The essential plugins for a Minecraft server

There are tens of thousands of plugins. In practice, a handful comes back on every serious server. Here are which ones, and above all why.

Protect builds

WorldGuard and WorldEdit are the foundation. The first protects areas against theft and destruction, the second lets you change terrain in bulk. Without them, your first night of griefing will cost you some of your players.

For a survival server where everyone protects their base, GriefPrevention is simpler: players mark out their own land with a golden shovel, without the team stepping in.

Against cheaters, add a well-tuned anti-cheat: the guide Choose and tune an anti-cheat compares the options. And for small custom commands, Skript often saves you one more plugin.

Manage permissions

LuckPerms is the standard, with no serious competitor. It handles ranks, permission inheritance, temporary permissions, and works with everything else. Install it before you need it: taking over a server without permission management is painful. The guide Set up LuckPerms gives a ready-to-use rank base.

The basic commands

EssentialsX brings what the game doesn't provide: teleporting between players, homes (/home), warp points (/warp), private messages, kits. It's the Swiss army knife everyone installs.

An economy

Vault is the bridge between economy plugins. Paired with EssentialsX Economy or CMI, it lets players trade money, open shops and give meaning to their play time.

A badly tuned economy kills a server more surely than a bug. The golden rule: money must leave the system as fast as it comes in, otherwise inflation makes everything free in a month. See Build an economy that doesn't collapse.

Reward votes

It's the plugin people forget, and that's a mistake: votes are a server's main driver of visibility.

NuVotifier receives votes sent by directories. VotingPlugin or SuperbVote hand out the rewards. Allow ten minutes of setup, for a measurable effect on your attendance: the step-by-step is in Reward votes with Votifier, and the settings to give CubeVote in the Votifier documentation.

The setting not to miss: queue the reward when the player is offline. Otherwise, everyone who votes from their phone loses their gift.

Monitor performance

Spark, built into Paper, shows exactly what uses CPU time. The day your server starts stuttering, it's what will tell you why, usually a mob farm or a badly written plugin.

Show the world

A web map of the world, viewable from a browser, brings in curious visitors and brings players back: see A web map with BlueMap.

To go further, The most popular Minecraft plugins reviews some thirty plugins, from custom content with ItemsAdder or Oraxen to web maps.

What not to do

Install thirty plugins "just in case". Each one adds load, possible conflicts and room for bugs. A server with eight well-configured plugins runs better, and is easier to troubleshoot, than one piling up forty.