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How to Change the Tick Distance on Your Minecraft Bedrock Edition Server

What is the tick distance?

The tick-distance determines the radius around the player in which entities and game mechanics are actively ticked. This includes:

  • Other players and mobs — they are only moved and shown within this area
  • Redstone circuits
  • Mob spawning
  • Plant growth and ticks of fire, water, dripstone, etc.

Chunks outside the tick distance are still loaded (as long as they are inside the view-distance), but are "frozen" — no active processing happens.

Players only become visible up close?

This is the most common case: if the tick distance is set too low (e.g. 4), other players and entities only appear when they get very close. Try setting the value to 810 and restart the server.

Effects on the server

  • Values that are too low cause farms, redstone, mobs or players outside the player to be inactive.
  • Higher values mean more server load, especially with many players or large systems.

Change the tick distance

  1. Open dashboard
    Go to your Minecraft Bedrock Edition server in the dashboard.

  2. Open file browser
    Open the file browser.

  3. Open config
    Open the file server.properties.

  4. Find entry
    Search for the following entry:

    tick-distance=4
    tick-distance=4
  5. Change value
    Change the value as required (e.g. 8 or 6).

  6. Save changes
    Save the changes by clicking on "Save".

  7. Restart server
    Restart the server so that the changes become active.

Recommendation

  • 4 → Default setting
  • 68 → Balanced between farming & world exploration
  • 1012 → Only with strong server performance

Client-side note

For players to actually see the full distance, they also need to set the render distance in their video settings high enough. Otherwise they only see part of the world the server sends — no matter what you configure on the server side.