--- title: "A Minecraft server with Adrenaline: optimising without changing the game" description: "Not a content pack: it adds nothing and doesn’t lock your world in. Plus the honest order of levers when a server struggles — it comes fourth." url: https://tickserv.com/en/guides/adrenaline site: "TickServ (https://tickserv.com)" lang: en published: 2026-08-22 games: [minecraft] --- # A Minecraft server with Adrenaline: optimising without changing the game Adrenaline isn't a modpack like the others, and that's the first thing to say: **it adds no content**. No new blocks, no creatures, no mechanics. Its page states it plainly — it "significantly improves rendering performance, logic performance, memory usage" without compromising on the game's vanilla looks. So it's an **optimisation** pack, to be chosen for one specific reason: you want vanilla Minecraft that runs well. ## What it changes, and what it doesn't What it does: - it runs **on both sides** — server-side and client-side. A player on a modest machine gains as much as the server does; - it **deliberately** excludes quality-of-life mods, to stay simple and compatible with as many setups as possible. What it doesn't do — and this is its biggest advantage on a server: **It doesn't lock your world in.** That's unique among the modpacks on our list. An All the Mods, Cobblemon or RLCraft world is inseparable from its mods: loaded without them, it permanently loses its blocks. Adrenaline creates nothing that doesn't exist in vanilla. So you can add it to an existing world, and remove it later, losing nothing. That's what makes it a no-commitment choice, where every other pack is a permanent decision for the run. ## Adrenaline isn't the first lever — here's the order Let's be honest, because it's more useful than a sales pitch: if your server is struggling, an optimisation pack isn't the first thing to try. It comes fourth. **1. Identify the symptom.** The two failures have nothing in common: - the server **falls over** — it dies when a player wanders from spawn: the **JVM heap** is short; - the server **drags** — blocks react late, mobs stutter: it's the **processor**. Getting the diagnosis wrong means buying RAM for a CPU problem. That has never worked. **2. Lower the simulation distance.** It runs from 3 to 32, and defaults to 10. It's the radius in which the server keeps the world _alive_, and therefore the number of chunks and entities to track. Dropping it to 6 or 8 is **free**, immediate, and almost always the best-value move. Try it before anything else. **3. Take the right RAM tier.** The number that matters isn't the machine's but the heap: here, the smaller of "RAM − 2 GB" and "75% of RAM". That's a 2 GB heap on the 4 GB tier, 6 GB on the 8 GB tier, 12 GB on the 16 GB tier. The detail is in the guide on [how much RAM your server needs](https://tickserv.com/en/guides/how-much-ram-game-server). **4. Move to dedicated CPU**, if the symptom is "it drags" and the previous steps weren't enough. Dedicated vCPUs are the only change that lifts ticks per second. **5. And then, Adrenaline.** Once the sizing is right, an optimisation pack claws back real gains — but it won't rescue an undersized server, and it won't turn a shared vCPU into a dedicated one. ## Version and loader Adrenaline is a **Fabric** pack (Quilt too), and it covers an unusually wide version range: from **1.16.5 to 1.21.x**. That's consistent with its nature — it has no content to port from one version to the next, only optimisations. The Java version follows the Minecraft version — Java 17 from 1.18, Java 21 from 1.20.5, per the [Minecraft Wiki](https://minecraft.wiki/w/Server/Requirements). Here, it's derived from the pack: nothing to choose. Since it runs on both sides, your players benefit from installing it too — but unlike content packs, **it isn't required to connect**. A vanilla client joins an Adrenaline server without trouble. That's another consequence of it adding nothing. ## RAM: the lowest tier on the list The pack's page states **no official memory figure**. The tier below is what we recommend. | Tier you pick | Actual JVM heap | Verdict for Adrenaline | | ------------- | --------------- | -------------------------------- | | 4 GB | 2 GB | playable with a few players | | **8 GB** | **6 GB** | **the right choice for a group** | | 16 GB | 12 GB | many players, large map | It's the only one of our modpacks that stays reasonable on the small tiers, precisely because it adds no content to load. An Adrenaline server costs what a vanilla server costs. ## Startup, on the other hand, is fast A pleasant flip side of having no content: **no twenty-minute first boot.** There aren't five hundred mods to resolve or a bespoke world to generate. Expect a few minutes, like a vanilla server — where a large content pack needs 15 to 25 minutes on first boot. ## Backups The world is archived **before every shutdown**, with a `save-all flush` immediately before, and restored on the next boot. An automatic backup runs **every 30 minutes** while you play, of which the **last 5** are kept. Storage is free, server off included. And since the world stays readable in vanilla, your archive isn't a prisoner of the pack: you can take it and open it elsewhere. That's the freedom content packs don't give you. > [Create your Minecraft server](https://tickserv.com/en/games/minecraft) and pick Adrenaline from the modpack list. Your first session is free.