GT New Horizons Server Hosting

What GT New Horizons Is

GT New Horizons, GTNH for short, is a modpack built around GregTech on Forge for Minecraft 1.7.10. Its team chose to stay on that old version years ago and has kept working on the pack ever since: instead of chasing new Minecraft releases, they rework the mods themselves. The current release is 2.8.4, and its server download holds around two hundred mods.

Progress runs through tiers of power. You start in the Stone Age and the Steam Age, then climb through LV, MV and HV and on from there, and every tier asks for machines made from materials only the tier before it could produce. The quest book lays that road out, and it is long enough that most groups stay in the same world for a very long time.

That last point is the one that matters for hosting. A GTNH world does not stay the size it was in the first week. Bases fill up with multiblocks, cables and item storage, chunk loaders keep factories running while nobody stands near them, and all of that lives in memory and on the tick, twenty times a second.

How Much RAM a GTNH Server Needs

The GTNH team gives a plain rule for its own pack: 6 GB for the server, then half a gigabyte for every extra player in the early game, and a full gigabyte for every extra player once the group reaches UV and the late game. The start script in the server download asks for exactly 6 GB, and that is the floor, not the target.

The plan column adds a gigabyte of margin to the rule. Java needs some memory outside the heap as well, and a GTNH world a year in has far more loaded than one a week in, so a plan that exactly matches the rule is the plan you outgrow first. Moving up later keeps the same files and the same address, so starting on Starter with two or three players is a perfectly reasonable way in.

Why a 1.7.10 Server Cares About One Core

Minecraft 1.7.10 works out the whole world on a single thread. Every GregTech machine, every cable and every Applied Energistics network is calculated on that one thread, twenty times a second, so the speed of one core decides how many machines a GTNH server carries before the tick rate drops. More cores help with everything around it, such as saving chunks and handling connections, but they do not make that one thread any faster.

This is the pack where the Performance line earns its price: the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X with DDR5 RAM or the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, Enterprise NVMe, and a full thread for every vCPU instead of a share. On the standard line the cores are shared, which is fine for a small group in the early tiers and starts to show once the factories grow. If you want to know what the tick numbers mean, TPS and MSPT are explained here.

Setting Up GTNH on Our Panel

GTNH is not on CurseForge, Modrinth or Feed The Beast, so the one click installer in the panel does not list it. The setup still happens entirely in the panel, and nothing has to be uploaded from your own computer:

1. Start from a Forge server

   Order the server with Forge as its software. If it already runs something else, switch it to Forge on the Settings tab first.

2. Set the version to 1.7.10

   Type 1.7.10 in the version field on the Settings tab and save. The panel pairs that version with Java 8 on its own, which is the Java the server pack below is built for.

3. Take a backup, then empty the server folder

   Make a backup on the Backups tab first. Then clear out the Files tab: the pack brings every file it needs, and anything left over from an earlier install can only get in its way.

4. Fetch the server pack by its link

   The GTNH download site has a ServerPacks folder with two builds of every release. Copy the link of the 2.8.4 build whose name ends in Java_8.zip, paste it into From link on the Files tab, and the machine downloads it in the background while you wait.

5. Unpack it where it is

   Decompress the zip in the server folder. The mods, config and libraries folders and the Forge jar land right next to each other, which is where they have to be.

6. Rename the Forge jar to server.jar

   The panel starts a file called server.jar. Rename the Forge jar from the pack to exactly that name:

   forge-1.7.10-10.13.4.1614-1.7.10-universal.jar

7. Accept the EULA

   Open eula.txt and make sure the last line reads eula=true. That line is your agreement to Mojang's licence, and no Minecraft server starts without it.

8. Start it, and give the first start time

   The first start is slow: two hundred mods on 1.7.10 take a few minutes to load before the console says Done. After that, join with the same 2.8.4 release on your own computer.

The download site also has a build for Java 17 to 25, which the GTNH team recommends because it runs faster. That build starts through its own launch jar with its own list of arguments, and the panel's start line is written for a plain server.jar, so the Java 8 build is the one that runs here as it comes. The modpack guide covers the packs that do install with one click.

Every Player Needs the Same Release

Players join with the GTNH client on their own computer, usually through a launcher such as Prism Launcher or MultiMC that installs the whole pack in one go. The release has to match the server's down to the last number: a player on an older release joining a 2.8.4 server gets a list of mods that do not match instead of the world.

Adding a mod on one side only is the other way to break it. Anything that adds blocks or items has to be on the server and on every client, and in GTNH it also has to agree with the pack's own recipes, which is why most groups leave the mod list exactly as the team ships it.

To keep the world to your own group, type whitelist on in the console, then whitelist addfollowed by each player's name.

Updating to a New GTNH Release

A GTNH release does not install on top of the one before it. Take a backup, delete the config, libraries, mods, resources and scripts folders, and unpack the new server pack in their place. The world folder, the server settings and the player lists stay where they are, and the Forge jar gets the same rename as the first time.

From the old config folder, keep only your JourneyMap server settings if you changed them. Copying the whole old config folder over the new one is the classic way to end up with a server that starts and then behaves strangely, because every release expects its own defaults. Players move their client to the same release at the same moment, and reading the changelog first tells you whether a release asks for anything extra.

Backups on a GTNH Server

Every plan comes with a nightly backup of the whole server, and you keep 10 of them. GTNH also ships Server Utilities, which makes world backups of its own by default and stores them inside the server folder, on the same disk as the world. On a server that runs for months those add up. Look at the backup settings in serverutilities.cfg and decide whether you want both, or only the nightly backups from the panel.

How GTNH Sits Against the Other Packs Here

GTNH is the slow one among the packs we write about. All The Mods 10 puts hundreds of mods in front of you on day one and Create goes deep on a single mod, while GTNH is one long road, and the load on the server grows along that road instead of arriving in the first week.

All The Mods 10 hosting, Better MC hosting, Create hosting, RLCraft hosting.

Questions About GTNH Servers