Anvil-MC 1.9.1 adds an Automation tab to every Minecraft server you host on Android. It does two things: it can put an empty server to sleep and wake it the moment someone joins, and it can run tasks for you on a schedule, from auto saves to a daily auto restart, while the server is up. Both are optional, and both work on Java, Pumpkin and Bedrock servers.
Why automate a server that runs on a phone?
A Minecraft server on a phone has two costs a cloud server does not: battery and heat. A world with nobody in it still ticks, still loads chunks, still keeps a few hundred megabytes of RAM warm. That is fine when friends drop in all evening. It is wasted when the last player logged off at midnight and the next one shows up after school.
Until now the choice was binary: leave the server running around the clock, or stop it and tell everyone to message you when they want to play. Sleep when empty is the middle option.
Sleep when empty
Turn it on in the Automation tab and pick an idle time. Fifteen minutes is the default; you can make it shorter or longer. Once the server has had no players online for that long, Anvil-MC saves the world and puts the server to sleep. Think of it as hibernation: the Java process exits, so the RAM goes back to the phone and the battery stops draining.
The part that matters: your server does not disappear. The public address stays live, and the server still shows as online in everyone's server list with a "Sleeping, join to wake up" message where the MOTD normally is. When any player tries to join, Anvil-MC sees the attempt, starts the server on your phone, and after about a minute they can join again. Nobody has to text you, nobody has to open a dashboard, and you do not have to be awake.
Both messages, the sleeping MOTD and the "waking up, try again in a minute" reply the player sees, can be customised in the Automation tab.
This is not Aternos-style sleep. Aternos stops the server the moment it empties, and the owner has to restart it from the Aternos website before anyone can play; the point is to relieve their shared queue. Anvil-MC's sleep exists to save resources on your phone, stays off unless you enable it, and any player can wake it by simply joining. If you never turn it on, the server never sleeps, which is still the main reason people move from Aternos.
When to leave it off
If your world depends on things happening while nobody is online, keep sleep disabled. Mob farms, crop growth, redstone clocks and villager trading refreshes all stop while the server sleeps, exactly as they would if the server were shut down. For a survival world where the farms are the point, a phone left on the charger with sleep off is still the right setup.
Scheduled tasks
The second half of the Automation tab runs tasks for you while the Minecraft server is up. Each task has a type, an interval and a couple of options:
- Announcement: send a message to everyone in chat.
- Save world: run a world save without stopping anything.
- Restart server: a clean restart that keeps your public address (more below).
- Set time or weather: keep it daytime, keep it clear, or whatever your world wants.
- Clear dropped items: remove loose items lying around the world.
- Console command: anything you could type into the console yourself.
Intervals run from every 15 minutes up to every 12 hours, or once a day at a time you pick. A daily "restart at 5:00" or an hourly save are the obvious ones, but a console command on a timer covers a lot of ground: a /tellraw reminder, a /kill @e[type=item], a /difficulty that flips to hard on weekends.
Players-only tasks
Any task can be set to skip while the server is empty. An announcement to nobody and a save of a world that has not changed are both waste, so most tasks should have this on. The exception is a scheduled restart, which you may want to happen regardless.
Restarts that keep your address
Stopping and starting a server by hand can mean a new tunnel session and a new address to hand out. A scheduled auto restart does not. It warns players in chat at 60, 30 and 10 seconds, saves the world, stops the server and starts it again on the same public address. Friends who were mid-session reconnect to the same IP they had a minute ago.
The warnings can be turned off, or replaced with your own text if you would rather say "Back in a sec" than the default.
A restart is the cheapest performance fix there is. Long-running Java servers slowly accumulate loaded chunks, entities and garbage. A daily restart at a quiet hour resets all of it, and on a phone with limited RAM the difference is noticeable by the second day. Pair it with sleep when empty and the server spends most of its life either freshly started or asleep.
A setup that works for most groups
- Sleep when empty: on, 15 minutes.
- Save world: every 30 minutes, players only.
- Restart server: daily at 5:00, warnings on.
- Announcement: every 2 hours, players only, pointing at your Discord or rules.
That gives you a Minecraft server on Android that is always joinable, never burns battery for nobody, and starts each day clean. If your group is on all day, drop the sleep and keep the rest.
Available now. Automation ships in Anvil-MC 1.9.1 on Google Play and as a direct APK from anvil-mc.com. You will find the Automation tab in the settings of any existing server, and the full release notes in the changelog. Questions or ideas for more task types: the Discord is the place.
