Minecraft is an amazing game on its own, but having the possibility of playing multiplayer with your friends on your own server is just amazing and fun, in top of that, this vanilla experience can be improved with modpacks or server-side-only additions known as plugins
These plugin catalogs are made of a bunch of diverse, fun, and innovative additions for your server, ranging from minigames, expanded commands, custom tools, and enchantments or even mobs and bosses.
You can download most of these plugins through their official pages on websites such as Curseforge, Spigot, and Bukkit, and through the Plugins manager from our own game panel!
Learn how to create your own Minecraft server if you don't yet have one. Creating your own Minecraft server allows you to take creative control and decide how you wish to play. You'll be able to follow this blog and choose from a range of plugins to amplify your gaming experience.
Before Starting
Keep in mind all of these plugins require a custom server jar such as Spigot or Paper to work, we recommend using Paper but you're free to use the one that suits your needs, click on one of the names previously mentioned to get redirected to the installation guides we've made
Now, without further ado, we’ve picked 10 of the best and most essential plugins for your Minecraft Server as of 2023
1- EssentialsX
Have you ever felt that default commands for servers are lacking features or are too technical and thus hard to understand for new users? There are multiple plugins available that aim to solve this problem but EssentialsX is the best of them
EssentialsX is a plugin that adds dozens of new commands to your server, a must-have plugin that includes administration and moderation tools, abbreviations for vanilla commands, teleportation commands, and even its own fun custom commands. Furthermore, EssentialsX has a bunch of extensions available with new features such as colors in chat, region protection and
EssentialsX is available for download through its official page, we also have a guide in our knowledgebase to get you started with this plugin that you can read by clicking here!
2- WorldEdit
Building can become such a hassle and be a repetitive task at a high scale, while it's commendable for a user to be able to build amazing structures block by block the truth is that this will take a lot of time, time that is not available to everyone and could be used actually playing the game
Given this premise, WorldEdit is a must-have plugin for all servers and the best tool a builder could have, so what this plugin does? it adds a range of commands oriented to world-building at any scale, simplifying and saving a lot of work and time. With WorldEdit you could create structures by just typing a few commands!
WorldEdit is available in multiple versions with their own features, with the original release dating as far as 2010
WorldEdit is available for installation through his official page and through our plugins tab. If you're interested in learning how to use WorldEdit we have a guide covering the installation process and some of the basic commands in our knowledgebase
3- WorldGuard
Having protected zones in a server is one of the first things you'd have to consider if you wish to have a public server, griefers are a real problem, and having players spawn-kill any new users is not something you would aim for. We all have heard the stories of escaping 2b2t spawn
And this is where WorldGuard comes into play, WorldGuard is an essential plugin that adds region management to a server, letting server owners define and protect specific regions and add limitations or rules for them. With WorldGuard it’s possible to create a Spawn zone for new players, an in-game shop where players can’t harm each other, or jails with no chat access for bad players, the choice is yours to make.
WorldGuard requires the aforementioned WorldEdit to work, you can get latest WorldGuard version through its official page, and since this is such an important and essential tool we have our own guide where we cover the region-defining and region flags aspect, which you can read here
4- Multiverse-Core
Have you ever felt that having only one overworld is not enough for your server? perhaps you want to have both a flat and a normal world? Multiverse-Core is the perfect plugin for that! As the name implies, Multiverse-Core adds the possibility to create and use different worlds on your minecraft server, each with a world type and seed of your choice
You can even modify the behavior of certain plugins in these worlds, create portals to go to these worlds, or even restrict access, so you can introduce concepts such as a world only meant for collecting resources that get automatically reset every few days, a world where pvp is not allowed, or perhaps a creative world for players to build whatever they feel like
With Multiverse-Core you can create as many worlds as you want, as long as your server has enough resources to handle the extra load of course
You can download Multiverse-Core through its official Spigot page here and install it to your server by dropping the .jar file into your plugins folder
5- Simple Voice Chat
If you ask me I feel voice chat is an essential tool in every multiplayer game, sometimes the communication tools included in a game can be really limited, and a roulette of pre-defined messages will prove to be useless if you’re trying to cooperate with your teammates to achieve a certain goal, and this is where Simple Voice Chat gets in play
Although it could be classified as a hybrid between a plugin and a mod given that players will need to install the mod on their end, Simple Voice Chat server-side is a plugin that will add voice chat to your minecraft server, with features such as proximity voice chat and voice recorder, along with multiple options available for configuration like voice distance for you to adjust it to your liking. With this plugin, players will be able to communicate in an effortless way and would only rely upon the server chat to use commands
You can download this plugin (for your server) and mod (for your launcher) through its curseforge page here
6- Dynmap
Other games like Terraria have their own maps where you can see the entire world and see the changes you’ve made to it through your playthrough, and while it’s true that Minecraft has its own map system, it’s not the same and you can easily get lost, which is why a plugin like Dynmap is essential for your server
So what does Dynmap do? It adds an aerial live map to your server, accessible through the server IP and an assigned port or even a website of your own, where you can see in real-time changes in the map and all players location, with many other features such as player faces, web chat (for map viewers), visible chat messages in the map and compatibility with plugins like WorldGuard to display the protected areas in the map. This plugin is especially useful if you intend to run an SMP with an Earth theme
Dynmap is available for download through its Spigot page, you can download it by clicking here
7- Holographic Displays
Let’s say you wanted to give instructions to players in your server to specific parts of the spawn, in the past, you would have had to put signs with arrows pointing to the directions, which let's be honest, it's really limited and can be hard to read. Fortunately, Holographic displays exist and work as a way to represent messages or even images to players on the server.
