Best Purpur-Only Features You Should Enable

Purpur is Paper plus a huge amount of extra configuration. Here are the most useful Purpur-only features and how to enable them.

Where to find Purpur settings

Open purpur.yml in your server root via the dashboard file manager. Most settings are well-commented inline.

Ridable mobs

Purpur lets you ride almost any mob — chickens, cows, pigs, wolves, foxes, even bees. Enable in purpur.yml under each mob's ridable setting.

cow:
  ridable: true
  ridable-in-water: false
  controllable: true

Players can then right-click the mob with a saddle to ride it.

Totem of Undying balance

You can configure exactly how totems behave — what effects they apply when triggered, the cooldown, the durability cost. Useful for PvP servers.

Anvil tweaks

Purpur lets you remove the prior-work penalty (the increasing XP cost when re-using an anvil with the same item). Set anvil.use-vanilla-behavior: false and configure anvil.allow-colors: true to allow color codes in item names.

Per-world game rules

Purpur's per-world configs let you have different gameplay rules in different dimensions. Different difficulty in the nether, different mob caps in the end, etc.

Performance settings

• entities-can-use-portals — disable if you don't want zombies/skeletons going through nether portals
• items-merge-radius — items pick up nearby drops automatically. Saves on entity count.
• experience-merge-radius — XP orbs merge into bigger orbs. Reduces lag.

Mob behavior tweaks

• aware — disable to make a mob completely passive
• can-breed — disable to prevent breeding
• controllable — for ridable mobs, make them steerable
• head-rotation-speed — for fine pathfinding control

Custom death messages

Purpur supports custom death messages with formatting and player placeholders. Define them in the config.

What if you don't need any of this?

Then you're really just running Paper. There's no harm — Purpur runs Paper plugins and configs identically. But if you don't use the extra features, Paper itself is just as good.