Forge version: forge-1.7.10-10.13.4.1614
Twilight Forest version: twilightforest-1.7.10-2.3.7

The problem:

• On a multiplayer server with my friends, we cannot get the Twilight forest portal to open
• usings too many items, it shows the items are there, however when I try to take them it says "no item with ID [xxx]"
• grabbing an item from the creative menu and placing it on the ground turns it into a dirt block

Troubleshooting:

• With with exact same mods in a single player server, the twilight mod works perfectly fine
• There are no logs that say that anything is explicitly wrong (unless I'm looking in the wrong place)
• Creating a new server with the same mod list leads to the same issue

any help would be appreciated, thanks :)

Solution found;

Issue: The server was being loaded up as a vanilla server despite the fact that forge was being used to make the server

Solution:

• install java JDK 8.0

• Run the Forge universal jar,

• if the jar does nothing, ensure that java 8.0 is added to path

• if still not working, ensure that 8.0 is being used instead of some other version installed is being used, to do this create a bat of cmd file with the following

"C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.8.0_202\bin\java.exe" -Xmx4096M -Xms4096M -jar server.jar
pause

this selects the right version of java to run the server from and dedicates 4GB of ram to the server,
NOTE: rename the forge file to server.jar