About LeafSMP

LeafSMP is a small, whitelisted, 16+ vanilla survival Minecraft server on Java Edition, self-hosted in the UK and run by one person who reads every application by hand.

What LeafSMP is

LeafSMP is a small, whitelisted vanilla survival Minecraft server for players aged 16 and over. It runs Minecraft Java Edition 26.2, in one survival world, on a machine in the United Kingdom that I own and maintain myself. There are twenty slots.

It exists because most public servers are either enormous and impersonal or small and unreliable, and because the ones that are neither usually want money from you eventually. This one is small on purpose, it is backed up and monitored on purpose, and there is nothing to buy.

Vanilla, not nearly vanilla

A lot of servers describe themselves as vanilla and mean "vanilla plus the bits we changed". LeafSMP runs Paper, which is a performance-optimised build of the server, and Paper ships with dozens of defaults that quietly change how the game behaves - patched duplication bugs, nerfed mob behaviour, throttled redstone, altered item merging.

Every one of those behaviour-changing defaults is turned back to what the Mojang server does. TNT duping works. Piston mechanics are the ones you learned. Farms tick the way the wiki says they do. What is kept from Paper is only the parts that make the server run faster without changing what happens in the world.

The exception, and it is the only one, is mob spawning: per-player mob caps are on so that one person AFK at a farm does not eat everybody else's spawns. On a twenty-slot server that is the difference between farms working and farms not working.

Grief is reversible, so the world is not locked down

Every block placed, every block broken and every container opened is written to a log with the player who did it and the time they did it. If somebody empties your chests or knocks a hole through your build, I can read exactly what happened and put it back the way it was, item for item.

That is why there are no land claims, no protection plugin and no region tool. You do not have to fence off what you build or ask permission to settle somewhere. The world behaves like singleplayer, and the safety net is behind it rather than in front of it.

Nothing is for sale

There is no shop, no ranks, no crates, no cosmetics, no priority queue and no donation link. There is no economy plugin and no server currency. The conveniences anybody has are a single /home, /back, /spawn and /tpa, and everybody has all of them.

The server costs me money to run and that is fine. Selling anything would change what the server is for.

How it is run

It runs on dedicated hardware I own and maintain rather than on rented hosting: an eight-thread Intel Core i7, 32GB of memory and NVMe storage, on a UniFi network behind battery backup and fibre. Nothing else shares it.

The world is backed up every two hours and the newest backup is automatically restored and checked every single day, because a backup nobody has ever restored is not a backup. Copies go off-site as well. Performance is monitored continuously and I get alerted when something is wrong, usually before anybody in game notices.

None of that is interesting to play on. It is the reason the server is still here and your build is still there.

Who runs it

One person. I read every application, I answer questions in Discord, I make the calls when something is not covered by the rules, and I do the restores when somebody loses a base. There is no staff team and no application to join one.

Which LeafSMP this is

Several unrelated Minecraft servers use the name LeafSMP. This one is the Java Edition survival server at leafsmp.com, with its Discord at https://discord.gg/3cQBcBm6ep. It used to be at minecraft.lewisjgibson.com, and that address still works. If you arrived from a server list or a video and something does not match, it is probably a different server with the same name.