Changing Your Minecraft Server Settings

Gliding across the endless lands of Minecraft, you’ll discover a variety of mobs both cute and dangerous, dungeons of darkness and lava, and thousands of different customizations you can try as you explore with others! The adventure grows when you take advantage of these customizations, leading to new and exciting experiences for all players on your Minecraft server.
 
The fun never stops as no matter what types of journeys you and your friends favor, be it creative only building, hardcore survival, or using admin-only controls to run a community server, you can take your own path by changing your server settings. Join us as we cover the settings you can change and how you can change those to upgrade your Minecraft server experience for all!

How to Change Your Minecraft Settings

To begin, we will be showing you how to find and edit your main server options found. There are three ways you can edit these options to ensure you can edit your settings easily and with full control!

General Minecraft Server Settings

Minecraft Server Settings

• MOTD – Sets the “message of the day”, a message that will show under the server name in the Minecraft server list.
• Server Name – This is the server name displayed when pinged by a server query.
• Game Mode – Determines the game mode for your server. You can choose between “Survival”, “Creative”, “Adventure”, and “Spectator” modes.
• Player count – Modify the number of players that can join your server.
• Online mode – When disabled, this disables Mojang’s account authentication when joining a server.
• PvP – Enable this option to allow players to attack each other on the server.
• Whitelist enabled – If enabled, this allows only specific players in a whitelist to be able to join.
• Auto Save – You can enable this to ensure the world autosaves every 15 minutes.
• Optimize map for Minecraft Version 1.13 and newer – When your server is on 1.13 or higher, this option optimizes your server map to increase performance.

RCON Settings

• RCON enabled – Enabling this option allows you to utilize RCON to administrate your server.
• RCON password – Sets your RCON password that is used to connect to RCON when managing your server.

Gameplay Settings

• Nether enabled – You can disable the Nether by unchecking this option.
• Command blocks enabled – Enable this box to allow for command block to work in-game.
• Monsters enabled – When marked, enables the spawning of monsters in darkness.
• Pets enabled – Allows for the spawning of friendly mobs and animals when checked.
• Villagers enabled – This setting allows villager NPCs to spawn when marked.
• Difficulty – Determines the server difficulty which can be set between Peaceful, Easy, Normal, and Hard.
  • Peaceful Difficulty – Hostile mobs will not spawn naturally, except for zoglins, hoglins, shulkers, piglin brutes (Bedrock Edition Only), and the Enderdragon. Players also gain back health rapidly and do not get hungry. In Peaceful difficulty, it is impossible to activate the Ender portal to go to the End as you cannot get the twelve ender eyes necessary to activate the End portal.
  • Easy Difficulty – Mobs deal less damage compared to normal difficulty, cave spiders and bees cannot poison a player, Withers cannot afflict a Wither effect although wither skeletons are able to, and zombies and skeletons cannot wear full armor sets. When the hunger bar goes empty, players will lose health until they only have 10 hearts left.
  • Normal Difficulty – Mobs deal their normal amount of damage, zombies cannot break down doors, Vindicators can break doors, villagers have a 50% chance of being killed and turned into a zombie, and zombies and skeletons can rarely wear enchanted armor sets. When hunger depletes, players will experience damage until they are at 1 heart.
  • Hard Difficulty – Mobs deal the most damage in this difficulty but can drop better items when killed. Zombies can break doors and spawn reinforcements, spiders gain extra stats for speed, strength, regeneration, and invisibility, villagers always turn into a zombie when killed by one, and pillagers can spawn near players. Depleted hunger will cause damage until a player is killed.
• Hardcore enabled – When enabled, sets the server to hardcore mode which forces the difficulty to hard, each player will only have one life, and if killed you can only respawn in Spectator mode or exit the server. *You can reset your player data or your world to respawn as normal back on your server.

Level Settings

• NPC villages enabled – When ticked, allows NPC villages to appear in new chunks.
• Level seed – Used by the world generation algorithm, this will be the seed set when randomly generating a new world. Using the same seed results in the same random world.
• World types – This setting determines the world type of your server. You can choose between Default, Flat, Large biomes, Amplified, and Customized (Generator Settings).
• Generator settings – Allows for specifying details and generator options for the world type “Customized (Generator Settings)” if selected.

Java Settings

The settings here are internal Java options. Normally, changes here are not needed. It is recommended to only change the values here if you know exactly what you’re wanting to do.

• Java version – Sets the java version for the server.
• -MaxPermSize – Determines the memory Java can consume to store permanent generation data.
• -Xincgc – Enables an incremental garbage collector for Java.
• -DisableExplicitGC – Disables the manual execution of the garbage collector.
• -SoftRefLRUPolicyMSPerMB – Specifies the number of milliseconds a soft reference will be kept alive for each MB of free space in the heap.
• -UseAdaptiveGCBoundary – This allows the garbage collector to move the boundary between the tenured generation and the young generation as needed to help with performance.
• -MaxGCPauseMillis – Sets the maximum garbage collector pause time. A lower value may reduce the memory usage but can lead to higher CPU usage.
• -UseFastAccessorMethods – Enables optimized versions of GetField.
• -XXUseParallelGC – Use parallel garbage collection for scavenges.
• -Dfastcraft.asm.permissive=true – Disables the mod “Fastcraft” if it is installed on the server.
• -XXUseG1GC – Enables the G1 garbage collector.
• Partial Modification Loader – Activates the Partial Modification Loader.

