Purpur vs. Pufferfish: Which Paper Fork Fits Your Server in 2026

If you know Paper, you have probably heard of Purpur and Pufferfish, two forks that build on Paper's foundation. They solve different problems, and in 2026 they also differ in something more basic: which Minecraft versions you can run them on.

The Fork Hierarchy

Vanilla Minecraft
    └── CraftBukkit
        └── Spigot
            └── Paper
                ├── Purpur (extra configuration and gameplay options)
                └── Pufferfish (extra performance patches)

You may still see Petal recommended in older guides. It was a fork of Purpur, and its GitHub repository is archived and has had no commits since November 2022, so leave it out of any new setup.

Pufferfish: Performance Patches

Pufferfish calls itself "a highly optimized Paper fork designed for large servers requiring both maximum performance, stability, and 'enterprise' features" (Pufferfish on GitHub). Its README lists, among other things, better entity performance, partial asynchronous processing, faster map rendering for image map plugins, Sentry error tracking and a built-in profiler.

The feature most people pick it for is DAB, Dynamic Activation of Brain. It is not async pathfinding. Per the Pufferfish configuration docs, DAB "reduces the frequency of brain ticks" for entities farther from the nearest player. It applies to mobs that use the brain AI system, such as villagers, axolotls, hoglins, zombified piglins and goats. The settings live in pufferfish.yml:

• dab.enabled turns it on. The docs strongly recommend leaving it on.
• dab.start-distance is the distance in blocks within which entities are not affected.
• dab.activation-dist-mod controls how quickly the tick rate drops with distance. Lower means far entities tick less often.
• dab.max-tick-freq sets the slowest an entity will ever be ticked.
• dab.blacklisted-entities excludes mobs you need to behave normally.

The catch in 2026: Pufferfish's public source code stops at Minecraft 1.21.10. There is no 26.x branch on its GitHub, and its download page offers jars up to 1.21.8. Paper and Purpur both have builds for 26.3 (Paper's 26.3 builds are still alpha).

Purpur: Features and Configuration

Purpur extends Paper with hundreds of extra options in purpur.yml. A few real examples from the Purpur configuration docs:

world-settings:
  default:
    blocks:
      farmland:
        disable-trampling: true    # nobody tramples crops by jumping
    mobs:
      zombie:
        ridable: true              # players can ride zombies
      villager:
        lobotomize:
          enabled: true            # lobotomizes villagers that cannot move

Lobotomize is Purpur's main performance switch for trading halls. The docs describe it as "Lobotomizes the villager if it cannot move (Does not disable trading)".

Purpur's docs do not list DAB. What Purpur offers is configurability without separate plugins, and it keeps up with current Minecraft versions.

How to compare them on your server

Which fork is faster depends on your world, plugins and players. Test it on a copy of your world:

1. Back up the server and keep a copy of the world as your test world.
2. Run your current software with your usual plugins and a normal evening's players. Record /spark tps and run /spark profiler start --timeout 600.
3. Swap the jar (same Minecraft version), restore the same world copy, and repeat under a similar load.
4. Compare median and 95th percentile MSPT, and look at which profiler entries got smaller.

The spark command reference explains the options. Note down the software version, plugins and player count next to each result, so you can repeat the test later.

Our Recommendation

• Survival and SMP servers on Minecraft 26.x: Paper, or Purpur if you want its options. Turn on villager lobotomize if trading halls show up in your profiler.
• Servers staying on 1.21.8 or older (the newest jar on Pufferfish's download page) with many brain-AI mobs: Pufferfish is worth testing, mainly for DAB.
• Modded servers (NeoForge, Forge, Fabric): none of these apply. Use the pack's own loader, and on Fabric add optimization mods such as Lithium and FerriteCore.

Paper and Purpur install from Space-Node's game panel, and because Purpur is a drop-in replacement for Paper, you can switch between the two on the same Minecraft version and keep your world. Do not switch a 26.x world to a 1.21 server: the PaperMC team says that after upgrading a world to 26.1 "you cannot downgrade back to a lower version" (Paper 26.1 announcement). If you want to run Pufferfish on a 1.21 server, ask us in live chat first.

Start your Minecraft server on Space-Node

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