Homestead Modpack Server Hosting: Running the Cozy Farming Pack with Friends

A Homestead server is slow living in Minecraft for your whole group: farming, cooking, fishing, a cozy home and hundreds of quests that guide you along. The pack is about settling down and playing slow, and it shines brightest with friends: one cooks, another fishes, a third builds a Create windmill. Here's what's inside Homestead, what the server needs, how much memory to get and how to run the pack on Elysium.

What Homestead is

Homestead — A Cozy Survival Experience was made by Tokimi (Toekimi on CurseForge) and the CozyStudios team. The author says he built it for himself, but the project quickly grew bigger: it took five to six months to make. It appeared on CurseForge in May 2025 and has gathered nearly 2.9 million downloads, and on October 22, 2026 the big 2.0 release came out, followed by 2.0.1.

Homestead runs on Minecraft 1.20.1 and Fabric. CurseForge tags it as Vanilla+, exploration, quests and tech, and as Extra Large in size. Its backbone is the quest book: 709 quests across 27 chapters. The largest chapters are Cogs and Whimsy for Create (73 quests), the fishing chapter Catch of the Day (64), The Portable Life (57) and Seasoned and Settled (53).

What there is to do in Homestead

• Farm and kitchen. 187 dishes, fields, animals and nearly 200 recipes from the bundled farming and food mods.
• Cellar and kettle. 177 drinks: barrels, kegs and brewing stations, broths and specialty pours to sip or sell.
• Fishing. 33 fish and 12 tiers of crates to haul up, and you can fish not only in Overworld water but also in Nether lava and End waters.
• Building. 6,981 decorative blocks for any style — a single plank alone can be cut 35 ways.
• Create. The full Create experience with quests from your first cogwheel to industrial contraptions, plus automated windmills in the farming chapter.
• Gear and storage. Backpacks in six tiers with 57 upgrades, the Sophisticated Storage lineup and armor and tool progression beyond Netherite.
• Collecting. Over 100 plushies — of mobs, YouTubers and community members — hidden around the world.

For looks, the pack has built-in shaders: Complementary Reimagined in three variants plus four more sets. They're enabled by default, but they only run on the player's PC and don't load the server.

What a Homestead server needs

How a Fabric server works and how it differs from Forge is explained on the Fabric hosting page.

How much RAM you need and which plan to choose

The author recommends giving the game 6–8 GB and staying under 10 GB, since more memory than that can hurt rather than help. That advice is for the client. A server needs memory for all players at once: each one keeps their own chunks loaded, and animal farms, crops, barrels and Create contraptions are blocks and entities the server keeps ticking all the time. That's why we treat 8 GB as the baseline.

A Minecraft server simulates the world mostly on one thread, so for a farming pack with automation, single-core clock speed matters. Elysium servers run on Ryzen 9 7900X at up to 5.6 GHz with NVMe drives in a Frankfurt data center. More on how memory relates to player count is in how much RAM a modded server needs.

How to install Homestead on Elysium

1. Open the order page and find Homestead in the modpack list using search.
2. Pick a plan. The form suggests the minimum plan by memory and flags plans that are too small for the pack.
3. Pay for the order: the server downloads the pack from CurseForge and installs Fabric on its own.
4. Start the server from your dashboard. The first start of a large pack takes longer than usual.
5. Install Homestead in the CurseForge launcher, check that the pack version matches the server's and connect using the address shown in the panel. The quests begin with the First Sprout chapter.

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.

Settings for a cozy server

Server files are available in the panel's file manager and over SFTP. What's worth setting:

• pvp=false — in a calm farming pack, sudden fights between neighbors are usually unwelcome.
• white-list=true — for a server with friends, turn on the whitelist and add players with whitelist add <name>.
• view-distance — 8–10 chunks is enough to enjoy the scenery with shaders; beyond that the load grows without much benefit.
• simulation-distance — don't set it too high: it controls how far from players farms and machines keep running.

Agree on Create separately. Contraptions are the best part of the Cogs and Whimsy chapter, but a huge automated farm with a hundred animals or a dozen spinning windmills right at spawn put a noticeable load on the server. More on how Create behaves on a server is on the Create hosting page.

Common problems

A player can't join the server

The most common cause is different versions — especially right now: 2.0 and 2.0.1 came out five days apart, and some launchers may have updated while others haven't. Check the version number for everyone and don't add extra mods to the client.

Lag for just one player

If everyone else is fine, it's almost certainly FPS, not the server. Homestead's shaders are on by default, and the author himself suggests turning them off in Video Settings if you need the frames.

The server won't start

Check the console in the panel: Fabric reports which mod failed to load and what it's missing. If the error is about Java, 1.20.1 needs Java 17; you can switch it in the Versions tab, and changing only Java doesn't touch the server files.

Lag on a well-developed server

The usual culprits are big animal farms and Create contraptions. Check whether someone has a farm with hundreds of mobs, lower simulation-distance and, if your group has grown, move up one plan.

Backups and updates

A month of Homestead adds up to a lot of work: fields, cellars, a plushie collection, finished quest chapters. An Elysium server makes an automatic backup every night, and there are manual slots: 3 on Nexus, 4 on Vortex, 5 on Apex. Before updating the pack through the Modpacks tab, make a manual backup and save the world: it's a clean install, and you'll need to bring the world back afterwards.