The server browser is more readily discoverable in Battlefield 6, after being buried deep in the menus of previous titles in the series. However, its functions are still quite complex, and there are certain aspects of it that most players will not grasp right away.
This guide serves as a comprehensive explainer for using the server browser in Battlefield 6.
Show Player Created Content
Before you can even play custom content, you must enable a setting related to these community experiences. Navigate to Battlefield 6 Settings, then System, and set “Show Player Created Content” to on. You may find this setting turns itself off randomly, so return here if you see a message stating that you have to make a purchase when attempting to join custom servers. It may also be necessary to force close your game and restart it before the settings change actually takes place.
Where Is The Server Browser In Battlefield 6?
Begin by selecting Community beneath Multiplayer in the bottom left of the main menu. This page is titled Experience Search, where you can see a random selection of ‘Community Experiences’ along the bottom. Ignore all of those and select ‘Browse Servers’ in the middle instead.
Server Browser Settings
The first thing you should know is that official Battlefield 6 servers are simply not listed here, unlike some previous titles in the series. Nevertheless, you can find and play on community servers which conform to the official ruleset, and thus gain full progression XP.
The ‘Browse Servers’ section is where you will see all currently running servers along with their custom names, current player count, and ping. As you select each one, you can view further details including their tags, and the mode. If a server has been heavily modified in some way, it will be tagged here clearly as “Modified XP”, and implies a limited XP gain towards your progression.
The sort function in the top-left allows you to view servers based on player count or ping. Filters let you get even more granular, so you can exclude modes and maps. Entire real-world regions with unplayable pings can be filtered out as well. If you find that your results include too many overfull servers, you can opt to filter them based on the number of available slots. Tag search can help with finding servers that meet certain requirements such as being ‘Verified’ experiences, which are custom games where you can still earn full XP towards your progression, including Assignments.
Search Experiences Alternative
If you are more inclined to find servers based on specific rulesets, you can use the ‘Search Experiences’ button to the left of ‘Browser Servers’ instead.
Here you can search for experiences, which are essentially user-created custom games. You can search either by keyword in the name or description of an experience using the text box at the top, or by ‘experience code’ at the bottom. You may stumble upon these codes in videos on social media based on their virality, which makes it easy to then find them in-game using this search function.
Tag-based search allows you to filter experiences by their settings. These tags are applied automatically by the game so you can generally rely upon them to not be bait and switch servers for the purpose of farming naive rookies.
You can also filter by map and mode, which is helpful if you are looking for the opportunity to explore the secrets of a specific map, for example.
Host A Server
At the very top of the server list under the server browser is the ‘Host’ function. This lets any player, including you, to set custom rules and then spin up a server which will be listed along with all the rest of the custom experiences for anyone to see and join.
You can set a Server Name of your choosing, and a Server Description to properly explain its purpose. Welcome and Periodic messages are for making automated announcements at the start of and during matches.
It is possible to host a secret gated server by setting a password, which you can then share only with your private community. This also prevents it from being listed in the various Search functions, including on the official website.
Server persistence determines if the server remains spun up after you yourself go offline, thus keeping it accessible to other players.
Those are all the intricacies of Battlefield 6’s server browser explained.
