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: Access the SimpleGameHosting Panel
To change your Message of the Day for your Minecraft server, you need to access the SGH Control Panel.
Open a new tab in your browser and navigate to: panel.simplegamehosting.com.
Enter your login credentials in the provided field and click the "Login" button.
👋 Note: You should have received a signup email after purchasing your server. If you didn't, please contact LiveChat Support on our website.
After successfully logging in, you will be presented with the dashboard. This is where you will select the server you wish to manage. If you have multiple servers active, they will appear here. Enable the "Showing Other Servers" toggle in the top right corner if you do not see your server listed.
Click "Manage Server" to move forward with changing the Message of the Day.
Step 2: Safely Shutting Down Your Server
After clicking "Manage Server," you'll be taken to the Console for your server. You can safely stop your server from here by hitting the red "Stop" button in the terminal/console window.
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
Next, click on the "File Manager" tab in the menu bar. You'll be taken to a page on the Panel where you'll be able to manage all of your server's files and folders.
⚡️ For Advanced Users: You can also access your files with SFTP. View our guide for more.
Make sure you're in the root folder of your server. You can do this by ensuring that "/home/container/" is displayed to the left of the "Create Directory" button.
Next, click the "server.properties" file to open the built-in Editor. This will display all of the pre-set properties for your server, including the MOTD.
On a Vanilla server, you will typically see the "motd=" on line 12 of the editor, but this can often vary. Don't worry if it is not on the same line for you.
To change your MOTD, simply change the text after the "=."
👉 Certain server software (Spigot, PaperMC, etc.) allows you to customize your MOTD's text format and color. Here are the codes that can be used to customize your Message of the Day. You can learn more about customizing your MOTD in our Help Guide.
Once you've added your new MOTD, click the "Save Content" button in the top right corner of the Editor.
Step 4: Testing Your New MOTD
Head back to the Console for your server. To do this, simply hit "Console" in the menu bar on the SGH Panel. When you're back, hit "Start" in the terminal/console window to boot up your Minecraft server.
After your server boots up successfully, launch Minecraft on your computer. Head to the Multiplayer tab in-game, and be sure to add your server to the Server List.
If you don't have your server saved to your Multiplayer Server List in-game, you can quickly copy your server IP by hitting the two squares next to the IP on the Console page. You can then quickly paste it into Minecraft without having to remember it.
You should now see your new MOTD displayed next to your server icon!
🤔 Not Working? Try this. If you already have Minecraft open in the background, you will need to press "Refresh" on the Multiplayer in order for the changes to be visible.
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.
Bold, Italics, Etc.
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!