hopper

You can configure a lot of things about hoppers in the spigot.yml file, under the world-settings -> default section.

The default values for the main options are:

ticks-per:
  hopper-transfer: 8
  hopper-check: 1
hopper-amount: 1
hopper-can-load-chunks: false

Recommended starting value

If you care about redstone contraptions working as expected like in vanilla minecraft:

ticks-per:
  hopper-transfer: 8
  hopper-check: 1
hopper-amount: 1
hopper-can-load-chunks: true

These values should work fine for almost all contraptions, with the exception of very few sorting systems which may require a lower hopper-check value as the items only travel over the hoppers for a single tick. Use these for most servers:

ticks-per:
  hopper-transfer: 8
  hopper-check: 2
hopper-amount: 1
hopper-can-load-chunks: false

If you’d like to ultra-optimise hoppers, you can set the hopper-check to a higher value (with the highest I’d recommend going being 4) but this may cause quite a lot of contraptions to break.
You can also increase the hopper-transfer value to slow down item transfer even more:

ticks-per:
  hopper-transfer: 16
  hopper-check: 4
hopper-amount: 2
hopper-can-load-chunks: false

ticks-per/hopper-transfer

This basically says ‘how many ticks should a hopper wait before it transfers items to the container it connects to’?

The default value of 8 means that a hopper will transfer items every 8 ticks, or every 0.4 seconds.

• Increasing this value makes hoppers transfer items out of a hopper more slowly.
  • This reduces lag
  • …but it can break redstone contraptions that rely on hoppers transferring items quickly.
• Decreasing this value makes hoppers transfer items out of a hopper more quickly.
  • This increases lag
  • …but it makes redstone contraptions that rely on hoppers transferring items quickly work better.

ticks-per/hopper-check

This basically says ‘how many ticks should a hopper wait before it checks for items to pull into itself from above’?

When you drop an item on top of a hopper, or it travels over a hopper in a water stream, the hopper checks whether there’s items above them.

hopper-amount

This says ‘how many items should a hopper transfer at once’?

The normal value is 1. But if, for example, you have your ticks-per/hopper-transfer value set to twice the normal rate, 16, you may want 2 items to be transferred at once so that hopper transfers aren’t 2x slower.

hopper-can-load-chunks

If you turn this option to true, then hoppers will be able to load chunks when they try to pull items from containers in unloaded chunks, or push items to containers in unloaded chunks.

For example, you could have long hopper lines that go through unloaded chunks, and the hoppers would still work.

Because this essentially acts as a mini chunk loader, it can cause a lot of extra lag, so I’d recommend to keep this option set to false unless you really need it.

Manual hopper optimisation

You may know that putting a composter on top of a hopper can make a hopper cause a lot less lag. That’s because the hopper doesn’t have to check for items to pull in from above every tick - it only has to check when the composter outputs an item.

Encourage your players to use composters on top of hoppers where possible, to reduce lag!