Purpur Server Hosting

What is Purpur, and how is it different from Paper?

Purpur is a drop-in replacement for Paper built around configurability. It inherits Paper's performance work and API, then adds purpur.yml, a config file packed with gameplay options that have no equivalent in vanilla or Paper. Coming from Paper, you keep your world, plugins and files like paper-global.yml exactly as they are; Purpur simply adds its own file on first start.

That makes flexibility, not extra speed, the real reason to choose Purpur. It fits SMP servers that want to personalize survival without piling on plugins, communities that love vanilla-plus touches like riding mobs or moving spawners, and admins tired of chasing one behavior across three separate plugins.

If you don't need any extras, Paper is enough. Most of Purpur's options keep vanilla behavior by default, so nothing changes until you switch it on, but more settings also means more combinations to test before you go live.

What can you change with purpur.yml?

purpur.yml has two main parts: settings for server-wide behavior and world-settings for per-world gameplay. Rideable mobs are the crowd favorite. Turn on ridable for a mob and players with the right permission mount it with shift + right-click, steer with WASD and jump or fly with space; sub-options like ridable-in-water and ridable-max-y let you set limits. For spawners, the silk-touch option makes a broken cage drop as an item instead of vanishing, and you decide which tools and enchantment level are required.

On the performance side, villager lobotomize stands out. It disables AI calculations for villagers that can't move, such as those locked in trading halls, which noticeably relieves the CPU on villager-heavy servers. The AFK system can prefix idle players with [AFK] in the tab list and decides whether entities near AFK players keep ticking.

Elytra durability tweaks, sleep messages and use-alternate-keepalive, which aims to cut timeout kicks for players on unstable connections, live in the same file.

How much RAM does a Purpur server need?

Purpur runs on Paper's engine, so its resource needs are nearly identical; the options in purpur.yml don't add meaningful memory load on their own. Bronze 4GB is a good start for a light-plugin SMP of 5–15 players, Silver 6GB for 15–30, and Gold 8GB for 30–50 players running economy and land-claim plugins. At 50–100 players you'll move into the Platinum 10GB to Diamond 12GB range.

One Purpur-specific detail matters here: riding flying mobs lets players reach new terrain much faster, which raises chunk-generation load. If you enable riding, pre-generating the world with Chunky and setting a world border matters even more than it does on Paper. On the flip side, a villager-heavy economy server can carry noticeably more players on the same plan once lobotomize is on.

The 6 vCores on Emerald 16GB keep chunk generation and garbage collection away from the main thread on exploration-heavy servers. Xtreme 32GB is usually more than a single Purpur instance needs.

How do you control Purpur features with permissions?

Most player-facing Purpur features need more than a config toggle; they also require a permission. That lets you hand features out by rank instead of giving them to everyone: mob riding just for your event team, for example, or spawner pickup only for players who've reached a certain level. LuckPerms is the cleanest way to manage this; look up Purpur's permission nodes on the Permissions page of the official docs and assign them to groups.

On the plugin side, Purpur does everything Paper does: Bukkit, Spigot and Paper plugins load unchanged, and a jar from Hangar, Modrinth or SpigotMC only needs to go into the plugins folder. Purpur also exposes its own API additions to developers, so some plugins unlock extra features when they detect it.

The one thing to watch is overlap. If a plugin does something you've also enabled in purpur.yml, the two can clash; don't run spawner pickup through both Purpur and a separate spawner plugin, for instance. Managing each behavior from a single source makes troubleshooting easier as well.

When does Purpur update to new Minecraft versions?

Because Purpur is built on Paper, a new Minecraft release reaches Paper first and Purpur builds follow. If you want the newest version on day one, expect to wait a little on Purpur. For most communities that wait is the right call anyway, since plugins take time to update too. Purpur builds are published on purpurmc.org with version and build numbers.

A new version can add options to purpur.yml or move existing ones, so review your custom settings after updating. A safe routine looks like this: take a manual backup in the panel, confirm your plugins support the new release, update the server software, start it, read the console warnings and watch tps for a few minutes. A world opened on a newer version can't safely go back to an older one, so never skip the backup. Purpur follows the same Java rules as Paper: Java 21 for 1.20.5 through 1.21.x, and Java 25 from 26.1 onward.