Minecraft
MOTD Designer
Your MOTD is two lines among hundreds of servers, and it is the only thing a player has to decide whether to click. Design it with a preview instead of restarting the server every time you want to check.
25 characters visible. The client cuts a line at roughly 45.
27 characters visible. The client cuts a line at roughly 45.
How the server list shows it
For server.properties
Uses the escape, not a literal § — some versions do not read server.properties as UTF-8 — and \n marks where the second line starts.
motd=\u00A76\u00A7lMY SERVER \u00A78» \u00A7fSurvival \u00A7a\u00A7lOPEN\n\u00A77Season 4 \u00A78| \u00A7bNew map \u00A78| \u00A7e1.21.1
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How it works
In server.properties the MOTD is one value, with an escaped newline splitting it into two lines, and colour codes work anywhere in it. The preview draws the same formatted runs the client draws, at about the width the server list allows, so it closely matches what players will see — truncation point included.
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Common mistakes
Roughly forty-five visible characters fit on a line before the client chops it, and codes do not count towards that — so a line with lots of formatting has less space than it seems. The encoding matters too: the output uses the escape instead of a literal section sign, since several versions read server.properties as Latin-1, and there a literal one comes out as garbage.