Minecraft
Genre: Open-World-Survival
Studio: Mojang
Publisher: Mojang
Rent a server
Rent a server
Genre: Open-World-Survival
Studio: Mojang
Publisher: Mojang

How much RAM do I need for my Minecraft Vanilla server?

If you decide to play Minecraft in its “vanilla” version (i.e. without mods and such), then the recommendation for RAM amount is relatively simple and primarily tied to the amount of players on your server.

Vanilla Minecraft

For most vanilla servers, these specifications should fit and ensure good performance. However, it is important to mention that Minecraft can quickly go to its knees in terms of performance, especially when the maps become very large over time. Even if, for example, 6GB is enough for 20 players on paper, performance problems can occur in the game itself. In such cases, it is not necessarily necessary (or helpful) to increase the RAM.

Instead, there are other tools that can positively influence performance, but require a few adjustments or modifications here or there.

What can I do to improve the vanilla Minecraft performance?

Paper

A widely used option would be “Paper“. This is a modification that optimizes some of Minecraft’s functions with the help of a plug-in, which then improves performance.

Important While using Paper can improve performance, it can also cause various issues with niche vanilla features and Redstone.

Paper – Folia

If you plan to run a server with more than 50 people, you should definitely check out “Folia“. This adds multithreading to Minecraft, which greatly improves performance. However, it does require some technical knowledge to implement. So this solution is recommended for advanced users.

Pufferfish

Another option for optimizing performance would be “Pufferfish“. This offers significantly more possibilities compared to Paper, but therefore also requires a bit more basic knowledge for the optimal configuration.

Fabric Mod Loader (plus Lithium)

A fourth solution would be the Fabric Mod Loader together with “Lithium“. This is especially recommended if you are focused on an authentic vanilla game experience, but still want improved performance. It leaves any vanilla functionality alone, but still provides some server-side optimizations.

Paper/Fabric Minecraft + Lithium

Prerendering Chunks

Another option for improving performance is to pre-render chunks. The process of rendering chunks is arguably one of Minecraft’s biggest problems. Therefore, pre-rendering chunks can have an extremely big impact. Here you can find mods and articles for Fabric and Forge.

Important Disadvantages of pre-rendering the chunks are that depending on the size of the map it can take extremely long until the rendering is completed (up to several days). Also the radius of the world border should be changed to the same size as the pre-generated chunks to prevent players from generating new ones.

Performance profiler

There are so-called “performance profilers”, which can check your server for issues and conflicts that might cause performance problems. Keep in mind that this only applies to servers that support plugins (Spigot, Paper, Pufferfish, Purpur).

It is recommended to use such a profiler BEFORE performing a RAM upgrade, because more RAM does not necessarily solve the performance problem. However, we would like to point out that the use of such a tool (like Spark) is quite complicated and reading the outputs can be quite confusing.

similar articles