MOTD and server icon: stand out in the server list
Before a player has seen a single block of your server, they've already formed a judgement — in the server list. There you're competing with dozens of other lines of text for a few seconds of attention. The two things you fully control there: your MOTD and your server icon. Both take five minutes to set up, both are often neglected. A shame, because a messy first impression costs you players you never even saw arrive.
What exactly is the MOTD?
MOTD stands for "message of the day": the text players see under your server name in their multiplayer list. You set it via the motd= line in server.properties, and by default it reads the less-than-inspiring "A Minecraft Server". You have two lines at your disposal of roughly sixty characters each; anything longer gets cut off. Changing it is a matter of editing the line and restarting — the short version is in the knowledge base: how to change your MOTD.
Be aware of all the places that text shows up: not just for friends who have already saved your server, but also on server list websites where strangers scroll by. For that second group, your MOTD is quite literally your advert.
Colour and formatting: from § codes to MiniMessage
Minecraft has had formatting codes with the § character since forever: §a makes text green, §l bold and §k gives that flickering "obfuscated" effect. In server.properties you can't type the § character directly; there you use the notation \u00A7. It looks like this:
motd=\u00A7bYour Server \u00A77| Survival \u00A77| English\n\u00A7eSeason 3 has started!The \n in the middle of the line is the jump to line two. Modern plugins, meanwhile, often work with MiniMessage, a far more readable format that also handles hex colours and gradients, such as <gradient:#00d4ff:#7b2bff>Your Server</gradient>. That does require a plugin that supports MiniMessage; a bare server.properties only understands the § notation.
Your server icon: exactly 64x64 pixels
The little icon next to your MOTD is a file with strict requirements: a PNG of exactly 64 by 64 pixels, named precisely server-icon.png, in the root directory of your server. If any of those three things is off, Minecraft does nothing at all — no error message, just no icon. After uploading, restart the server. The steps are also in the knowledge base: adding a server icon.
Design-wise: in the list, that image is only a few millimetres across. One recognisable symbol with strong contrast works; a screenshot of your spawn or a logo with text in it turns into unreadable noise. Look at your icon at a small size before you call it done.
What a good MOTD does — and a bad one wrecks
The temptation is to throw everything at it: six colours, flashing effects, exclamation marks. But look through the eyes of a player scrolling through a list. They want to know at a glance: what kind of server is this, and is there anything going on? Clarity beats gimmicks almost every time. A MOTD like "Survival | 1.21+ | No resets" with "New: shops at spawn" underneath says more in two lines than a rainbow of effects.
And: whatever your MOTD promises, your server has to deliver. Misleading lines — a "24/7 active community" that consists of three people, events that never happen — get you joins at best from players who leave again after two minutes, with a bad taste in their mouth. Your server list entry decides whether someone joins; the first five minutes on the server decide whether they stay. Those two have to match, otherwise a pretty MOTD only buys you faster disappointments.
Testing is thankfully simple: add your own server in your client and look at the result with fresh eyes, ideally sandwiched between a bunch of other servers. Does the second line fit, do the right words stand out, is the icon recognisable at a small size? Then ask someone who doesn't know your server what they'd expect based on those two lines — if the answer doesn't resemble what your server actually is, you know exactly what to rewrite. There are few places where you can steer the ratio of viewers to joiners as directly as here.
Rotating lines with a MOTD plugin
If you want more than static text, there are plugins that make your MOTD dynamic — MiniMOTD is a well-known one in the Paper ecosystem. It lets you rotate several messages, use MiniMessage formatting with gradients and show something different per occasion. Handy for events and seasons, with one warning: a dynamic MOTD nobody maintains any more is worse than a static one. If "Christmas event!" is still scrolling past in March, every visitor knows enough about how lively your server is.
Common mistakes
- Too many colours and effects. More than two or three colours gets restless, and the obfuscated effect makes text unreadable by definition. Use colour to make one thing stand out, not everything at once.
- Misleading text. False promises chase away exactly the players you wanted to bring in — and on server list sites they leave a bad review as a souvenir.
- An icon that silently doesn't work. Wrong size, wrong name or not a real PNG: you get no error message. If you see the default icon, run through the three requirements.
- Lines that are too long. Whatever doesn't fit gets cut off, sometimes mid-word. Keep it short and check the result in your own server list.
- Never updating it. An outdated MOTD tells every visitor: nobody's working on this any more.
A strong server list entry costs you half an hour and pays off every single day — it's the cheapest bit of promotion there is. Not hosting your server anywhere yet? At MC-Node a Minecraft server starts from €0.50 per month, on our own hardware with NVMe storage, DDoS protection included and cancellable monthly.