Every important server.properties setting in one friendly form, with a
plain-English explanation for each. Tweak the values, watch the file build live, then
download or copy it.
The message players see in their server list. Supports section-sign (§) colour codes.
What mode new players start in. Survival is the standard choice; creative gives unlimited blocks and flight.
How hostile the world is. Peaceful disables most mobs and hunger damage; hard enables starvation and tougher mobs.
Locks difficulty to hard and bans players permanently (or sets them to spectator) when they die. Off for most servers.
Whether players can damage each other directly. Turn off for purely co-operative or build servers.
How many players can be online at once. Set this to your realistic peak, not your whitelist size.
How many chunks the server sends around each player. Lowering this is the single biggest CPU and bandwidth saver — 8 to 10 is plenty for most servers.
How far from a player mobs, crops and redstone keep ticking. Usually kept equal to or just below view distance.
Radius around world spawn that non-ops cannot edit. Set to 0 to let everyone build at spawn.
Verifies players against Mojang/Microsoft auth. Keep this ON unless you run behind a proxy like Velocity or BungeeCord, where it must be off.
When on, only players you have whitelisted can join. The best way to keep a private server private.
Allows command blocks to run. Needed for many maps and minigames; leave off if you do not use them.
Whether players can travel to the Nether through portals. Turning it off disables Nether portals entirely.
Whether hostile mobs spawn naturally. Note: difficulty=peaceful already removes most monsters regardless of this setting.
Kick players after this many minutes of inactivity. 0 disables the timeout (no kicking).
The folder your world is stored in. Change it to switch worlds; create a new name to start fresh.
Seed used to generate a new world. Leave blank for a random world; it has no effect on a world that already exists.
Live preview — updates as you edit. Download saves a server.properties file you can drop into your server folder.
Heads up: editing the world seed or world name only matters for a brand-new world. To apply changes, stop the server, replace (or merge) this file, then start it again.
server.properties is the plain-text configuration file at the root of
every Java Minecraft server. It controls gamemode and difficulty, the player cap,
view and simulation distance, PvP, the whitelist, your MOTD and dozens of other
settings. This generator lets you set them with confidence and download a ready-to-use
file.
If your server is lagging, two keys matter most: view-distance and
simulation-distance. Dropping simulation distance from 10 to 6 often does
more for tick rate than any amount of extra RAM, because Minecraft’s tick loop is
single-thread CPU-bound. See our
RAM guide
for the full picture.
Want a colourful server-list line too? Use the MOTD generator. Built by ChunkyHost — servers that only bill while you play.