Simple Voice Chat on a Minecraft server

Simple Voice Chat adds proximity voice chat to Minecraft: you hear players who are near you in the world, and they get quieter as they walk away. There are also groups where you talk regardless of distance.

Why voice needs its own port

Voice does not travel over the same connection as the game. The server opens a separate UDP port and the clients connect to that. If that port is not assigned to your server, the game works normally but the voice chat stays silent.

Players always need the mod on their side, even when the server runs Paper. Without it they can join, but they cannot speak or hear.

The quick way: Automations

In the Automations tab there is a Simple Voice Chat card. One click:

• installs the plugin or mod that matches your engine,
• assigns a new free port to the server,
• writes that port into the voice chat config.

Restart the server afterwards. If you installed the mod by hand earlier, the panel detects it and only assigns the port.

By hand

1. Install Simple Voice Chat from the Plugins or Mods tab, in the version that matches your game version and engine.
2. Start the server once so the config file is created, then stop it.
3. In IP addresses and ports, add a new port and note its number.
4. Open the config file in Files and enter that number in port=:

# Paper: plugins/voicechat/voicechat-server.properties
# Fabric, Forge, NeoForge: config/voicechat/voicechat-server.properties
port=27123

1. Leave bind_address= empty. It takes an address only, never an address with a port.
2. Start the server and look in the console for the line saying the voice server started on your port.

Advice online often says to set port=-1 to reuse the game port. Do not do that on our servers: use a separate assigned port.