How To: Read Your Minecraft Server Console

Contents

1. Reading the Console Output
2. Example Console Output
3. Interpreting the Example Console Output

Reading the Console Output

Within the console output, each line consists of the following:
DATE TIME SOURCE LEVEL MESSAGE
Each part has different information that you may need. Below you will find a brief explanation of what each part means

• DATE - The date that the message was sent on, this is the day first then the month. (Example: February 15th is 15.02)
• TIME - This is the time the message was sent, in 24 hour time.
• SOURCE - This is the source of the message, this will tell you whether the message was sent by Multicraft (Ex: [Multicraft] ) or by the Minecraft server (Ex: [Server])
• LEVEL - The level will tell you if the message is informational (INFO), a warning (WARN), an error (ERROR). This will only show up if the message was sent from the Minecraft server
• MESSAGE - This is the message that it wants to give you, this can be anything from a nice little sentence about what's happening (Ex: Starting server!) or it could be more a technical error (Ex: java.lang.NullPointerException), due to this masive range of complexity, we will not be discussing what the messages mean in this article.

Example Console Output

15.02 23:59:00 [Multicraft] Starting server!
15.02 23:55:11 [Server] INFO java.lang.NullPointerException
15.02 23:55:11 [Server] Server thread/ERROR Couldn't load chunk

Note: This is only example output, crash reports and the actual console will contain much more detail about what actually went wrong. These lines were chosen as a simplistic view of what each line has as it's basic information, not the more complicated error messages.

Interpreting the Example Console Output

We will interpret a couple of the console messages below to show a couple of clear examples with how each section looks:

Above you can see that two of the errors have the exact same time, this is most likely due to them being related problems. So in this case, the server couldn't load the chunk because of the pointer not existing. In the other log message it is just confirming that Multicraft is starting the server.