Help CenterMods on Minecraft servers can be very tricky things sometimes! You can spend hours upon hours checking every mod for compatility. Going through crash report after crash report trying to figure out which mod could possibly be causing problems. And after all of that, the server might not even be optmized properly and run poorly! In this guide, we'll be guiding you through some helpful steps you can take to optimize your modded Minecraft server so you can get the best experience possible!
📦Important note for pre-made modpacks! Usually modpacks come with specifically chosen mods and configuration settings for the best experience playing the modpack. Following some of the tips and steps in this guide may interfere with the intended experience of the modpack, so follow at your own risk when it comes to pre-made modpacks!
⏩ Make sure to setup our Vanilla server optimization tips as well. These will all work on modded in addition to the recommendations below.
🌎World Pregeneration
Loading new chunks in your Minecraft world can be quite an intensive process! A chunk in the context of Minecraft is simply a section of the world. These sections are 16x16x256, or 16 blocks wide, 16 blocks long, and 256 blocks tall (including air blocks). All together, each chunk will have approximately 65,536 Blocks! When exploring new parts of your world, the server will need to generate 65,536 blocks for every single chunk you explore!
As you can imagine, this is usually a very demanding process on the server. However, when you explore parts of your world that you or other players have already explored, the server will not have to generate entirely new chunks. The server will instead just pull the already existing chunk data from your server, which is a much less intensive process!
The process of chunk "pregeneration" is a method of generating a large amount of the world without having to have players walk around and explore. This will cause the server to be able to be under much less load and will lead to a much more optimized experience overall! We have guides available for pregenerating the world on your Minecraft server on the SimpleGameHosting help pages! We'll link them below.
- Pregenerate a world for Minecraft 1.16.5 or newer
- Pregenerate a world for Minecraft versions prior to 1.16.5
👓View and Simulation Distance
View Distance and Simulation Distance are both settings that can be found in your server's "server.properties" file. This will be in your server's root directory, the area you get to when you click on the "File Manager" tab of the game panel. You can click on the file to edit it within the File Manager.
There are two settings inside of this file that can impact server performance heavily. You'll want to tweak both of these to ensure that your server is running as optimally as possible.
view-distance: 4-8
Your view distance affects how many chunks load around players. For survival worlds, 6-8 should be the ideal setting here. However, on SkyBlock and servers where view distances is less important, turning it down to 4 can be a huge performance boost.
simulation-distance: 3-5
This affects the distance in chunks around players in which things around the will happen. For example, things like crops and saplings growing, furnaces working, animals growing up, and more will only happen if a player is within this amount of chunks of it. Setting this lower and your view distance higher allows players to see further without using a ton of server performance.
You can make the changes necessary by changing the number to the right of the colon after the setting name, and then hitting the purple "SAVE CONTENT" button in the top right. After you save the content, you need to restart your server for the changes to take effect.
🏃♀️Modernfix and Other Optimization Mods
There is a whole genre of Minecraft mods out there with the sole purpose of making the game run better. They can do this through many different methods, such as changing how entities work, optimizing Minecraft's chunk generation, and even entirely rewriting Minecraft's lighting engine!
There are more optimization mods than we can reasonably discuss in this guide, but we will talk about and recommend one specifically. Modernfix is basically the holy grail of Minecraft optimization mods in the modern day. It's a very large collection of performance pathces, memory optimization, and bugfixes all inside a single mod. Even better, the mod doesn't even have to be installed on the player's PC for it to work on the server.
You can just add it to the server and players will be able to join as usual! ModernFix is available on both Modrinth and CurseForge, so you can choose which website you wish to download it from.
If you already have a modpack that doesn't have ModernFix in it, and wish to add it, you can follow our guide on adding mods to a pack!
You don't have to stop at just ModernFix though! You can add other optimization mods to your server to try and squeeze out as much performance as possible. There are helpful guides online that will give you some recommendations on which mods you should install for your version of Minecraft!
🔨 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!