Getting started with Velocity

Velocity is refreshingly easy to set up.

Installing Java

Velocity is built on Java, so if you do not already have Java installed, you will need to install it before you continue. A discussion about installing Java is out of scope for the Velocity documentation to cover.

Downloading Velocity

You will need to download Velocity first. Visit the download page and download the latest proxy build from it. Place the downloaded JAR file into a directory just for your proxy. Afterwards, you can run the JAR using java -jar velocity-proxy-1.0-SNAPSHOT-all.jar.

Configuring Your Servers

Once Velocity is up and running, we can move on to configuring your servers for use with Velocity. For now, we’re going to get a basic setup going and improve upon it later.

Open up velocity.toml and find the [servers] section. This section looks like this:

[servers]
lobby = "127.0.0.1:30066"
factions = "127.0.0.1:30067"
minigames = "127.0.0.1:30068"

Go ahead and put your servers in this file, and then restart Velocity. Once you’ve done that, you will need to open the server.properties file for each of your servers and set the online-mode setting to false. This allows Velocity to connect to your server. Once you’re done, you should restart your server. Velocity should now be ready to use.

This is a minimal setup. Since we’re not forwarding IPs and player information, the Minecraft server will assume you connected from offline mode and will use a different UUID and display only the default Steve and Alex skins. However, Velocity can forward this information onto your Minecraft servers with some extra configuration. See Configuring player information forwarding to learn how to configure this feature.

What’s Next?

In this section, you downloaded and added your servers to the velocity.toml file. This file is very important for us, so in the next section we’ll cover it in great detail.