How to Change Your Bedrock Server Settings

Everything a Bedrock server can be told to do lives in one file called server.properties. The Game Settings page is that file in plain language: every setting has a name you can read, an explanation of what it does, and the raw key printed underneath so you can still search for it the way the wiki writes it.

1Open Game Settings

• Log in to your game panel and click your Bedrock server.
• Click Game Settings in the left menu under GAME SERVER.
• Changes save as you make them. Most of them apply the next time the server starts, so finish the whole page and then restart once.

2World

• Server name is what players see in their server list. It is the one setting everybody notices.
• World seed only matters when a new world is generated. Typing a seed does nothing to the world you already have. To actually use it, start a fresh world from the Worlds page.
• Default game mode is what new players start in. Force game mode puts everyone back into it every time they join, which is how you stop people staying in creative.
• Difficulty runs from Peaceful to Hard.
• Allow cheats is the one people miss. Without it, your operators cannot use /give, /gamemode or anything else in game, no matter what permission level they have.

3Players and Access

• Maximum players is your slot count.
• Allowlist only closes the server to everyone not on the list. The list itself is on the Players page.
• Require Xbox Live sign-in should stay on. Turning it off means anyone can claim any gamertag, so on a public server it is genuinely unsafe.
• Default permission level is what a player can do the first time they join: Visitor, Member or Operator. Leave it on Member. Setting it to Operator gives commands to every stranger who walks in.
• Idle kick frees a slot after so many minutes of inactivity. 0 never kicks.
• Disable player interaction hides players from each other entirely. It exists for unusual setups and is rarely what anyone wants.

4Gameplay

• Require resource packs forces players to accept your packs before they can join. Pair it with the Add-ons page if you want everyone seeing the same thing.
• Chat restriction can hide other players' messages (Dropped) or switch chat off completely (Disabled).
• Block custom skins rejects skins players have installed themselves.
• Answer LAN discovery is worth reading before you touch it. Turning it off also stops the server binding the default ports 19132 and 19133, which is not what most people expect from a setting with that name.

5Performance

This group is where you go when the server is struggling, and the first two settings do most of the work.

• View distance is how far players can see. Dropping it is the single biggest saving available on a Bedrock server.
• Tick distance is how far the world keeps simulating around a player. 4 is the lightest setting.
• Client side chunk generation hands chunk building to players' own devices and takes load off the server.
• Maximum threads at 0 lets the server use as many as it wants.
• Compression algorithm and threshold are best left alone. zlib compresses more, snappy is faster, and the default threshold suits almost every server.

6Show Other Settings

At the bottom, Show other settings reveals the remaining eighteen keys from server.properties: script debugging, content logging, the server authoritative movement checks, level-name and the rest.

These are passed through exactly as you type them, with no help text and no validation, so only change one if you already know what it does.

Good to Know

• Restart to apply. Bedrock reads server.properties at startup. A field you changed while the server is running is saved but not live until you restart from the Console page.
• The raw key under each setting is deliberate. Every guide and wiki page on the internet uses those names. Search for view-distance and what you find will make sense next to this page.
• Editing the file by hand still works. The page reads and writes the real server.properties, so anything you set through Files shows up here, and anything you set here is in the file.
• Not every setting exists on every server software. PocketMine-MP and PowerNukkitX have their own configuration in addition to this. See changing your server version.

Finished

Your server plays the way you want it to. Next, decide who is allowed in with the allowlist and operators.