How to make a Prominence II server

Prominence II is a narrative RPG modpack: 1.8 million downloads on Modrinth, quests, a talent tree, and endgame boss encounters called Mythic Challenges. It's a pack you play for its story — which changes how you host it for a group.

First, clearing up a naming confusion

You'll see "Prominence II RPG" and "Prominence II Hasturian Era" going around, sometimes as if they were different packs to choose between.

They aren't. It's a single pack, titled Hasturian Era, containing two campaigns that unlock as you progress: "The Void's Invasion", then "The Hasturian Era". There's no variant to decide between before creating your server — just a narrative progression that opens up as you play.

That avoids the first mistake: hunting at length for the "right version" that doesn't exist, or worse, having your group install a different pack from yours.

The story, and what it imposes on a group server

This is the pack's distinctive characteristic, and it's a human one before it's technical.

On a factory pack, everyone advances in their own corner without bothering anyone. On a pack with quests and campaigns, three questions land on the first evening:

• are you playing the campaign together? If so, you need to be present for the narrative beats, otherwise someone does them alone and the others watch;
• are spoilers acceptable? A player who advances faster will describe, deliberately or not, what's waiting for the others;
• is the talent tree per-player? Yes — so two players on the same server don't have the same abilities at the same time.

None of those questions has a right answer. But settling them before you start avoids the classic RPG-server falling-out, where half the group has finished the story while the other half is discovering act one.

Player data weighs as much as the world

A direct consequence of the above: on Prominence II, progression doesn't live only in the scenery. Completed quests and spent talents live in each player's data.

Losing the data directory therefore isn't losing buildings: it's losing everyone's narrative progress — the part that took the most time and doesn't get replayed the same way.

That's why, on this pack, backups matter more than sizing. The 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.

Five rotating backups, concretely, is the ability to return to a state from two hours ago if a session goes wrong.

RAM: what the server actually gets

The pack's page states no official memory figure. The tier below is what we recommend, not a recommendation from its authors.

The number that matters isn't the machine's but the JVM heap (-Xmx), necessarily smaller: the operating system, Docker and Java's off-heap memory live beside it. Here, the heap is the smaller of "RAM − 2 GB" and "75% of RAM":

Take the 16 GB tier as soon as there are several of you. The creation screen warns you if you drop below what the pack asks: it compares heaps, not machine sizes.

The endgame bosses, and the one moment CPU matters

The Mythic Challenges are end-of-progression fights — so they're dense: many entities, many effects, a lot of computation in a small space, usually with several players present.

That's when a server that was holding up perfectly can start to drag: hits land late, the boss teleports. The symptom is a processor one, not a memory one — a server short of heap doesn't slow down, it falls over.

Two levers, in this order: drop the simulation distance (3 to 32, default 10) to 6 or 8, which is free; then move to the dedicated CPU level if the fight is still choppy.

Version, loader, and the client rule

Prominence II targets Minecraft 1.20.1 on the Fabric loader. The Java version follows the Minecraft version — Java 17 from 1.18, Java 21 from 1.20.5, per the Minecraft Wiki. Here, both are derived from the pack: nothing to choose.

And the usual rule, without exception: everyone installs the same pack, at the same version. On a quest pack, a version mismatch can also desynchronise progression state, not merely refuse the connection.

First boot

Expect 15 to 25 minutes on first boot: downloading, resolving mods, configuration, then generating the world. Don't kill it thinking it failed — later boots are quick, the world already being generated.

What not to do

Switch packs on a Prominence II world. The world and player data hold blocks, items and a quest state only this pack can read. To try something else, create a second server — server off = €0.

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