Help CenterThe Message of the Day (MOTD) is the first thing players see before joining your Minecraft server. It's a crucial feature that allows you to share important details about your server, updates, game modes, etc. This guide will show you how to change the MOTD for your Minecraft server via the SimpleGameHosting panel.
🔎Looking for a formatting guide with color codes for customizing your MOTD instead? Here's our guide on colors & formatting.
Changing Your Minecraft Server MOTD
Step 1: Logging Into The Game Panel
To begin the process of adding a Message of the Day (MOTD) to your Minecraft server, you first need to access the SimpleGameHosting Control Panel.
1. Open a new tab in your browser and navigate to panel.simplegamehosting.com.
2. Enter your login credentials in the provided field and click the Login button.
3. After logging in successfully, you’ll be taken to the Console tab for your server. If you have more than one server, you’ll first see a dashboard listing all your available servers. Just click on the one you want to manage.
Step 2: Safely Shutting Down Your Server
On your servers Console tab, you can safely stop your server from here by hitting the red Stop button in the terminal/console window.
🛑Wait: Before you continue, make sure that your server has fully shut down. Once complete, you will often see the console display "Server marked as offline...".
Step 3: Changing the MOTD
To update your server’s Message of the Day (MOTD), start by clicking on the File Manager tab in the menu bar. This will bring you to a page where you can view and edit all of your server's files.
Make sure you’re in the root directory of your server. You’ll know you’re in the right spot if you see /home/container/ to the left of the Create Directory button at the top of the page.
Once there:
1. Find and click on the server.properties file.
2. This will open the built-in file editor and display your server’s configuration settings, including the MOTD (Message of the Day).
- From here, you can edit the MOTD to whatever you’d like players to see when they view your server in the multiplayer list.
On most Vanilla servers, you’ll usually find the motd= line around line 35 in the server.properties file but this can vary depending on the server version and other settings. Don’t worry if it’s not in the exact same spot for you.
To change your MOTD:
1. Look for the line that starts with motd=.
2. Replace the text after the equals sign with your desired message.
👋Note: If you’re using server software like Spigot or PaperMC, you can also add color and formatting codes to customize your MOTD’s appearance. You can learn more about customizing your MOTD in our Help Guide.
3. Once you’ve entered your new message, click the Save Content button in the top-right corner of the editor to save your changes.
Step 4: Testing Your New MOTD
To test if your updated Message of the Day is working, head back to the Console tab on the SimpleGameHosting Panel by clicking Console from the menu bar. Once you’re there, click the Start button to boot up your Minecraft server.
After the server has fully started:
1. Launch Minecraft on your computer.
2. Go to the Multiplayer tab.
3. If your server isn’t already saved to your list, you can quickly add it by copying your server IP.
- Just click the two overlapping squares next to the IP address on the Console page to copy it to your clipboard.
- Paste it into Minecraft to connect easily.
You should now see your new MOTD displayed just beneath or below your server name.
🤔 Not seeing the new MOTD? If Minecraft was already open, click the Refresh button on the Multiplayer screen to reload the server list and see
MOTD Formatting
The MOTD has many different customization options at its disposal through the use of "Formatting Codes". Formatting Codes are special codes used to invoke different text effects within the MOTD using \u00A7X, where X is one of the many format codes that can be used. We'll be going over a few below.
Colors
Colors can be invoked by replacing X with any number 1-9, or any letter a-f (the letter MUST be lowercase).
For example, if I wanted to write an MOTD with the word "Hello" written in blue, I would format it by using \u00A79Hello. The end result will look like below:
A full list of colors and their corresponding codes can be found on the Minecraft Wiki.
Formatting
We can also use of other formatting options such as bolding, italicizing, strikethrough, and more. These options must come AFTER any color formatting, or it will not work! For example, we can make our Hello bold by using \u00A7l, the code for bolding text. Adding it to the current MOTD gives us \u00a79\u00a7lHello.
These can also be found within the Minecraft Wiki.
Note: Strikethrough and Underline do NOT work on Bedrock edition clients!
A Useful Tool
If manually adding all these formatting codes seems like a hassle, don't worry! There is an MOTD generator specifically made for adding formatted text to your server's MOTD that you can find here. The website will automatically generate the needed formatting codes for you to paste into your server.properties file, and it even comes with a preview so that you can see what your text will look like!
If you need help, don't hesitate to reach out to our support team by submitting a Support Ticket or contacting us directly via LiveChat!