How to Optimize Spawn Chunks (Force Loaded Chunks)

What Are Spawn Chunks

Spawn chunks are the chunks around a world's spawn point that remain loaded in memory at all times, even when no players are nearby. In vanilla Minecraft, this is a 19x19 chunk area (about 304x304 blocks) centered on the world spawn. These chunks tick constantly: entities move, redstone fires, hoppers transfer items, crops grow, and mob spawning logic runs. On a clean vanilla world this is fine, but on a server where players have built farms, redstone machines, or entity-heavy structures near spawn, those permanently loaded chunks become a constant drain on TPS. Learning to optimize spawn chunks minecraft servers keep active is essential for long-running survival worlds.

Measuring Spawn Chunk Impact

Before making changes, measure how much your spawn chunks cost. Use Spark to run a tick profiler and examine entity ticking and block ticking costs. You can also use /paper dumpentity to see entity counts by chunk. If the spawn area has hundreds of entities (villagers, item frames, armor stands, dropped items) ticking with no players around, you are paying a TPS cost for nothing.

A quick test: set the world spawn to a remote, empty location with /setworldspawn, wait for the old spawn chunks to unload, and compare your TPS. If TPS jumps by 1-2 points, the old spawn area was the problem.

Disabling Spawn Chunk Loading

Paper lets you disable spawn chunk loading entirely with a single setting in paper-world-defaults.yml:

# paper-world-defaults.yml
spawn:
  keep-spawn-loaded: false

Setting this to false means spawn chunks behave like any other chunks: they load when a player is nearby and unload when nobody is around. This is the simplest way to optimize spawn chunks minecraft servers maintain. For most survival servers, this is the recommended setting. The only downside is that the first player to teleport to spawn will experience a brief chunk-loading delay, which you can mitigate by pre-generating the spawn area with Chunky.

Force-Loaded Chunks with /forceload

Sometimes you want specific chunks to remain loaded (for a global farm or a clock circuit) without keeping the entire spawn area active. Minecraft's /forceload command lets you selectively keep individual chunks loaded:

/forceload add 0 0 2 2

This keeps chunks from (0,0) to (2,2) loaded, which is a 3x3 area instead of the 19x19 spawn area. Use this for clocks, sorting systems, or anything that genuinely needs to run without players present. You can list all force-loaded chunks with /forceload query and remove them with /forceload remove.

Be conservative with /forceload. Each force-loaded chunk ticks fully, including entities, block updates, and random ticks. Loading 50 chunks "because we might need them" defeats the purpose of disabling spawn chunks in the first place.

Cleaning Up the Spawn Area

If you keep spawn chunks loaded (or if your spawn area gets loaded frequently by players), optimize what is inside those chunks:

• Remove unnecessary entities: Item frames used for decoration, armor stands for holograms, and stray villagers all cost tick time. Replace decorative item frames with painted maps on blocks where possible. Use a hologram plugin that creates packet-based holograms (not real armor stands) for display text.
• Disable or simplify redstone: Redstone clocks, sorting machines, and piston doors in the spawn area tick constantly. If the contraption does not need to run 24/7, add an on/off switch or move it out of the spawn chunk range. See our redstone lag guide for more details.
• Limit mob spawning: Use light levels, slabs, or buttons to mob-proof the spawn area. Mobs that spawn in dark corners of spawn builds tick every single game tick even when no player can see them.
• Clear dropped items: Use ClearLag or Paper's alt-item-despawn-rate to clean up dropped items faster in the spawn area. Hundreds of dropped cobblestone from a nearby mob farm can accumulate in spawn chunks.

Per-World Spawn Chunk Settings

You can configure spawn chunk behavior per world. If your server has a dedicated hub world, you might want spawn chunks loaded there (since players teleport to hub spawn frequently) while disabling them in the survival world. Paper's per-world configuration lets you set keep-spawn-loaded differently for each world in paper-world.yml inside each world folder.

For the Nether and End, spawn chunks rarely matter because players almost never spawn at those worlds' spawn points. Disabling them for these dimensions is a free performance gain.

Optimize spawn chunks minecraft servers keep loaded by reducing what those chunks contain, or simply turn off spawn chunk loading and use targeted /forceload for the specific chunks that need to stay active. Combined with proper entity management and redstone discipline, this can recover 1-3 TPS on mature survival servers. For the full server optimization workflow, see our 20 TPS guide.

See an optimized server in action: Astroworld MC, IP play.astroworldmc.com, Java + Bedrock.