Minecraft proximity voice chat: how to set it up on a server

Why voice chat is different from every other plugin

A Minecraft server talks to players over TCP on one port — usually 25565. Almost every plugin lives inside that connection and needs nothing else.

Voice is not like that. Audio cannot tolerate the delays TCP introduces when it retransmits a lost packet, so Simple Voice Chat opens a second connection over UDP. That second port has to be reachable from the internet, or players connect to the server normally and simply never hear each other.

The failure nobody warns you about

Out of the box, the plugin uses UDP port 24454. On a dedicated machine you would open that port and be done.

On shared hosting you cannot. Your server is given specific ports, and 24454 is not one of them — it belongs to the host, not to you. The plugin still starts, and the log looks entirely healthy:

This is worth stating plainly, because it is the part that wastes people's evenings: a working log line does not mean working voice chat. The plugin reports that it bound the port inside the container. It has no way to know whether the outside world can reach it.

The fix: one line

Simple Voice Chat has a setting for exactly this situation. In plugins/voicechat/voicechat-server.properties:

-1 means use the same port as the Minecraft server. Your server's port is already open, already published by the host, and already reachable — because that is how players connect in the first place. Voice traffic rides UDP on that same number while Minecraft keeps using TCP, and the two never collide.

Restart the server. The log now reads:

How to check it actually works

Do not trust the startup line. The only proof is a real client completing the handshake. Join the server with the mod installed and watch the console for:

Those two lines mean a player negotiated the voice connection end to end. If you only ever see the startup line and never a secret request, the UDP port is not reaching your server.

Every player needs the mod

Simple Voice Chat is not a server-only plugin. It has a server side and a client side, and a player without the client mod installed will join and play normally but hear nothing and be heard by nobody.

Tell your players before you announce voice chat. The most common "it does not work" report is simply a player who has not installed the client mod.

If it still does not work

In order of how often each one is the actual cause:

• The player has no client mod. Check whether anyone at all gets a secret request in the log.
• Version mismatch. The plugin and the client mod must target the same Minecraft version. A 1.21 client mod will not talk to a 26.2 server.
• The port is back to 24454. Reinstalling or updating the plugin can rewrite the config with the default. Check the file again.
• The player's own network. Some restrictive networks block outbound UDP entirely. If one player fails and everyone else is fine, this is usually why.

On ChunkArc

Voice chat works on the Free Beta, and you do not have to do the port fix yourself. Every server gets a port published for both TCP and UDP, and if the plugin writes its default 24454 we rewrite it to -1 for you within a few minutes.

We added that after finding four servers where voice chat had been installed, looked fine in the log, and had never worked once. Nobody had reported it — the failure is silent, so people assume the host blocks voice chat and give up.