With holographic displays you can put custom messages and text for players to read, and with an extension such as Placeholder API you could even display specific stats from other plugins to each player (useful if you want to display a scoreboard) or even information from other servers
You can find this plugin on its Bukkit page here, and while it's not currently maintained it's at least still being ported to newer Minecraft versions. Are you interested in making your own messages? feel free to read our own guide covering this plugin here
8- LuckPerms
Plugins on Minecraft servers come with their own set of permissions, this is essential to limit what commands are available to default players and what commands are meant for the administration team, to avoid total anarchy where every player can ban and unban players at their will while flying and invoking thunders while using sticks enchanted with sharpness 255 (or would you?)
This is why you need LuckPerms on your server, with LuckPerms you can create groups and add/remove the permissions from each plugin as you see fit, you could create a Moderator group with only kick/ban commands, or a Builder group with access to WorldEdit and creative, or perhaps a VIP group to sell in your Tebex Server Shop
You can download LuckPerms through its official page here, and we have a guide in our knowledgebase to get you started in creating groups and setting permissions, just click here!
9- ClearLag
Entities in minecraft can be problematic if left unattended, while you may not notice this while playing with just a few of your friends the real problem comes when there are 20 players on a server, each one on a different part of the map leaving unpicked items, exp orbs, spawning mobs, destroying everything under the sun with TNT and testing just how many chickens farms can they make in 1/4 chunk. This will of course cause extreme lag eventually, the solution? scheduled restarts through the game panel and a plugin to limit this, where ClearLagg will come into action
ClearLagg is a plugin that brings many options to prevent lag on your server, such as removing entities automatically in a certain timeframe, removing entities only on a specified radius, limiting mob spawners and TNT explosions. This plugin has many options available for configuration such as what entities should be removed/filtered, triggers to run cleaning commands if your server exceeds ram usage, timeframe for automatic removals, and so on.
Are you interested? You can download this plugin through this link and improve your server's resource usage!
10- Citizens
Don’t you ever feel like your Spawn zone feels alone and that using villagers is very limited? Won't you like a player-like character at the start welcoming you every time you join the server? This is just one of all the possible things that can be done with a plugin like Citizens
With Citizens you can create NPCs with their own functions, appearance (support for all mob types), and instructions. This is a simple yet complex resource that can be used in creative ways to achieve incredible results, such as NPC Guards in a certain part that blocks access to unauthorized players, Shopkeepers with their own custom shop, or NPCs that execute a command when right-clicked by a player
Citizens is free and available for everyone through its official bukkit page here
Important
While we didn’t include them on this list, most of these plugins need another plugin API as a dependency to work, such as Vault for economy management, Placeholder API to display custom texts and variables from other plugins, and ProtocolLib to expand and allow further changes to the minecraft protocol which in result provide new features for other plugin
That's it!
And with that, we've reached the end of the blog! We hope this blog was informative and allows you to decide which plugins to install onto your Minecraft server. Make sure to check out our Minecraft Knowledgebase which includes a variety of tutorials to help you make the most out of your Minecraft server.
