How to Get More Players on Your Minecraft Server (2026)

How to get more players on your Minecraft server

To get more players on your Minecraft server, give it one clear niche, make the first hour good enough that new players come back, list it on the big server lists and ask players to vote every day, and build a Discord community around it. Then add short videos, collaborations with creators, and regular events, and keep the server fast. Measure which channel brings players who return the following week, and put your time there.

The order matters: promotion multiplies whatever a new player finds. If they find lag or an empty spawn, every channel below will look like it failed.

Pick a niche and fix the first hour

Most lists show thousands of survival servers. A player choosing between them needs a reason to pick yours, and “friendly community” is not one. Write one sentence that says who the server is for and what is different, for example “a hardcore SMP where the world resets every 30 days and the top builders keep their maps” or “a Cobblemon server with weekly gym battles run by staff”.

Then play your own server as a brand new account and time the first hour. A good first hour usually has:

• Play within 60 seconds. No wall of rules, no five portals to choose from. One clear path from spawn into the game mode.
• A short tutorial or starter quest that teaches the one or two systems that make your server different, and nothing else.
• Other people in sight. Route new players through a shared area, and have staff or regulars greet them in chat for the first few weeks.
• A goal for tomorrow. A daily reward, a claim that grows, a weekly event, or a leaderboard gives a reason to log in again.
• Every price visible before joining. The Minecraft Usage Guidelines require you to show all content and pricing before a person joins, signs up, or signs in, so your website and list page should link the store.

Two smaller fixes help with lists. Keep your name in line with the Usage Guidelines, which allow the Minecraft name only as a secondary part of a name or title, and add the disclaimer they ask for (“Not an official Minecraft service. Not approved by or associated with Mojang or Microsoft.”) to your website. And if your server runs Java Edition, the Geyser project lets Bedrock Edition players join Java servers, which can widen your audience to console and phone players.

Performance and hosting: TPS, MSPT and location

Minecraft runs at a fixed 20 ticks per second (TPS), and the Minecraft Wiki notes that a server only holds 20 TPS when each tick takes 50 milliseconds or less. That per-tick time is called MSPT. When it goes above 50, mobs freeze, blocks reappear, and new players leave without saying why.

• Profile before you buy more RAM. According to the Paper documentation, Paper bundles the spark profiler starting with 1.21, and /spark profiler start --timeout 600 returns a report link after 10 minutes. The spark command docs also list /spark tps and /spark health for a quick check. Run it during your busiest hour.
• Host near your players. Ping depends on distance. If most of your players are in Europe, a US host adds delay to every action. Pick the region where your audience lives and say it on your list page.
• Watch uptime. Lists check whether your server is online, and some delete servers that are often down (see the next section).

Minecraft server lists and how voting works

Server lists are where players look for a new server. The large ones include MinecraftServers.org, Minecraft-Server-List.com, Minecraft-MP, TopG and the Planet Minecraft server list. Each sets its own rules, but most rank servers by votes.

MinecraftServers.org is a good example of how this works. Its help page says rank is determined entirely by votes, votes reset for all servers on the 1st of each month, and a player can vote for the same server once per day and for at most three different servers per day. It deletes servers listed for more than 10 days if their uptime falls below 25%. It also sells sponsored spots at the top of pages, which are marked with a highlighted background (checked on October 22, 2026).

Because votes reset monthly, lists reward servers whose players vote every day, not servers that had one big week.

How to write a list page that gets clicks

• Put your niche sentence in the first line of the description. Players scan dozens of listings.
• Use a banner that shows the game mode, not only a logo. MinecraftServers.org removes rapidly flashing banners, and most lists have similar rules.
• Pick tags that match what you actually run. The MinecraftServers.org terms say tags must be accurate and staff may remove those that do not match.
• Add real gameplay screenshots, your Discord link and your website.

Vote rewards with NuVotifier

Votifier is the plugin that lets a list tell your server when someone voted, so you can reward them in game. The original Votifier is no longer maintained, and most servers use NuVotifier, a fork that works in its place and runs on Bukkit, Spigot and Paper (1.7.10 and later), Sponge 7, BungeeCord and Waterfall, and Velocity. MinecraftServers.org supports both the original protocol and the newer v2 protocol that NuVotifier added.

