
- Prepare your players even before they reach your server, making sure the desired resource packs are loaded.
- Be ready for the next Minecraft version, without any necessity to update Passage beforehand.
- Support Mojang chat signing for a better protection of your players and advanced chat features.
Visit our website to get a full overview over Passage's features.
Warning
Passage is under active development and may experience breaking changes until the stable version 1.0.0 is released. After that version, breaking changes will be performed in adherence to Semantic Versioning.
Install your own instance of Passage within seconds with our Getting Started Guide on our website. You can also find more information on how to configure, optimize and embed Passage in your network there.
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