The panel

The panel is what the desktop app shows. It is one HTML page served by SpawnLoft itself, so it works offline and runs equally well in a browser tab:

node mcctl.mjs ui        # opens http://127.0.0.1:8770 in your browser

Servers

• A card each, with a status lamp, the port, the memory and a live uptime that ticks.
• Adding a server either creates one, which downloads the server jar and reports real progress, or points SpawnLoft at a folder you already have. Nothing is moved; existing ports and the RCON password are read from that folder's own server.properties.
• Renaming, resetting and deleting ask for the server's name. That friction is deliberate: a dialog that only says "are you sure" gets answered reflexively. The name shown can be clicked to fill it in.

Console

Search, filter to warnings or errors, pause, copy, wrap, line numbers and a bounded scrollback. Log level shows as a coloured rail in the gutter rather than by recolouring the text, so ERROR stands out without becoming harder to read. A stack trace inherits the level of the line above it, which is what makes "filter to errors" show the whole failure instead of its first line.

Export saves the console to a .log file beside the server's snapshots, or uploads it to mclo.gs for sharing with a plugin developer. The upload happens only after a dialog that says what is in it; see Security for the details.

Plugins

Search and install from Modrinth and Hangar together, each result naming its source, filtered or checked against this server's version, with checksum-verified downloads, an update check, and one-click updates with a plugins-scope snapshot taken first. Hangar projects that host their downloads elsewhere are linked to rather than pretended at.

The page manages only what SpawnLoft installed. A custom or premium plugin dropped in by hand is never listed there, never offered a meaningless update, and never has its hash sent to anyone. mcctl plugins <name> lists the full inventory, manual jars included. Enable and disable rename the jar in place, so a disabled plugin keeps its spot and its config.

Backups

Take one at a chosen scope, see every snapshot with its size, age and coverage, and restore or delete any of them. Restoring is refused while the server runs, because extracting over files a live server holds open corrupts a world rather than replacing it. Automatic backups run on a schedule with a retention limit, and the limit only ever removes snapshots its own schedule produced, never one taken by hand or before a reset.

Players

Everyone the server knows about, gathered from operators, bans, the whitelist, the name cache and the world folder, since none of those is a complete list on its own. Search, filter to operators or the banned, and op, ban or delete a player's world data. Whoever is connected is marked and sorted first. Changes go through the console while the server runs and into its files when it does not.

Performance

Processor and memory over the last minute, five minutes, half hour, hour or four hours, sampled every ten seconds. Both scales follow the data, because a fixed 0 to 100% processor axis draws every ordinary server as a flat line on the floor.

Scheduler

Nightly backups, a restart at 5am that warns the players first, a command on the hour. These run through Windows Task Scheduler, so they happen whether or not SpawnLoft is open. See Scheduled work for what a task can be.

Settings

The part of server.properties people actually change: who can join, MOTD, difficulty, game mode, max players, PvP, whitelist, view distance, spawn protection. Everything else stays in the file for mcctl props or an editor, and nothing the panel writes disturbs another key or a comment.

Changing who can join on a world that already has players warns first. Minecraft derives an offline UUID from the player's name and uses the real Mojang one otherwise, so flipping this hands everybody a different identity. The panel reads the world's player data and says how many players are affected before you decide.

Feedback

Three doors in the header. Something broke opens a GitHub bug report with the version, Java, server status and panel log already in it. A question opens a new post in the project's Q&A, and An idea one in Ideas. Nothing is sent from SpawnLoft on its own; the browser hop is the consent.

Settings → Copy diagnostics puts a bug report's worth of facts on the clipboard. It never includes an RCON password or a webhook URL.