The original Java Edition of the Minecraft Server that we installed previously implements all of the basic server functionality required for multiplayer Minecraft. But perhaps this is not enough. What if you want to customise the server by installing plugins? In that case you need to install a more sophisticated server forked off the original. The PaperMC Minecraft Server provides a lot of bells and whistles not present in the original.
Download
Download the PaperMC server.
wget https://bit.ly/papermc-jar -O paper-1.20.4-365.jar
That should leave you with a Java archive, paper-1.20.4-365.jar. You’ll probably want to download a more recent version if one exists.
Prepare Server
You’ll need to accept the EULA. See instructions here.
Run Server
Run the server.
java -Xms1G -Xmx2G -jar paper-1.20.4-365.jar nogui
If you get an error about your version of Java not being supported then you have some options:
- either change to a supported version; or
- simply ignore the issue.
I’m taking the latter approach (it seemed like a lot less work!) and it works fine.
java -DPaper.IgnoreJavaVersion=true -Xms1G -Xmx2G -jar paper-1.20.4-365.jar nogui
Once the server is running you can connect and play as usual. In subsequent posts we’ll look at the process of adding and configuring plugins.
Advantages of Paper
What additional features can you expect with the Paper distribution?
- Better performance.
- Plugin API (so you can add features to the game).
- Asynchronous chunk loading (impacts performance).
- Entity activation range (impacts performance in large worlds).