Config Files Section

You can access all of your configuration files for your Minecraft server here. We will cover each of these files below!

bukkit.yml

• spawn-limits – Sets the spawn limits for monsters, animals, water-animals, and ambient creatures in Minecraft.
• ticks-per (spawns) – Adjusts the tick delay for how often animals and monsters spawn. The default value of 400 will mean that a creature will attempt to spawn every 400 ticks or 20 seconds.
• autosave – Determines the interval in server ticks on how often the server will autosave. The default value of 6000 results in an autosave every 5 minutes.
• allow-end – When set to false, disables the End world on the server. End portals will stop working.

spigot.yml

• bungeecord – Activates a server to be the proxy server for a BungeeCord network. This is an advanced option. We advise using the BungeeCord option included in the left navigation bar to create a BungeeCord network You can find more information on this option below in the “BungeeCord Settings” section.
• messages – Use this section to set and change the default Minecraft messages.
• world-settings – This section allows for adjusting many aspects of your world, from growth, entity tracking range, hopper transfer speed, and more.
• merge-radius – Sets the range in blocks at which exp orbs and items will merge together if they’re the same item. Increasing this range can help with performance on servers where players drop a lot of items or have mob farms.
• entity-activation-range – Adjusts the range in blocks in which a mob will activate and appear in-game. Lowering this can help with performance, but will mean that mobs farther away than the set range will be invisible.
• entity-tracking-range – Determines how far away in blocks an entity can track you from. This can be adjusted for all types of mobs.
• ticks-per (hoppers) – Sets how often hoppers run a check, perform a transfer, and the number of items that can be transferred.

server.properties

All of the main Mincecraft server settings located in your General Settings will appear in this file. This includes your map options, generator options, difficulty, motd, server name, RCON, and more!

ops.json

In the ops.json file, players you OP will appear here. You can OP players, giving them full access to all commands and features in-game, by using the “Player Control” feature in the navigation bar to the left on your Minecraft server panel.

FTP File Browser

To access your server files in your FTP or File Browser, you will need to find each file. We will include the steps to accessing your File Browser and the locations where each configuration file is stored in there.

1. Access your Minecraft server’s control panel.
2. On your server to the left in your navigation bar, look for “File Browser” under “TOOLS” and select this option.
   
3. In the “File Browser”, you click folders to enter them and can click the home icon above your files at any time to return back to the start of your server file’s main directory.
   
4. You can now navigate to the following areas to access each specific configuration file. For the locations included, <servertype> represents the specific Minecraft server type that you have installed. When installing the Minecraft Bukkit server type, for example, your main directory folder will be named “minecraftbukkit”.
   • Server.properties | “<servertype>” → “server.properties”
   • Spigot.yml | “<servertype>” → “spigot.yml”
   • Bukkit.yml | “<servertype>” → “bukkit.yml”
   • Paper.yml (if Paper is installed) | “minecraftbukkit” → “paper.yml”
   • For plugin configs | “minecraftbukkit” → “plugins” → “” folder → and then you can edit any .config, .conf, .txt, .json, and .yml files.
   • For mod configs | “<modded-servertype>” → “config” → “” folder → and then edit any .config, .conf, .txt, .json, and .yml files.
5. Edit these files directly by clicking on them within the “File Browser” and after making any changes, click “Save changes” at the bottom.
6. Lastly, exit your File Browser and then restart the server to load those adjustments.

Editing Additional Minecraft Options

Along with your main server settings, there are also many additional options you can use to add everything from server networking, compatibility with Minecraft: Bedrock through Geyser, adjusting your Minecraft version, managing your worlds, and much more.

BungeeCord Server Settings

Before you can set up a Minecraft BungeeCord network, you will need at least three Minecraft servers. One of which will need to be the BungeeCord server that acts as a proxy to the actual Minecraft servers, and then at least two playable servers that your players will be able to join and play together on. This is generally a Hub and then can be servers such as Creative, Survival, Minigames, Factions, and more!

• BungeeCord active – Enables BungeeCord on the server, ensuring that you can add it to a BungeeCord network.
• Start only BungeeCord – Determines if only the BungeeCord server should be started for your network. The game server will stay stopped.
• BungeeCord Firewall – Sets if a firewall should be enabled, whether that’s the IP itself or your own custom one.
• BungeeCord Firewall IP – Allow you to set a firewall IP for your server if you have a custom address.

Changing Your Minecraft Version

You are able to change the version of your Minecraft server in this area if supported by the server type you have installed. Most server types will support multiple versions that you are able to switch between. It is generally recommended to run the latest version when possible.

Installing Geyser to Your Minecraft Server

In this area, you are able to install any available addon packages for your server type. For a Minecraft Bukkit and Spigot server, Geyser and Floodgate can be installed to support Minecraft: Bedrock Edition users being able to join your server.

Managing Your Minecraft Worlds

The ultimate world manager curated for your Nitrado Minecraft server, in this section you can manage all of the worlds on your server with the ability to change the default world, make a copy of your worlds, delete, and repair your worlds. World backups are also stored below in the “World Backups” section.

Edit Your Minecraft Game Server to Perfection

Minecraft’s ability to change nearly every possible setting of the game ensures you have the ability to create the perfect server without limitations! From a server name and a MOTD to establish your server, options that optimize your server’s performance, settings to connect multiple of your Minecraft servers into your own network, the ultimate file manager, and world management fully custom for Nitrado Minecraft game servers, and so much more!
 
Dive into the amazing world of Minecraft servers head first, access hundreds of settings you can adjust in a flash using a variety of powerful tools, and draw in your friends and other players with your own Minecraft server!
 
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