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How to Link Several Minecraft Servers with Velocity

Oct 5, 2026

What a proxy does

A proxy sits in front of your servers. Players connect to the proxy's address, and the proxy sends them on to one of your servers, for example a survival world and a creative world, without anyone typing a second address. Velocity is the proxy most Paper and Purpur servers use today.

In Coalstack a proxy is a normal server entry. It starts, stops and shows a console like any other, and it lives in the same server list.

Creating the proxy

Open New Server and choose Velocity as the platform.
Pick a version (stable releases only) and a name. There is no EULA, memory or template step, because a proxy only forwards traffic.
Create it. Coalstack downloads Velocity from PaperMC and writes a starting velocity.toml on port 25565 with modern forwarding and a random forwarding secret.

Linking your servers

Select the proxy, then open Networking and the Network tab. Add each of your Paper or Purpur servers. For each one Coalstack:

adds it to the proxy's server list, in the order you link them;
turns on Velocity forwarding in the server's config/paper-global.yml using the proxy's secret;
sets the server's online-mode to false, because the proxy now checks logins. The old value is remembered and put back if you unlink the server;
moves the server to the next free port if it was using the proxy's port.

Restart the proxy and the linked servers afterwards. Only Paper and Purpur servers can be linked, and the tab says why for anything else.

Joining and exposing it

Players connect to the proxy's address and port (25565 by default). If friends join from outside your network, forward the proxy's port, not your backend servers' ports. The port forwarding guide shows how. Your backend servers should stay unexposed, since they no longer verify logins themselves.

Limits to know about

A proxy has no world, so backups don't apply to it, and its settings live in velocity.toml, which you edit under World & Files, then Files. If Coalstack was restarted while the proxy kept running, Stop has to force-quit it. The Networking section of the docs has the full list.