The Killd Board / Boats
How many boats does it take to crash a Minecraft server?
4,842 before the tick rate slipped, and 28,212 before the server died. An empty boat is close to the cheapest thing you can put in a world, which is exactly why the number is interesting.
Paper 1.21.11 · AMD Ryzen 7 9700X · 6GB allocated
Why boats cost so much
A boat has no AI, no goals and nothing to path towards. All it does is exist, sit in water and collide. That is nearly the floor for what an entity can cost. Getting from there to a dead server took five thousand of them, which is the honest measure of how little headroom the tick budget has: even the cheapest entity in the game becomes fatal if you have enough of them in one place.
How we tested it
Everything spawned into a single chunk, in one pile, with the server left running until the tick rate gave up. The server ran Paper 1.21.11 on an AMD Ryzen 7 9700X with 6GB allocated, which is the same hardware and the same RAM policy as an ordinary Hostd plan. We watched TPS and tick times rather than guessing, wrote down the count where the server first fell behind, and kept spawning until it either died or made it clear it was not going to.
Nobody spawns five thousand boats deliberately. People do leave boat farms, item frames, armour stands and dropped items accumulating for months, and the arithmetic is the same.
What this means for your server
If your own server is printing Can't keep up! Is the server overloaded? the cause is the same shape as this one: something in the tick loop is taking longer than its 50ms budget. Roastd reads your RAM allocation, view distance, player slots, JVM flags and logs and names which of those it is. No account, no world upload, no charge.
Questions about boats
Do boats cause lag in Minecraft?
Individually, almost none. An empty boat has no AI and no pathfinding, and it is one of the cheapest entities in the game. It still took only 4,842 in a single chunk to push our test server under 20 TPS, because entity count alone eventually costs more than the tick can afford.
Does entity count matter if the entities are cheap?
Yes. Cost per entity decides how many you get away with, not whether you get away with it. Boats are near the cheap end and still broke the server at under five thousand. Wardens, at the expensive end, managed it at 1,912. Both numbers are smaller than the entity count on a lot of long-running survival worlds.
Elsewhere on the board
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Rent the machine we keep breaking
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