Minecraft multiplayer lag: causes and fixes

Minecraft has no official servers for most of its multiplayer. You play on someone's server: a friend's, a community's, one you rent. That makes its lag different from other games', and it's why NoSpike asks you which server you play on.

Three kinds of Minecraft lag

Before changing anything, work out which one you have. They look alike and have nothing in common:

• Your frame rate. The whole game stutters, including the menus and your own movement in single player. That's your PC: render distance, shaders, mods. No network fix touches it.
• The server's tick rate. A Minecraft server updates the world 20 times a second. When it can't keep up (too many entities, big farms, too many players for its hardware), everyone on it lags at once: mobs freeze, blocks come back, furnaces slow down. That's the server, not you.
• Your connection to the server. Only you lag: you rubberband, blocks you break reappear, other players jump around, while the people on the server's own network play fine. That's the network between you and the server.

Minecraft server lag: is it your ping or the server? goes deeper into telling the second and third apart.

See your ping to the server

In Java Edition, the multiplayer server list shows a ping bar for each server; hover over it to see the figure in milliseconds. Inside the game, hold Tab: the player list shows each player's connection as bars, and if yours are worse than everyone else's, the problem is on your side of the path.

Watch whether it's always high or high only at times. A server hosted far away gives you a high, steady ping. A ping that jumps comes from queueing somewhere: Wi-Fi, a busy home line, or a provider's busy hours. What causes ping spikes shows how to find where.

What helps

1. Choose a server near you when you can. A server in Europe is a different game from one across the Atlantic.
2. Use a cable for long sessions. Wi-Fi's jitter is what makes blocks reappear. Wi-Fi or Ethernet has more.
3. Keep the home line quiet, especially uploads: Minecraft sends little, but it needs to send it now.
4. If you run the server, give it enough memory and a fast CPU core, and keep entity counts down. Its tick rate is everyone's experience.
5. Change the route when your ping to the server is much higher than its distance explains. That's the path between your provider and the server's host.

Where NoSpike fits

Because Minecraft's servers are everyone's own, NoSpike can't know which one you play on until you tell it. In the app, add your server's address on Minecraft's page; NoSpike then measures your route to that server and the routes through its relays in Europe, and routes the game only when a relay is faster.

It moves only the traffic to that server, checks again every minute, and doesn't change the route while you're playing unless the one you're on fails. NoSpike can make the road to the server better; it can't make the server itself faster. If the server's tick rate is what's lagging, everyone sees it, routed or not.