Minecraft server.properties Explained, Line by Line

server.properties is the first file you touch on a new Minecraft server and the one most people edit by trial and error. This is a walkthrough of the settings that change how your server behaves, and an honest note about the ones that do not matter as much as you would think.

The performance settings

These three account for most of the difference between a smooth server and a struggling one.

view-distance

view-distance=10

How many chunks out from each player the server sends to the client. This is the single most expensive setting in the file: cost grows roughly with the square of the value. Going from 10 to 16 does not add 60% more work — it adds around 150%.

Most servers do not need more than 8–10. Players rarely notice the difference past that, and you get the capacity back in tick headroom.

simulation-distance

simulation-distance=10

How many chunks out actually tick — mobs move, crops grow, redstone runs. Separating this from view-distance was one of the more useful changes Mojang made.

The common tuning is a larger view distance with a smaller simulation distance: players see far, but the server only simulates close in. Something like view-distance=10 with simulation-distance=6 is a reasonable starting point for a busy server.

max-players

max-players=20

Worth setting honestly rather than optimistically. Every online player multiplies the chunk loading and entity tracking work. A server configured for 100 players that can comfortably handle 30 will simply fall over at 40 instead of turning people away at 30.

The MOTD

motd=A Minecraft Server

The two lines of text under your server name in the multiplayer list. Two things make this annoying to edit by hand:

• Colour codes use the section sign §, which many editors will not type and some will mangle on save.
• The file is read as ISO-8859-1 unless escaped, so pasting § directly often produces garbage characters.

The safe way is to write the codes escaped as \u00A7, which is what our MOTD generator outputs — it gives you the exact motd= line with a live preview of how it will look in the server list.

Security and access

online-mode=true
white-list=false
enforce-secure-profile=true

online-mode=true should stay true. It verifies every player against Mojang's authentication servers. Turning it off means anyone can connect using any username, including that of an operator. The only legitimate reason to disable it is running behind a proxy (BungeeCord, Velocity) that does the authentication itself — and in that case the backend servers must be firewalled off from the internet.

spawn-protection deserves a mention because the default catches people out:

spawn-protection=16

This creates a 16-block radius around spawn where non-operators cannot build. On a survival server where spawn is just where players appear, this is usually not what you want — set it to 0.

Networking

server-port=25565
server-ip=
network-compression-threshold=256

Leave server-ip empty unless you have a specific reason. It binds the server to one interface, and setting it wrong is a common cause of "my server won't start" or "I can't connect from outside".

network-compression-threshold sets the packet size above which packets are compressed. The default of 256 is fine for internet servers. Raising it trades bandwidth for CPU; only worth touching if you are on a local network.

Settings that matter less than people think

• max-tick-time — a watchdog that kills the server if a tick takes too long. Many guides suggest disabling it with -1. That hides crashes instead of fixing them; the watchdog is usually telling you something real.
• sync-chunk-writes — occasionally suggested as a performance fix. On Paper this is already handled better at the server level.
• use-native-transport — Linux-only optimisation, enabled by default, no reason to change.

A note on Paper and forks

If you run Paper, Purpur or a similar fork, server.properties is only part of the picture. Those servers add paper-world-defaults.yml, spigot.yml and bukkit.yml, and several of the interesting performance settings — entity activation ranges, mob spawn limits, chunk loading behaviour — live there instead.

Editing view-distance in server.properties still works, but if a setting seems to be ignored, check whether the fork has overridden it in its own configuration.

Generate the file

If you would rather not hand-edit escaping and colour codes, our MOTD and server.properties generator produces the lines ready to paste.