Minecraft Windows 10 Edition - (Unable to connect to world) Friend can't join me and I can't join friend

Amen.  I come home from work and three of my kids are begging me to fix a minecraft problem.  I spend two hours on it, never get it fixed, and everyone goes to bed angry.

im having a similar issue. im using the windows 10 edition of minecraft. 

i am unable to join friends worlds but i can join the recomended servers no problem.

i have tried to use the commands you posted but they didnt work. i have tried turning off my anti virus but that doesnt seem to work either. 

im using mobile internet if that makes a difference. i dont see how it would as i should be able to connect through a mobile device anyway on the win 10 version. 

cheers

I'm a bit sorry about being so critical, but this first response here is very poor.  I've been an Internet Engineer for thirty years and the usability around this problem is terrible, and the answer points to a busy work steps that demonstrate that for the vast majority of people they do not represent any kind of effective solution.  As of this writing, "12 people were helped by this reply" but 4687 indicate "I have the same question".  A quarter of a percent success rate is atrocious.

Basically there are a whole bunch of different issues that can cause this, but all of them result in the vague and unhelpful error message "Unable to connect to world" without even some sort of reference code which could be looked up for more answers. 

This answer doesn't even directly mention the possibility of firewalls being an issue.  When I first encountered the "cannot connect to world" error for trying to access my realm, I looked into whether firewalls could be a problem.  I finally found one page on the official Minecraft help site that says, "To allow access to Minecraft realms through your firewall, the ports that need to be open are 26000-28000 and port 80 and 443 without destructive proxies. This should be enough, and no server IP or hostname is needed."

This itself is not as helpful as it could be because it doesn't mention TCP vs UDP.  However, in my firewall at the time, initiating TCP sessions to any port shouldn't have been a problem, so I enabled outbound UDP to that 26000-28000 port range.  Still no love.  I then started doing packet traces and saw it was trying to reach a port like 30,212 (I don't remember exactly).  I broadened my UDP hole to 26000-32000, which is quite huge, and then I could connect to realms.

Yet I turned to the net once more when I was having trouble getting my kids to access the realm, which is how I found this page and all of the other people having problems with Minecraft access but getting entirely unhelpful official support.   My problem is not the same as the OP, but I'm commenting here because the bad top post is just astonishing.

In my case, the kids' iPads are running the same version of Minecraft as mine but can't connect to the Realm even though their Xbox Live accounts are set up with permissions to join multiplayer games and they can join each other on the LAN.  (The permissions thing was a whole different terrible usability experience.) Trying to load up the Realm though results in it starting the process to enter, but failing with "Unable to connect to world" like my earlier firewall problem had.  So I tried just taking my firewall out of the picture entirely and opened UDP to all ports.  Still fails.   No indication it is a permissions problem.  No helpful diagnostics at all. 

I know my network inside and out.  I know how to debug network problems like bad addresses and ethernet adapters needing to be reset and the sorts of things mentioned here.  This is none of those things, and the top answer here is basically worthless.  Please come up with better diagnostics for resolving this sort of problem, which includes pointers to how to fix.

My problem is that i cant play local multiplayer at all. My PC can join my tablet just fine, but not the other way around. Trying to join through xbox live just says unable to connect.

Whenever we try to connect to each other's worlds through the Xbox app it says "Unable to connect to world". We can play together on a realms server, and can join other servers, just not each other.

I've changed my NAT type to open, and port forwarded all the required ports for the Xbox app. Still nothing.

I've tried using a VPN to several different countries but still has the same results.

We are both using Minecraft: Windows 10 Edition.

We have both uninstalled and reinstalled Minecraft, no luck.

The only thing I have gotten to work was to join a session through VPN access from my PC while connecting to my sons game who was on his Xbox One. I too have gone through just about every recommended step that I have read online, none of them actually working at this point. I use Nord VPN who has a P2P VPN server you can use. I'm sure other providers out there offer the same thing as well.

Merry Christmas everyone!