LeafSMP is a small, whitelisted 16+ vanilla survival server on Java Edition, hosted in the UK by one person who reads every application by hand. It is about two months in, with a group already settled in and building, and there is still plenty of room to find a spot of your own.
Vanilla, not nearly vanilla
Plenty of servers say vanilla and mean vanilla plus the bits we changed. This one runs Paper for the performance work, and every Paper default that changes how the game behaves is turned back to the Mojang one. Duping mechanics, piston behaviour, mob AI, redstone timing and item merging all work the way they do in singleplayer and the way the wiki describes.
The single exception is per-player mob caps, so one person AFK at a farm does not eat everybody else's spawns. On a twenty slot server that is what makes farms work at all.
Grief gets put back
Every block placed, every block broken and every container opened is written to a log with a name and a time. If somebody empties your chests or knocks a hole through your build, it can be read back and put back item for item.
That is why there are no land claims, no protection plugin and no region tool. You never have to fence off what you build or ask permission to settle somewhere. The world behaves like singleplayer, with the safety net behind it rather than in front of it.
Nothing is for sale
No ranks, no shop, no crates, no cosmetics, no priority queue and no donation link. There is no economy plugin and no server currency. The conveniences anybody has are one home, /back, /spawn and the consensual /tpa family, and everybody has all of them.
How it plays
- Hard difficulty, and keep inventory is off, so what you carry matters
- One survival world, no seasons and no scheduled wipes
- PvP is on so you can duel if you both want to, but this is not a PvP server
- The Nether and the End are open with nothing disabled
- Simple Voice Chat for proximity voice if you want it, and entirely optional
- Twenty slots, and a name colour you pick yourself that shows in game and in Discord
The setup
Self hosted in the UK on dedicated hardware rather than rented hosting: an eight thread Intel Core i7 with 32GB of memory and NVMe storage, behind battery backup and fiber, running nothing else. The world is backed up every two hours and the newest backup is restored and checked every single day, because a backup nobody has ever restored is not a backup. There is a live browser map of the whole world at leafsmp.com/map.
How to join
Come into the Discord, read the #about channel, and press Apply for Whitelist. It asks for your Minecraft username, your age and a few honest sentences about yourself. One person reads every one, usually within an hour or two, and there is a welcome in chat when you are in.
Join the Discord or read everything first at leafsmp.com