Minecraft
MOTD Designer
The MOTD is two lines of text in a list of hundreds, and it is the only thing deciding whether someone clicks. Design it against a preview rather than by restarting the server to look at it.
23 visible characters. Around 45 fit before the client cuts it off.
27 visible characters. Around 45 fit before the client cuts it off.
How the server list shows it
For server.properties
The escape rather than a literal § — server.properties is not read as UTF-8 on every version, and \n is how the second line is expressed.
motd=\u00A76\u00A7lSPAWNLY \u00A78» \u00A7fSurvival \u00A7a\u00A7lOPEN\n\u00A77Season 4 \u00A78| \u00A7bNew map \u00A78| \u00A7e1.21.1
How this works
The MOTD lives in server.properties as a single value, with the two lines separated by an escaped newline. Colour codes work throughout. The preview here renders the same runs the client would, at roughly the width the server list gives you, so what you see is close to what a player sees — including where the truncation falls.
What people get wrong
Around forty-five visible characters fit per line before the client cuts it off, and codes do not count toward that, so a heavily formatted line has less room than it looks like. The other thing worth knowing is the encoding: the generated value uses the escape form rather than a literal section sign, because server.properties is read as Latin-1 on a number of versions and a literal one turns into rubbish there.