VanillaCord Server Hosting

What is VanillaCord, and why isn't it a proxy?

VanillaCord is a patching tool, maintained by ME1312, that adds IP forwarding support to vanilla Minecraft servers. The name can mislead: VanillaCord is not a proxy itself, it prepares the backend server that sits behind one. You give it a version, it downloads Mojang's official server jar for that version, patches the login process, and writes a new jar named after the version into its out folder.

Why is that needed? An unmodified vanilla server cannot understand the real identity of a player coming through Velocity or BungeeCord; it sees everyone as an offline player arriving from the proxy's address. VanillaCord lets it read the forwarded data, so the whitelist, operator permissions and player data stay tied to the correct UUID.

The project README lists versions from 1.7 to 1.21, plus snapshots and pre-releases. Version 2.0, released in March 2024, was a full rewrite on bridge-asm prompted by internal changes in 1.20. If you plan to run a newer Minecraft release than that list covers, test it on a separate server first.

Why choose a pure vanilla backend over Paper?

Paper is fast and runs plugins, but it changes some vanilla behavior for performance and safety. It disables piston-based TNT, carpet and rail duplication by default, for example, and certain farm designs or redstone timings can produce different results. For technical players who expect wiki farm designs to work exactly as documented, those differences are frustrating.

VanillaCord gives those communities a place inside a network. Your lobby and minigames can keep running on Paper with all their plugins, while the survival world stays pure vanilla and players switch between them with /server.

The trade-offs are real. Vanilla has no plugin API, so there are no permission, economy or land-claim plugins; customization is limited to datapacks, functions and command blocks. Vanilla also lacks Paper's optimizations, so it uses more CPU and RAM for the same player count. When you pick a plan, size a VanillaCord server like a real survival server, not like a proxy.

How do you configure forwarding in vanillacord.txt?

The first time the patched server starts, it creates vanillacord.txt in its working directory. Two lines matter: forwarding and seecret. It looks like a typo, but the key really is spelled seecret, and you can repeat that line if you need more than one key.

forwarding defaults to bungeecord. That mode reads the ip_forward data sent by BungeeCord and Waterfall but carries no signature, so anyone who reaches the backend port directly could try to log in under a fake identity. The bungeeguard mode wraps the same format in a token; copy the token from the proxy's BungeeGuard config onto the seecret line.

On a Velocity network, the cleanest option is the velocity mode. Paste the key from Velocity's forwarding.secret file onto the seecret line and set player-info-forwarding-mode to modern in velocity.toml. Velocity's modern forwarding works on 1.13 and newer; for an older vanilla version, use Velocity's bungeeguard mode instead.

After editing the file, restart the server, join through the proxy, and confirm the player data file was created under the correct UUID.

How much RAM does a VanillaCord server need?

Unlike the other software in this category, VanillaCord actually runs a world, so its memory needs resemble a vanilla survival server rather than a proxy. What drives usage is player count, the view-distance and simulation-distance settings, how many chunks stay loaded, and how dense your farms are.

Bronze 4 GB is fine for a small group of friends. Around ten active players with a few automatic farms sit more comfortably on Silver or Gold. If technical players keep mob farms, raid farms and sprawling redstone permanently loaded, Platinum and above leave room for both world data and Java's garbage collector.

There is also a ceiling to understand: the vanilla game loop runs on a single core. Past a certain point, extra RAM does not shorten tick times. At that stage, lowering simulation-distance, clearing unnecessary chunk loaders and keeping entity counts in check make a bigger difference. That is where the Ryzen 9 9950X's strong single-core performance earns its keep.

Day-to-day administration behind the proxy

Most administration happens through familiar vanilla files. In server.properties you tune view-distance, simulation-distance, difficulty and max-players. Permissions come from ops.json and operator levels, access from whitelist.json; with enforce-whitelist on, anyone not on the list is kicked when the whitelist reloads. Because forwarding works, those files match each player's real UUID.

Upgrading versions takes a little more care than on Paper. For a new Minecraft release, you run VanillaCord again with that version number to produce a fresh patched jar. Take a manual world backup first and, ideally, trial the copy on a separate server, because once a world opens on a newer version there is no clean way back. Also make sure your proxy already supports the target version.

Datapacks go into the datapacks folder inside the world; /datapack list shows what is loaded, and /reload refreshes them. With the panel's web console, you can run all of these commands without joining the game.