Minecraft: Here’s What Generator Settings Are & How To Change Them

Although creating a new Minecraft world in a single-player world is as simple as pushing a button to get a randomly generated one, the story is a bit different when it comes to servers. You can control almost anything when it comes to world generation, and that is where generator settings come into play. So what are these generator settings in Minecraft, and how do you change them?

What are server properties?

Server properties is a file in Minecraft that stores all of your world’s settings. Some of the things that this file controls are disabling the nether, setting the difficulty, and even the seed. World seed is a randomly generated number that sets you up for which world you’ll enter eventually, and there are 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 viable seeds.

The server properties file can easily be accessed through the server site you use for hosting. In single-player worlds, likely, you aren’t able to control or change these settings apart from what’s already available to you in the World Options menu when you start a new world.

The solution to changing server properties in a single-player world would be to set up a local server, but that involves you actually making a server. Hence, there’s no real solution to accessing these without owning a server. Each server website has a different way to access these files, so you’ll have to dig around a bit to find them.

On Aternos, for example, you enter your server and find the files folder on the left. Enter the file and then enter the server.properties file. It should be similar on all servers, and if you can’t access them and find them, almost all, if not all, servers provide you with simple guides on where to find them.

What you can change

The basics of server properties are simple and are made to be user-friendly. All the settings available to you are lines of code made into user-friendly brackets you can disable or enable. This rewrites the code when you change them, so you don’t have to. Even though, if you know anything about commands and use them on a regular basis in your world, it’ll be relatively easy to write code for these server properties on your own.

In case you’re running a realms server which is the official solution to playing multiplayer Minecraft, you will need to access the file from your computer and actually rewrite lines of code that make up a server.

You can change a lot of things, so here are some of the most important ones and ones that might matter to you the most:

• Spawn Protection – prevent players from editing blocks within a set spawn range. This will remove your attempts at breaking or placing blocks once the range is passed. Typically, this range is set to 16
• Gamemode – the game mode determines what type of world you’ll be playing. You can choose to play in a creative, survival, adventure, or spectator mode.
• Spawn-Monsters – the spawn monsters setting is pretty self-explanatory. It can be set to either true or false.
• PvP – By default, this is set to true, which means that you and other players will be able to damage each other in the game. If it’s set to false, you won’t.
• Enable Command Block – You can also choose to have command blocks in your world. It is set to false by default meaning that you won’t find them in your world unless you change it
• Max-Players – Max players are set to 20. This means that your server can hold up to 20 players. You can change this too but the more people that are on your server, the more considerable toll it takes on your computer.

Generator settings are the only thing you have to write like you’re using commands in your typical Minecraft world. You need to have some knowledge about it, and you can’t just write anything hoping it will work. It’s a special type of code, so any generation option you want to alter must be written using this code.

To make this more straightforward for the average player to understand, people have come up with presets that you can copy/paste into the generator-settings setting to generate a desired world. Most commonly, this is a super flat world.

Presets to the rescue

Luckily, you don’t need to know how to code to make your own arguments for how the world will generate because preset websites exist that let you change the code with the push of a button. One such preset generator can be found on the Minecraft101.net website. The linked preset generator will help you determine how your super flat world will look.

You can change how many layers of certain blocks will be there. The default for a supper flat is one layer of bedrock followed by seven layers of dirt blocks and one layer of grass blocks, but you can change it to any block and number of layers. Under the basic options, you can choose which structures will generate or not; under advanced options, you change things like village size, stronghold count, chances of spawning a mine shaft, and more.

What are the best world generator settings in Minecraft?

Minecraft’s most commonly used generator setting is 'generator-settings=minecraft\:bedrock,2*minecraft\:dirt,minecraft\:grass_block;minecraft\:plains;village;‘ which will create a standard super flat world for you. The generator-settings feature has been broken since 1.13, and there’s no guarantee that it won’t ignore the settings you set. World generation settings can take on a whole new dimension, though.

In 1.12, it was possible to create your own custom worlds. There were plenty of options that you could change, and the most popular ones seem to be Caver’s Delight, Mountain Madness, a Water World, Isle Land, Drought, Cave of Chaos, and Good Luck. These presets are self-explanatory and can be found on the MinecraftTools website.

After 1.13, you can’t use these custom seeds in your worlds, so the only way to use them is to go to version 1.12. Note that these are not the same as generator settings used for servers. The code used for these has to be copied and pasted into Minecraft. It is a seed, so you should paste it there.

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