Continue with Google
Continue with DiscordHome·Plugins
GuideMinecraft plugins
A plugin changes the rules of your server without asking anything of your players. Here are the ones to install first, and in what order.
A plugin is not a mod
A plugin lives on the server and nowhere else: your players connect with an ordinary Minecraft, with nothing to install on their side. A mod, on the other hand, has to be present on both sides, on the server and in each player's game, otherwise the connection is refused. In return, a plugin needs an engine able to read it, Paper, Spigot, CraftBukkit or Purpur, and that choice is made before anything else, on the page versions and modpacks.
The catalogue available from the panel lists 18,774. You install them from the browser, without going through FTP.
That number is not a target. A server that runs well uses a handful, each one installed for a need you can name. The rest of this page sorts those needs in the order they really come up, from day one to the day the server fills up.
Five needs, in this order
Do not install by plugin name, install by problem to solve. As long as one step's need is not covered, the next is useless: giving everyone teleportation on a server that can still be wrecked only speeds up the damage.
- Protect the builds
The first reflex, even before opening the server to strangers. Two schools: mark out zones yourself and forbid breaking there, which WorldGuard and its companion WorldEdit allow, or let each player claim their land with a shovel, as GriefPrevention does. Pick one of the two, never both.
- Manage permissions
Who can ban, who can fly, who can teleport. LuckPerms sorts players into groups and grants permissions to the group, not to the person. The day you appoint a moderator, you move them to another group and everything else follows, without touching a single file.
- Keep a record of actions
A chest emptied overnight, a wall taken down by someone who swears they did not. CoreProtect logs who placed or broke what, where and at what time, and knows how to put it back. Without this log, you judge on hearsay and you lose honest players.
- Help players get around
Back to spawn, a personal home, a teleport request to a friend, named locations for the shop or the farm. EssentialsX brings together the commands players expect and that do not exist in the bare game. It is often the first thing newcomers say is missing.
- Keep performance up
Every plugin takes time on every tick and takes memory. The spark tool measures where that time goes and names the culprit, instead of leaving you to guess. Chunky pre-generates the terrain during quiet hours, so that exploration stops creating chunks live. If memory is what is lacking, the how much RAM page will tell you before you buy whether the problem comes from there.
What breaks a server
A lagging server is rarely the victim of a single greedy plugin. Three situations come up far more often, and all three come from the way everything else was stacked up.
Too many plugins
Tiny tasks, run again on every tick, end up weighing more than one big one. A plugin installed for a command nobody uses still costs something every second of play.
The same role twice
Two protection plugins, two permission managers: they intercept the same event and the last one to arrive decides. The symptom is easy to recognise, a rule applies one time out of two.
An outdated plugin
Every Minecraft version moves parts of the API around. A plugin written for the previous one refuses to start, or worse, starts and fails silently as soon as the first player connects.
The method that avoids all this
One plugin at a time. You install it from the panel, you restart, you read the console: a plugin that loaded badly says so, in plain words. You play for ten minutes, you check that what you expected works, then you move on to the next one. Installing five plugins at once and then finding that the server is stuck in a loop means five suspects and no evidence.
Keep an up-to-date list of what you have installed and why, with the server version it was running on. The day you change version, that list will tell you in a minute which ones will need replacing, and which ones you will not miss.
A plugin is removed in an instant, but what it wrote into your world stays. Trigger a backup before adding one, especially if it touches the terrain or the players' inventories: it is the only rollback that works every time.
A server first, plugins next
The trial lasts ten days, with no bank card, on the same hardware as the paid plans. Enough to install your first five plugins and see how they behave.