How realms work

The lifecycle

Create. /realm create opens a menu of themes. Picking one charges economy.create-cost (refunded if creation fails), then builds the realm from a random template of that theme — a copy of a world under the world layout, or a stamped cell under grid. The realm starts at realm.default-size and realm.default-member-size, then any atlasrealms.realm.size.<n> / member.size.<n> permission the owner holds sets or caps those on first entry.

Go. /realm go loads and enters the owner’s own realm. /realm visit <player> enters someone else’s, if its status and any ban allow it.

Invite. /realm invite <online player> (or the Members menu) lets the owner pick Resident Member or Trusted Member for the target. The target gets a clickable accept/refuse line. Invites expire after realm.invite-expiry-seconds.

Grow. The border and the member limit each grow through a permission rank, through a paid upgrade out of the bank, or both — see The bank & upgrades.

Bank. Any member can deposit into the realm’s one bank. Only the owner withdraws from it or spends it on upgrades.

Access levels, rights, and flags

A player standing in a realm holds one access level — Visitor, Resident Member, Trusted Member, or Owner. What a level may do is a set of rights, configured in roles.yml: build, use containers, interact with blocks, use workbenches, damage entities, damage players, ride entities, take from item frames.

Flags are a different thing: realm-wide switches like pvp, tnt-explosion or keep-inventory, configured per realm and defaulted in config.yml. A right decides what one player may do; a flag decides what the realm allows at all. Hitting another player, for instance, needs the pvp flag on and the damage-players right held — either one missing refuses it. See Flags & roles.

Realm status

An owner sets one status from the Settings menu or /realm admin realm setting <player> status <value>:

Status	Who may enter
OPEN	Anyone, unless banned.
MEMBERS	Members and the owner only.
CLOSED	The owner only.

A ban always beats status, and the owner is never refused their own realm.

Where the data lives

A realm’s record — owner, border size, member map, ban list, status, theme, and its balance — lives in the database, not on the owner. See the four record tables in the database, and note that the money sits on the realm, not in anyone’s pocket: deleting a realm pays the whole balance to the owner first, and a transfer hands the balance over with everything else.

The realm’s blocks live outside the database entirely: in an ordinary world folder under world storage, or in a compact .polar blob under polar storage. See World storage & layout for the difference.

Per-player data — which realm a player owns, their reset count, when they were last seen, and where to put them back on login — lives in a separate profile row, one per player.