Reduce entity lag on a Paper server

Entity lag happens when too many mobs, animals or dropped items keep the server busy and TPS falls below 20. Paper gives you a few commands to find where they pile up and a set of config options to limit them. This guide is for Paper servers. Folia is a Paper fork and Purpur is built on top of Paper, so look for the same files on them.

Checked against Paper 26.3 (build 211) and PaperMC's documentation, October 2026.

Find out what is piling up

Open the Console tab, check the TPS card, and type these commands without a leading slash.

1. paper entity list lists every ticking entity type. The output starts with Total Ticking and Total Non-Ticking, then one line per type with the ticking count first and the non-ticking count in brackets. Add a filter with the minecraft: prefix, for example paper entity list minecraft:item for dropped items. The namespace matters.
2. paper mobcaps shows the global mob caps for the overworld, and how many chunks mobs can spawn in. paper playermobcaps followed by a player's name shows the caps that apply to that player.
3. To see where the tick time goes, run spark profiler start --timeout 120 while the lag is happening. Paper bundles spark, so there is nothing to install.

A number that stands out, such as thousands of one animal or item type, tells you which setting below to reach for.

Change the settings

Open each file in the File Manager, change one value, save, then restart from the Console. Edit bukkit.yml, spigot.yml and Paper config gives the locations. Create a backup first.

Mob caps

bukkit.yml has spawn-limits, with defaults of monsters: 70, animals: 10, water-animals: 5, water-ambient: 20 and ambient: 15. Lowering a number lowers how many of that kind spawn. A world can override them in entities.spawning.spawn-limits in config/paper-world-defaults.yml, where -1 means use bukkit.yml. In the same file, entities.spawning.per-player-mob-spawns is true by default. It counts the cap per player instead of for the whole server, which gives roughly the same number of mobs spread more evenly, so one player cannot use the entire mob cap. Change mob spawn rates and limits goes further.

Entities far from players

In spigot.yml, under world-settings.default.entity-activation-range, entities outside the range tick less often. The defaults are animals 32, monsters 32, raiders 64, misc 16, water 16, villagers 32 and flying-monsters 32. Lower one in small steps and re-measure. nerf-spawner-mobs is false by default, and true disables most AI for mobs that come from spawners.

Dropped items

• spigot.yml, merge-radius.item is 0.5 blocks, and item-despawn-rate is 6000 ticks.
• config/paper-world-defaults.yml has entities.spawning.alt-item-despawn-rate. Set enabled: true and list item ids with their own despawn time in ticks. Paper's reference gives cobblestone: 300 as the example.

Collisions

collisions.max-entity-collisions is 8 in config/paper-world-defaults.yml and stops collision processing once that many are reached.

What players are sent

The Config Editor has Entity range (%), which is 100 by default. Lower values send fewer entities to each client, which means less bandwidth and fewer client-side spikes.

Fix the source too

Config options soften the load but do not remove it. If paper entity list shows one type in the hundreds, find the pen or farm that holds it and thin it out. Reduce lag with plugins covers entity-clearing plugins and their risks.