One of the great things about Minecraft is that the game is pretty lightweight. This is indicated by the fact that the game is made up of low-resolution blocks and pixels, compared to many of the visually stunning games today that make virtual realism their primary focus.
The vanilla version of the game can run on almost any type of PC, not to mention the various other platforms that can accommodate it. In-game stuttering and lag are major sources of annoyance for any gamer. Since Minecraft is a game played by an unusually large number of players, issues like this can adversely affect both the player base and the developers.
Fortunately, players can find a ton of solutions to help remove or minimize lag and stutter from the game.
Minecraft in 2022: Eliminating lagging and stuttering
Note: The solutions given below serve multiple purposes. They can remove lagging as well as potentially give the player a significant FPS boost. Additionally, the guide is made with vanilla Minecraft in mind, without the use of shaders.
To see Minecraft Beginners Guide, click here.
1) Download Optifine
Optifine is one of the most well-known performance mods for the game. It serves as the parent mod for a huge chunk of other mods, resource packs, and texture packs.
Additionally, players can allocate a greater amount of ram to Optifine installation and avoid crashes and errors like the "Minecraft Has Run Out of Memory" error. However, the biggest and most important change it brings to the game is shader support.
View the Minecraftwiki here.
Players can entirely change the look of their game with shaders installed, most of which bring massive changes to the game’s lighting, along with other effects like post-processing, anti-aliasing, dynamic lighting, and world curvature. However, many shaders may induce frame drops and stutters within the game, so turning them off while following this guide can be prudent.
To know more about Optifine and how to install it, click here.
While many players have powerful gaming systems, others possess low-end PCs that can have trouble running the game at higher video settings. Given below are some ideal settings for smooth gameplay and a boost in FPS:
- Graphics: Fast
- Smooth Lighting: off
- GUI Scale: 3
- Dynamic lights: off
- Shaders: off
- Render and Simulation Distance: Between 2 and 8 chunks for low end devices. Can help massively with lagging and low FPS.
- Max Framerate: Players can limit framerate to an ideal number that they know their PC can keep up with. Capping frame rate provides a smoother and less laggy experience.
- Biome Blend (under “Details)”: 5 x 5 or lower.
Under Performance
- Render Regions, Fast Render, Smooth FPS, Smooth world, Smart Animations, Fast Math, Lazy Chunk Loading, and Dynamic updates should be turned ON.
- Chunk updates: 1
- Chunk Builder: Threaded
Under Other
- The “Autosave” setting decides when the game is automatically saved. The moments in the game when that happens can cause a stutter or lag spike. Turning this up can reduce the number of autosaves and therefore the number of lag spikes.
Click here to know more on Minecraft Dungeons
Minecraft is a game that was made for children. The blocky world and appearance of mobs confirm this. However, over the years, people of all ages have taken a liking to the game. Today, Minecraft tops the list of the best-selling video games of all, beating out Grand Theft Auto 5 and Tetris by a significant amount.
While the aforementioned tweaks can significantly reduce lag and increase FPS, they do limit how good the game looks or disable some features like animation, smooth lighting, and more. Additionally, Minecraft 1.18’s massive changes to the game have made it one of the laggiest versions of the game.
For a more detailed guide on how to optimize the game, players can click here.
Note: This article is subjective and solely reflects the opinion of the writer.
With Minecraft being so varied with different settings, mods and plugins, there can be a number of things that you can do to improve lag on your server.
Common reasons for lag:- Too many players and not enough RAM.- Too many mobs/items and not enough RAM.- You are too far away from your server.
- Corrupt chunks/Entities
- Too many worlds are running on your server without sufficient RAM.- Errors are spamming in your console. - Too many plugins running on your server and not enough RAM.THINGS TO DO FIRSTConsole ErrorsAlways, check for console errors before submitting a ticket.
Most are easily solved with a Google search and you should get into the habit of fixing your server.
1. Check if you have any errors in your console. If you see any "SEVERE" errors, this maybe be the cause of your lag.
2. Try and troubleshoot these errors. Google is your friend, and we have a knowledge base full of guides.
If you see "End of Stream" with a "SEVERE" tag, do not be alarmed. Unless this is spamming in your console this it not an issue.
