Paper Note - PaperMC server alt Spigot

Last reviewed Aug 26, 2026 · 876 words

Give the JVM 3 GB, start it with Aikar's flags, and Paper will hold 10 players at a steady 20 ticks per second on hardware where the vanilla server jar visibly stutters. That is the practical case for Paper in one sentence: it is a drop-in replacement for the official server that fixes performance problems Mojang has left in place for a decade, keeps every Bukkit and Spigot plugin working, and costs nothing (GPL-3.0, about 12,600 stars). The listing's 1 GB minimum is real for one player wandering a fresh world; it is not the number to plan around.

Why Paper and not vanilla, Spigot or a modpack

Vanilla is single-threaded in the ways that hurt (chunk loading, entity ticking) and has no plugin API. Spigot added the API and modest optimisation; Paper forked Spigot to go further with asynchronous chunk loading, smarter entity activation ranges, and hundreds of small fixes, while staying compatible with the same plugin jars. It also exposes gameplay knobs vanilla hides, in config/paper-world-defaults.yml and paper-global.yml: mob spawn limits per world, hopper speed, whether TNT and pistons are allowed to do the things that crash servers. If your group wants Forge or Fabric mods (new blocks, new dimensions), Paper is the wrong tool; those are mod loaders, and Paper is a plugin server. For a survival world with friends, a mini-game, or anything "vanilla plus quality of life", Paper is the default and has been for years.

Java 21, and the flags that matter more than the RAM

Recent Minecraft versions require Java 21; check the PaperMC downloads page for what your target version needs. Then, the part most people skip: the JVM garbage collector defaults are tuned for short-lived applications, not a server that allocates constantly for hours. Aikar's flags are the community-standard set of G1GC options, and their effect on lag spikes is larger than adding another 2 GB. Set -Xms and -Xmx to the same value so the heap never resizes, and leave 1 GB or more for the operating system on top of whatever you give Java. A 4 GB VPS gets -Xmx3G, not -Xmx4G.

The Docker way: itzg's image does the tuning, and the backups

services:
  mc:
    image: itzg/minecraft-server
    ports:
      - "25565:25565"
    environment:
      EULA: "TRUE"
      TYPE: PAPER
      VERSION: LATEST
      MEMORY: 3G
      USE_AIKAR_FLAGS: "true"
      VIEW_DISTANCE: 8
      SIMULATION_DISTANCE: 6
    volumes:
      - ./data:/data
    restart: unless-stopped
    stdin_open: true
    tty: true

This downloads the right Paper build for the version, applies the flags, accepts the EULA (which you have read; see below) and puts world, configs and plugins under ./data. View and simulation distance are the two settings with the biggest effect on load; 8 and 6 look fine and cost far less than the defaults. docker attach gives you the server console. If you would rather have a web panel with a start button and a file editor, Crafty Controller is the simple one and Pterodactyl is the one for running many servers for other people.

Back up the world, world_nether and world_the_end folders plus plugins/ nightly with the server told to save-off first, or use the itzg backup sidecar container which handles that dance. For a private group, do not open 25565 to the internet; put every player on Tailscale and connect to the tailnet address. Public servers get griefers, bots probing for an open server-list entry, and the occasional exploit in a plugin; a private tailnet removes all three.

Plugins: install three, resist the rest

Plugins go in plugins/ as jars; Paper's own Hangar repository and SpigotMC are the sources. My starter set is a permissions plugin (LuckPerms), a world-protection and homes plugin, and a performance profiler (Spark) so that when someone says "it's laggy" you can see which chunk, entity or plugin is at fault instead of guessing. Every plugin beyond that is a tick-time cost and an update chore; a 30-plugin server is a server that breaks on every Minecraft release.

The EULA is the licence caveat, and it has teeth

Paper is free software; Minecraft is not. Every player needs a paid account (keep online-mode=true, which authenticates against Mojang and is also what makes bans mean anything), and Mojang's commercial usage guidelines restrict what you may sell: cosmetic perks and access are fine, gameplay-affecting purchases are not. That only matters if you charge; for a friends server it is a checkbox. The other hard rule is that "cracked" offline-mode servers are a bad idea for reasons beyond licensing, chiefly that anyone can log in as anyone.

What I'd do

itzg's image, TYPE=PAPER, 3 GB of heap on a 4 GB box, Aikar's flags on, view distance 8, three plugins, Tailscale-only access and a nightly world backup off the machine. That configuration has run a group of 8 for years with the only maintenance being a version bump when Mojang releases and a restart every 24 hours from a cron job, because a JVM that has run for a week is a JVM with a slow heap.