So you’re a Minecraft server owner, and you upgraded to 1.14. Things probably didn’t turn out exactly as you expected, and you went online looking for help. Unhelpfully, most sources look something like this:
At the end of the day, 1.14.1 will be released, based on bugs and issues that were reported in 1.14. The reason these bugs were not found out to begin with is insufficient testing of snapshots – which means not enough people were willing to put their servers and worlds on the line for intensive testing. Now that you have joined these elite few server managers who threw caution to the wind for the advancement of Minecraft Lovers everywhere, we salute you!
MinecraftLovers was also among the first servers to make the 1.14 upgrade – and we know all the problems it caused. We also did the legwork to find the biggest issues, and troubleshooting on how to fix them. The steps below will help get your server running more efficiently – while it might be a good idea to follow these steps every week, I recommend EVERY 1.14 server go through these motions before upgrading to 1.14.1 to avoid more headaches down the road.
Some, but not all, of these steps assume you are running a Spigot/Bukkit server. All steps assume you have FTP access to your server files, or self-hosting.
Tip 1: Keep Spigot Updated
If you are running a Spigot server, this should be a no-brainer. The Spigot team work constantly on their own sets of bug fixes and improvement enhancements, so even with no plugins or extra settings Spigot will usually run a lot smoother than a plain vanilla server.
We recommend running BuildTools once a day to get the latest set of improvements and bug fixes (depending on how the developers are feeling, there is usually between 1 and 20 updates to Spigot every day). Remember – when uploading the new spigot jar, completely shut down your server first, upload the new jar, and restart.
Click Here to get instructions on how to use BuildTools
Click Here to donate to the Spigot developers (they are all volunteers)
Tip 2: Upgrade to Paper
“Paper” is a fork of Spigot – meaning it started as the same project, but some of the development team took it in a different direction. The first builds of Paper for 1.14 were made available on May 7, 2019.
Paper is ruthless on improving server speed and efficiency – switching between Paper and Spigot is somewhat controversial between the two communities and generally lies with personal choice. At MinecraftLovers, we use Paper because we find it gives a big speed boost to the server as a whole. Many of the issues we have encountered with 1.14 have been related to massive server load and memory leaks that caused chunk corruption, so using Paper will help solve some of those problems right off the bat.
Click Here for more information on PaperMC
Click Here to donate to the PaperMC developers
Tip 3: Run the Region Fixer Early and Often
As I mentioned before, one of the big problems with 1.14 is that it tends to break worlds by creating corrupted chunks because of intensive load, which can massively impact your world.
The developer Fenixin built a python script that can scan your world files, identify corrupted, wrongly-located, or otherwise “bad” chunks and either fix or delete them. This can significantly reduce the risk of a server crash and generally give a speed boost – we recommend running this every few days in 1.14, and every few weeks even with more stable versions.
Click Here to get the Region Fixer
Tip 4: Run the Chunk Deleter
The “Chunk Deleter” was originally a tool built back in 2011, and updated specifically for the MinecraftLovers server in 2016 (and maintained by one of our staff, Lazini). This tool is used to delete “Unbuilt” chunks from your world – any place that was explored, but doesn’t contain anything someone actually “built”.
This tool is extremely useful in massively shrinking your world size (when your host puts a limit on how big your server can be), regenerating large chunks of wilderness (like forests and deserts that have been mined out but not used for builds), and causing passive mobs to naturally spawn as the chunks are re-generated without causing players to explore farther out.
With 1.14, cleaning up your world with the Chunk Deleter will also remove the vast majority of corrupted chunks, and cause the Region Fixer tool to run a lot faster. We recommend running this every other time you run the Region Fixer.
Click Here to get the Chunk Deleter
Tip 5: Stop Hosting A Server!
This might seem obvious, but if 1.14 is giving you a massive headache, you can skip it! Minecraftlovers has one of the oldest and most popular semi-vanilla servers, so if you’re sick of dealing with server management yourself we would be happy to have you!
If you found this guide useful, click here to donate to Minecraftlovers