The server.properties settings worth knowing

Getting Started Reviewed September 6, 2026 1 min read

server.properties has around sixty settings and you will only ever touch a few of them. These are the ones that change what players experience.

What to do

  1. gamemode and difficulty

    gamemode takes survival, creative, adventure or spectator and applies to players joining for the first time. difficulty takes peaceful, easy, normal or hard — on peaceful hostile mobs never spawn.

  2. max-players

    A hard cap on simultaneous connections. Raising it does not give the server more memory, so raise it alongside the plan, not instead of it.

  3. pvp

    true or false. Turning it off stops players damaging each other but not mobs damaging players.

  4. spawn-protection

    A radius in blocks around spawn where non-operators cannot build. Set it to 0 if you want players to build freely at spawn.

How to confirm it worked

Restart the server after saving. Changes to this file are read at boot, so editing it while the server runs does nothing until the next start.

Worth knowing

Do not edit server.properties while the server is running. It rewrites the file on shutdown and will overwrite your changes.