A Play button for your server

If you run a Minecraft server, the hardest part of getting somebody in is everything before the game starts: find the modpack, find the right version, install it, add the address, connect. A Play button does all of it from one click on your own page.

What the player sees

1. They click Play on your website.
2. The launcher opens and asks one question: Join your server? It will install your pack.
3. They say yes, and nothing else is asked of them. The pack downloads, your address is saved in their server list, the game starts and they arrive on your server.

Two things still interrupt, and both are meant to. On a first-ever install they sign in to Minecraft — that is Mojang's, not ours. And a modpack whose author disabled distribution on CurseForge sends them through CurseForge's own download page, because the author asked for that.

Somebody who does not have the launcher yet lands on a page that explains what this is and offers the download. They never see an error.

Making one

Sign in and open your account → Developers. You need three things:

Field	What goes in it
Server address	Exactly what a player types into Minecraft — play.example.com, or with a port. Not a web address.
Pack id	The modpack's project id on Modrinth or CurseForge. Paste the pack's address and the field fills itself in; CurseForge is the exception, because its API does not take a slug — use the Project ID from the right-hand column of the pack's page.
Version	Optional. Leave it empty and every player gets the newest version whenever they click. Fill it in and they always get that one.

Out comes a picture, a link and a ready-made snippet:

<a href="https://stygion.eu/play?t=YOURTOKEN"><img
   src="https://stygion.eu/b/YOURTOKEN.svg" alt="Play Your Server"
   height="40" style="height:40px;width:auto"></a>

Paste it on your page and you are done.

Pin a version when your server does not move, and leave it empty when you keep up with the pack. A pinned link is how you stop a player arriving on a version your server cannot accept.

Changing it later

You paste the snippet once. The button on your page is a picture served from us, so everything about it — the name on it, the address it connects to, which pack it installs, which version — is edited in your account → Developers, and every page carrying that button follows within a few minutes. You never have to go back and edit your website, and neither does anybody else who put your button on theirs.

That is also why it is a picture rather than a piece of HTML with your server's name written into it. The old shape went stale the day anything changed, silently, on pages whose owners had no way of knowing.

The words on the button come in Czech or English — the snippet you copy is made in the language you are reading the account in, and adding or removing ?l=cs on the picture's address switches it.

Taking one down

The same page lists every button you have made, with how many times each has been opened, and a Take down button. A link you take down stops working immediately, and both the picture and the page say it was taken down — so an old button on a forum post says something true rather than looking broken. Taking one down is final; make a new one rather than expecting it back.

What we count, and what we do not

The number beside each button is how many times it was opened — clicked and resolved by a launcher. Loading the picture is not counted, so it is a count of people who set off, not of people who scrolled past. There is no record of who clicked: we hold a number, not a list of where individual people play.

Why it needs an account

A link that installs software on somebody else's machine has to belong to somebody. Signing in is what makes a button answerable for and, more importantly, what makes it possible to take down. That is also why a link is a row we hold rather than a bundle of parameters in an address: the launcher asks us what a link means, so what it means can change and can stop.