How to make a COBBLEVERSE server

COBBLEVERSE is the big pack built on Cobblemon: 6.1 million downloads on Modrinth, and all 1,025 Pokémon across the Kanto, Johto, Hoenn and Sinnoh regions. Where Cobblemon adds creatures to Minecraft, COBBLEVERSE turns it into a full Pokémon RPG — and that difference is paid for in server resources.

What sets it apart from Cobblemon, concretely

If you're choosing between the two, this is the only paragraph that matters.

Cobblemon gives you the Pokémon: catching, battling, training, breeding. You build your run around that, freely. It's the base pack, and it's lighter — see the Cobblemon guide.

COBBLEVERSE gives you a progression:

• exclusive gyms with animated leaders, in a defined order;
• badges that unlock what's next, then an Elite Four at the end of the run;
• exclusive structures holding rare loot;
• the 1,025 Pokémon of the first four regions, not a subset.

On a group server, that structure has a consequence people discover late: badge progression is a route, not a sandbox. You will all want to face the same leaders. Decide early whether you play together or each at your own pace — it matters more than any setting.

Version, loader, and why you mustn't mix them

COBBLEVERSE targets Minecraft 1.21.1 on the Fabric loader.

That's the same generation as the official Cobblemon pack, but they are not the same mods: a COBBLEVERSE client won't join a plain Cobblemon server, nor the reverse. A content mod has to be present on both sides at the same version, and the error message doesn't always say which one is missing.

The rule: everyone installs the same pack, at the same version. Check the number, not the name.

RAM: its authors state 4 GB minimum, 6 GB or more recommended

And mind what that figure refers to. The pack's page asks for "at least 4GB of RAM" in single-player, "6GB+ recommended" — and those values are about the JVM heap (-Xmx), not the machine's memory. The operating system, Docker and Java's off-heap memory live beside the heap.

Here, the heap is the smaller of "RAM − 2 GB" and "75% of RAM":

Take the 16 GB tier if there are more than three of you, or if you plan to explore far. The 8 GB tier yields exactly the pack's "recommended" 6 GB — so with no reserve at all for a server that carries every player's load at once. The creation screen warns you when the tier doesn't cover the pack: it compares heaps, not machine sizes.

The real cost of 1,025 Pokémon

This is the pack's distinctive server characteristic, and it isn't in memory — it's in entities.

A wild Pokémon is a living creature the server simulates twenty times a second: movement, spawning, despawning. Multiply that by spawn density, by the number of players spread across the map, and by a complete rather than partial roster.

The symptom to recognise: the server drags rather than falls over — battles respond late, creatures teleport. This isn't RAM. Two levers, in this order:

1. Lower the simulation distance (3 to 32, default 10) to 6 or 8. It's the radius in which the world stays alive, and therefore the number of entities tracked. Free, immediate, and effective precisely because this pack has so many.
2. Move to the dedicated CPU level if that isn't enough: dedicated vCPUs are the only change that lifts ticks per second.

The first boot takes twenty minutes

A pack this size downloads, resolves its dependencies, writes its configuration, then generates a world populated with exclusive structures. Expect 15 to 25 minutes on first boot, against one or two for a vanilla server.

That's the classic phantom failure: people assume a crash, kill it, restart — and the first boot never finishes. Let it run through once; the later ones are fast.

Your Pokémon, and where they live

Captured Pokémon, earned badges and gym progression live in the world and player data — not in a separate file. Losing the world means losing the collection and the run.

Here, the data directory is archived before every shutdown, with a save-all flush immediately before so no minute stays in memory, and restored on the next session. An automatic backup runs every 30 minutes while you play, of which the last 5 are kept. Storage is free, server off included.

On a pack where you progress over weeks, that's the line that matters most.

What not to do

Switch from Cobblemon to COBBLEVERSE on an existing world, or the reverse. The two packs don't share the same mods: the world would lose the blocks and creatures the new pack has never heard of. Create a second server — server off = €0, so keeping two worlds in reserve costs nothing.

Create your Minecraft server and pick COBBLEVERSE from the modpack list. Your first session is free.