1. Install NuVotifier on your server (or on the proxy, if you run a network). On a network, the NuVotifier setup guide explains how to point lists at the proxy and forward votes to each backend server.
2. Install a vote listener plugin. The setup guide is clear that NuVotifier does not include any listeners by default, so it receives votes but gives no rewards by itself.
3. Enter your server address, Votifier port and public key (or token) on each list’s server settings. Never share the private key.
4. Vote once yourself on every list and confirm the reward arrives.
5. Remind players with a short daily message and a /vote command that lists every link.

What Mojang’s rules mean for vote rewards

The Usage Guidelines, which the Minecraft EULA points to for server permissions, do not mention voting or vote rewards. They do set rules for what a server may sell: gameplay entitlements may not ruin other players’ experience or give a competitive advantage, cosmetics may not be capes or imitate a player cape, and in-game currency may have no real-world value and may not be cashed out or moved to other servers. A vote is not a sale, but our reading is that you should hold vote rewards to the same standard, because a server where daily voting leads to the best gear feels pay-to-win to new players anyway. Good vote rewards are a cosmetic crate key, a little server currency, or a temporary particle trail.

Where new Minecraft players come from

Discord

Discord is where players talk between sessions, find teammates, and hear about the next event. Link it from the server, your list pages and your website, and post patch notes, event times and screenshots there. Do not run invite contests or rewards for joining, because Discord counts paid or rewarded joins as platform manipulation. How to get more Discord members covers the rules and what works instead, and the best Discord bots to grow your server lists bots for welcome messages, levels and event reminders. If you also run your own bot, see how to grow a Discord bot.

Short videos and YouTube

Short vertical videos are a good fit for Minecraft servers because one clip can show the thing that makes yours different: a boss fight, a griefer getting caught by a trap, a build timelapse, a funny moment from an event. Put your server address on screen and in the caption. Longer YouTube videos suit servers with seasons and stories, such as a recap of a war between two towns.

The Usage Guidelines allow videos with your own content and commentary that earn from ads around the video, but they do not allow videos whose purpose is to advertise products unrelated to Minecraft. Promoting your own Minecraft server is the kind of content they expect.

Collaborations with creators

A creator who plays on your server for one video or stream can bring hundreds of players at once. Ask creators whose audience matches your niche, give them something to do (a private event or a role in your next season), and have staff ready that day. If you pay them or give them anything of value, the Usage Guidelines require influencers promoting your server to disclose the relationship and follow the US Federal Trade Commission’s guidelines. The FTC’s Disclosures 101 for social media influencers says the disclosure belongs in the video itself, not only in the description, and that free items count as a material connection. On YouTube, YouTube’s paid promotion help page also asks creators to tick the paid promotion box in the video details (checked on October 22, 2026).

Events, retention and staff

Growth comes from players who return. Two glossary entries explain the numbers: retention rate and churn rate.

• Run events on a schedule. A build contest every second Saturday, a PvP tournament once a month, a holiday map. A fixed time gives players a reason to come back, and each event is content for videos. The Usage Guidelines say an in-game event must be free to view or attend.
• Plan seasons or resets if your game mode suits them. A new season is the best moment for creator collaborations and list sponsorships, because everyone starts equal.
• Hire staff for timezone coverage, not titles. A moderator who is online when your players are, answers questions, and stops griefing keeps more players than a bigger spawn.
• Ask leavers why. A short Discord poll often shows the same one or two problems.
• Fight alt accounts and bots early. Vote farms, alt accounts for daily rewards and spam bots wreck the economy that loyal players care about. Stop multi-accounting and VPN abuse covers the methods.

How to measure growth

Track a few numbers every week, and track them by source:

• New unique players per day, and where they came from. Ask “How did you find us?” in the starter quest with fixed answers, or give each channel its own address, such as a separate subdomain for TikTok, because Bukkit-based servers can read the hostname a player connected with.
• Next-week return rate: of the players who joined in a week, the share who played again the following week.
• Peak concurrent players at your busiest hour, which is what list visitors see.
• Daily votes per list, compared to your active players.

Put list and video links to your website through UTM parameters so your analytics shows which campaign sent the visit. Judge channels by players who returned, not by joins.

For channels that work for any new product, not only game servers, see how to get your first 100 users.

What not to do

Frequently asked questions