How to Set a World Border on Your Minecraft Server

What a border is for

The world border is a wall nobody can cross: a square around a centre. Anyone left outside keeps losing health until they get back in.

On a server with friends it does three things: the world stops taking up more and more space (every area someone walks through is saved forever), you can pre-generate the terrain right up to where players can go, and nobody flies off 50,000 blocks with elytra generating new terrain while everyone else plays. And in a UHC or a battle royale, the shrinking border is the game.

The two commands

Type them in the panel's “Console” as they are, without the slash, with the server running. They also work in game, with the slash in front, as an operator (see giving op).

Centre first, then size. The centre is usually the spawn point or 0 0; you can see the X and Z coordinates of where you stand with F3 on Java.

The number in worldborder set is the side of the square, not the distance from the centre: worldborder set 6000 leaves 3,000 blocks in each direction. It's the most common mistake: whoever wants a “3,000 radius” and types 3000 ends up with half.

worldborder center 0 0
worldborder set 6000

1. Check its size

   worldborder get tells you the current side, in blocks.

2. Grow or shrink it

   worldborder add 1000 adds 1,000 blocks to the side (500 on each side); worldborder add -1000 takes them away.

3. Remove it

   There's no “remove”: set it to the maximum, worldborder set 59999968, which is the size a new world comes with.

The time trap: since 1.21.11 it's ticks

If you give it a time, the border doesn't jump at once: it moves gradually to the new size. Up to 1.21.10 that number was seconds. Since 1.21.11 it's ticks (20 per second), and for seconds you add an s after it.

That's why the line almost every guide gives, worldborder set 5000 60, now takes 3 seconds, not a minute. With the s it does what it says: worldborder set 5000 60s. At NapNodes, Minecraft comes on Paper in the latest version, so it needs the s. The same goes for worldborder add and for the warning time.

worldborder set 100 3600s

The Nether and the End have their own border

On Paper every world has its own border, and in the vanilla game too since 1.21.9. The console command only changes the overworld's: if you do nothing else, the Nether stays unlimited and anyone who wants to generate terrain far away just has to go through a portal.

For the others, put execute in with the dimension in front. In the Nether one block is eight in the overworld, so the matching border is an eighth of the size and of the centre: 6,000 across centred on 0 0 becomes 750 centred on 0 0. The End has no such scale: same size as the overworld, or smaller if you only want the nearby islands.

execute in minecraft:the_nether run worldborder center 0 0
execute in minecraft:the_nether run worldborder set 750
execute in minecraft:the_end run worldborder center 0 0
execute in minecraft:the_end run worldborder set 6000

The red warning and the damage outside

As you get close to the border the screen turns red as a warning; outside, you lose health for every block you go further, past a margin. All four are changed with worldborder warning and worldborder damage.

1. worldborder warning distance 20

   The screen turns red 20 blocks from the border, instead of 5.

2. worldborder warning time 30s

   For a moving border: it warns you when it's 30 seconds from reaching you. It takes the s, like every other time.

3. worldborder damage buffer 0

   How many blocks outside the border you can be without losing health (it comes with 5). With 0, it hurts from the first block.

4. worldborder damage amount 1

   Health lost per second for each block beyond the margin (it comes with 0.2). For a UHC, raise it: with the default you barely notice.

What size to set

For a group of friends, between 4,000 and 10,000 blocks across is plenty to explore for months: there are biomes and villages to spare, and disk use doesn't shoot up. On a new NapNodes Minecraft server (Paper, no mods) the terrain already comes generated up to 2,000 blocks from the spawn point; a border 4,000 across centred there leaves the world exactly the size of what's already done.

If you're going to pre-generate it with Chunky, Chunky's radius is half the border's side: with worldborder set 8000, chunky radius 4000. The Chunky calculator tells you how much disk and time each size costs, and the world border generator writes all these commands (overworld, Nether, End and shrinking) from the radius or the side.

What's already generated outside the border isn't deleted: it still takes up space even though nobody can reach it. If the world is already huge, a border stops it growing, but doesn't shrink it.

Try it for free

On NapNodes' free Minecraft server, no card needed, you can try all of this from the “Console”. With 5 GB of disk, a border is almost a must: the panel emails you at 80% and 95% full. If the world gets too small, when you move to a plan the world stays and you widen it with worldborder add.

Frequently asked questions