TPS lag (server lag)
The next type of lag is server lag. This is described in Minecraft as TPS. TPS stands for Ticks Per Second. TPS is otherwise known as game ticks and is a maximum of 20. 20 TPS is hardwired into Minecraft as the universal speed. That is to say, the smallest amount of time possible that is distinguishable from the game's perspective. Each “tick” causes the game to recalculate directions of mobs, as well as other things such as growing crops adjusting the direction of mobs etc. Just to get an idea of how long it is, each redstone tick is equivalent to 2 game ticks. This is incidentally also the reason redstone “half” ticks exist, being 1 game tick. Remember that TPS and FPS are different. TPS, on the server, is controlled by the speed and capabilities of the server. FPS is based on the player's computer.
Reduce Your View Distance
We recommend that you reduce the view distance of your server from the default 10 to a value between 6-8.
ClearLagThis plugin is a great and very configurable and is recommended for any server. ClearLag can be found on Bukkit here.1. Once you have ClearLag installed you can run the command "lagg check" to see how many entities you have on your server2. If you are running a small server anything over the value "500" may possibly be the reason for your lag.
3. If you do have a high number of entities, run the command "lagg clear" and "lagg killmobs". This will remove the lag causing entities from your server i.e. items on the ground and mobs
Remove PluginsThe more players and plugins you have the more RAM you will need. If you have lots of plugins and not a lot of RAM you will overload your server causing it to have lag spikes and/or crash.
The best thing to do it limit the amount of plugins you require to run your server, as some plugins such as Survival Games can use up to 1GB of RAM.
Corrupted Chunks + Entity Buildup
A common issue with Minecraft servers is world "chunks" becoming corrupted, see an example of this here: Chunk Corruption Errors.
Along with this, you can find that entities can buildup within the world, large number of entities in a small area (mobs, items on the floor etc) can also cause FPS and TPS lag. To limit these, we suggest running a region fixer, if you have a server with MelonCube, you can create a support ticket to get this done, alternatively, you can run it on your world yourself using the tool here: Minecraft Region Fixer
Low Memory
Running your server without enough memory for the world/plugins/mods you are running on the server can often cause lag, you can read more about this here: Out of Memory issues
FPS lag (client lag)
As a player, you should be concerned with client lag. This lag is a direct result of the client. This means that this lag is caused by your computer running the Minecraft game. Client lag is affected by things like a large amount of entities (e.g thousands of dropped blocks or animals, and a few other related things, such as light values on structures running shader-packs, mods, etc). This will cause your FPS (Frames Per Second) to drop, and is the most common type of lag. When playing on servers this is reduced, as the game engine calculations are running on another computer (the server), minimizing the calculations your computer needs to run and therefore giving you, as the player, more resources to play the game. This is the only kind of lag that is affected by the quality of your computer.
Fixing FPS lag
The Optifine mod can help a player to achieve higher FPS with the same quality. You can also make efforts to limit this by removing all the land in spawn worlds, so that it is a void world with only the spawn, or should your spawn reside withing the same world as the world to play in, you can use WorldEdit to fill the caves below with stone, to lower the amount of light-values to be calculated when a player spawns. You should also remove any unnecessary and fast-flashing redstone and any mobs close by, by using WorldGuard regions and flags to block mob spawning.
LatencyFinally, we get to Latency or Internet lag. Internet lag is usually a result of being geographically far from the server host. This means that the electrical impulses take many milliseconds to reach the server and then have to travel all that way back. This means there can be a lag between input from your computer to it appearing on your and other screens. Take the example of you placing a block in front of your friend. Firstly you have to click to place the block, that information then has to travel up to 12,756 km (diameter of the earth) to the server. Then, this information has to be processed and sent out to your friend's computer, which might be up to another 12,756 km away. Traveling this long distance can take a while. Other kinds of internet lag can include bandwidth issues, common in the event of a DDoS (Distributed Denial Of Service) attack, where the server is bombarded with so many connections that it is unable to process normal connection. This is similar to how roads get slower and blocked with traffic when there is a lot of cars.
Fixing Latency LagIf you want to check your latency with a server just log onto Minecraft and add the server you want to test to your list of servers.When it's added there will be a small icon in the top right on the server field just above the number of slots the server holds.
If you hover over the icon it will tell you the ping of the server.
Fast Ping: <100msMedium Ping: 100-200msSatisfactory Ping: 200-300Slow Ping: 300-500ms
Laggy Ping: >500ms
Latency lag is when you are too far away from your server so the connection is slightly delayed.
Check your server Daemon/Node location and see if you are the closest you can be to our servers.
If you see that any of our server locations are closer to you than your current server's location, submit a ticket and request a transfer free of charge.
Want a super fast, lag-free server experience? Get a Minecraft Server with us and run your server with the experts!