A server with forty plugins has several thousand files. Almost everything you will ever need to edit is in one of about eight places, and knowing them turns a hunt into a direct click.
The map
server.propertiesServer root. Port, difficulty, view distance, MOTD, allowlist toggle, online mode.
plugins/<Name>/config.ymlEvery plugin's settings. One folder per plugin, created on first start.
logs/latest.logEverything the console said, including what scrolled past. logs/ also keeps compressed older ones.
world/The Overworld. world_nether and world_the_end sit beside it.
world/playerdata/One file per player: inventory, position, health. Named by UUID.
banned-players.jsonServer root, alongside whitelist.json and ops.json. All three are plain JSON.
crash-reports/Written on a crash, named by timestamp. The most recent one is the one you want.
spigot.yml and paper-global.ymlThe performance settings that are not in server.properties.
When you still cannot find it
- Sort by modified date
The file you changed last, or the one a plugin just wrote, comes straight to the top. This finds things faster than remembering where they were.
- Search from the root, not the folder you are in
The panel's search looks below where you are standing. Starting from the top costs nothing and misses nothing.
- Use SFTP for anything involving many files
A desktop client can search a whole tree at once and shows sizes at a glance, which the browser cannot do as comfortably.
The server holds its configuration in memory and rewrites several of these files on shutdown. Your careful edit gets overwritten by what was in memory. Stop, edit, start — in that order — for anything the server itself owns.
logs/latest.log is the file to send when asking for helpIt contains the full startup and everything since. A screenshot of the console shows twenty lines; the log shows the twenty lines above them, which is usually where the answer is.