Modded Minecraft server won't start and there is no crash report

No crash report is itself the diagnosis

Minecraft writes a crash report when Java throws something it cannot recover from. If there is no file in crash-reports/, one of three things happened, and they are easy to tell apart.

1. The OS killed the process

The most common cause on a rented box. You asked for more heap than the machine has, so the kernel killed the whole JVM — which cannot write a crash report because it no longer exists.

Symptoms: the log simply stops mid-line. No exception, no "Stopping server".

Fix: lower -Xmx to about 75% of the machine's real RAM. The JVM needs memory outside the heap, and your host needs some too. On Linux, confirm it with dmesg | grep -i kill.

2. It failed before the game loaded

Forge can fail during mod discovery, before the crash-report machinery exists. Then the answer is in logs/latest.log or logs/debug.log, not in crash-reports/.

Look for the first ERROR or FATAL line in the file, not the last. Causes precede effects, and one early failure produces a cascade of noise behind it. The last error is usually a symptom of the first.

Common at this stage: missing dependencies, duplicate jars, the wrong Java version and a non-mod jar in mods/.

3. A native crash

If you find an hs_err_pid*.log next to the server jar, the JVM itself died — usually a graphics driver or a native library. There is no Java trace to read. That file names the failing library.

Still nothing?

Check the obvious ones before going deeper: the EULA, the port being taken, and a second server already holding the world. Each produces a clear message and no crash report.

Doing this automatically

Forge Server Doctor performs the whole procedure above — reads the report, finds the real cause under the wrappers, skips the vanilla frames, and names the mod jar. 24 failure modes, each with its fix. The free edition covers the six most common startup failures.