So you made a Minecraft server and posted it to Planet Minecraft for the whole world to see. But when a player adds your server to their list of Multiplayer servers all they see is a single colored line of text that's monotone in flavor right underneth the server name. This monotone line of text is the first thing a new player sees when they try to connect to a server and you want it to speak what your server is about, so it's neccessary you customize your server's Message of the Day (MOTD) to match your server.


My Server MOTD still says "A Minecraft Server" Help!

First of all you need to find the server.properties file in your server's directory. It should be in the same folder as your minecraft_server.jar and/or craftbukkit.jar etc.. Right click the file and edit it with a word editor. I recommend Notepad++. 

Here is a portion of that file, I've bolded the section you are looking for:

... white-list=false generate-structures=true online-mode=true max-build-height=256 level-seed= [b]motd=A Minecraft Server[/b] enable-rcon=false

Everything after "motd=," but still on the same line, will be part of your server's MOTD. Feel free to change this to whatever you wish.

Preface to Colors, Text Effects, and Line Breaks

In Minecraft the allocated code to create these effects is to use a Section Sign (§) and then a letter or number attribute. So like so: §a or §2

But you probably don't have a § on your keyboard and the server.properties file only allows for specific kinds of characters to be placed into the file. So even if you copied and pasted a § into the document it wouldn't work. So we have to use some knowledge of Java, Minecraft's language.

To tell Java to write a section sign you need to use: "\u00A7" This accesses different parts of memory bits and puts it together to display a section sign. Now Minecraft won't display a section sign, because it's assigned to tell the program text is going to be modified in some way. You'll notice this if you copy and paste a section sign into a book and quill. How the text is edited depends on the effect variable. So the a or the 2 in these examples: §a or §2

Colors

The number or letter after the "#" are the effect variables to give the color they are written in. So to make a part of your MOTD Green (#2) you would write: \u00A72 The part in bold is the effect variable.



Anything after your color code will be that color, unless you include another color code or a different text effect that will be shown below.


Coming Soon!
I'm sorry guys, I'm getting lazy. I'll finish this some other time. I wanted to make this fun and informative by teaching some things about Java and what not, but that's a lot of work so I'm taking a break.

Soon to come:
Other Text Effects
Line Breaks

Maybe a better lesson in Java, and some more formatting, to make the blog look better.