BMC4 Server Hosting: How to Run Better MC on Forge 1.20.1 for Your Group

A BMC4 server is what you need when you want to play Better MC together instead of taking turns: shared bases, trips to the Aether and boss raids as a group. The pack looks like "enhanced vanilla", but under the hood it runs more than 350 mods, and a friend's gaming PC struggles to host it. Here's what a BMC4 server needs, how much memory to get, how to install the pack on Elysium and what to configure before the first login.

What Better MC BMC4 is

Better MC is a modpack series by LunaPixelStudios, and BMC4 is its edition for Minecraft 1.20.1 on Forge. The tagline on the pack page reads "Don't play Vanilla, play this". The idea is to keep the Minecraft you know and make every part of it richer. BMC4 has almost 19 million downloads on CurseForge, which makes it one of the most popular Vanilla+ packs out there.

What the pack includes, according to its author:

• Overhauled world generation based on Biomes O' Plenty and Geophilic, plus reworked strongholds and Nether fortresses.
• Thousands of dungeons and structures from When Dungeons Arise and AdoraBuild: Structures.
• Bosses and mobs from Mowzie's Mobs and Cataclysm, plus rideable dragons.
• The Aether dimension with the Deep Aether, Aether Redux and Aether Villages add-ons.
• More than 100 quests that guide players through the pack's content.
• Quality of life: Waystones for teleporting, XP Tomes for storing experience and Xaero's Minimap.
• Content from 1.20.2+ via the Vanilla Backport mod, and the pack's own shader presets.

Two things on that list matter most for a server. The first is sheer size: 350+ mods eat memory before anyone has even joined. The second is how dense the world is: any new chunk can bring a dungeon or a large structure, and the Aether is a separate dimension that the server keeps in memory while someone is in it. That's why BMC4 is more demanding than its screenshots suggest.

What a BMC4 server needs

BMC4 updates often: since December 2025 versions v54 through v62 have come out, roughly one a month. For a server that means one rule: every player needs exactly the same pack version as the server. Check it in the launcher before the first login and after every update.

How much RAM you need and which plan to choose

The baseline for BMC4 is 8 GB. With that, a server for two or three players handles mod loading and generating new areas without long garbage-collection pauses. Beyond that, it comes down to how many people explore different parts of the world at the same time: each of them drags their own area of loaded chunks along. How to size memory for modded packs is covered in detail in how much RAM a modded server needs.

Memory is only half of it. Minecraft 1.20.1 still runs its main loop on a single thread, so for a server with hundreds of mods, single-core clock speed is what counts. Elysium servers run on the AMD Ryzen 9 7900X at up to 5.6 GHz with NVMe drives, so new chunks full of structures are written quickly. The data center is in Frankfurt, which keeps ping low across Europe.

How to install BMC4 on an Elysium server

You won't need to assemble 350 mods by hand: BMC4 is in our CurseForge modpack catalog.

1. Open the order page and find the pack using the search in the list. In the catalog it's called Better MC [FORGE] BMC4.
2. Choose a plan. The form suggests the minimum plan by memory and marks the ones that are too small for the pack.
3. Pay for the order. The server downloads the pack from CurseForge and installs Forge on its own.
4. Start the server from your client area. The first start takes noticeably longer than usual while hundreds of mods register their blocks, items and recipes.
5. Install the same BMC4 version as the server on your side and connect using the address from the panel.

If you already have a server, you can install the pack from the panel in the Modpacks tab. It's a clean install: all server files, including the world, are deleted, so make a backup first. The step-by-step process for any pack is described in the guide how to install a modpack on a server.

BMC4 server settings after installation

Server files are available in the Pterodactyl file manager and over SFTP. The BMC4 author doesn't publish any special server.properties requirements, so follow the general rules for heavy packs:

• view-distance — 8 chunks is enough: the world doesn't look cut off, and the server doesn't keep extra chunks full of structures in memory.
• simulation-distance — 6–8. This is the radius where mobs, farms and machines are active; on a pack with bosses and crowds of new mobs, keep it modest.
• white-list=true — for a friends-only server, turn on the whitelist and add players with whitelist add <name> in the console.
• allow-flight — if players get kicked with a message about flying, for example while riding a dragon, set it to true.

Pregeneration is worth thinking about too. The BMC4 world is packed with dungeons, and when three friends scatter in different directions on the first evening, the server generates all of it at once. If you pregenerate the area around spawn in advance with a server-side tool like Chunky (players don't need it), the first hours of play run much more smoothly. More techniques, from JVM flags to entity settings, are collected in the modded server optimization guide.

Common problems and how to fix them

A player can't join because of mods

This is almost always a version mismatch. BMC4 updates often, and the launcher may offer an update before you've updated the server. Keep players on exactly the same version as the server and update everyone at once.

The server won't start after adding mods

Open the console in the panel: Forge reports which mod failed. Most often it's a client-only mod — a UI, graphics or shader mod. Remove those from the server's mods folder. If the log shows a Java version error, check the Versions tab: 1.20.1 needs Java 17. Changing only the Java version doesn't touch the server files.

Lag while exploring and in the Aether

Load spikes on BMC4 almost always line up with new chunk generation: someone flew far from base on a dragon or was the first to open the Aether. A moderate view-distance, pregeneration and spare memory all help. If Nexus can't keep up with 4+ players, moving to Vortex usually solves it.

Backups and pack updates

Elysium makes an automatic backup of your server every night, and you also get manual slots: 3 on Nexus, 4 on Vortex, 5 on Apex. Make a manual backup before any changes to mods or configs; you can roll back to it right from the panel.

Updating BMC4 through the Modpacks tab is the same clean install, so the order is: make a backup, download the world folder over SFTP, install the new pack version and put the world back. Read the version's changelog on CurseForge first: if a mod was removed from the pack, its blocks will disappear from the world.