What is Bukkit?
Bukkit is an application programming interface (API) that programmers can use to create plugins for Minecraft. It basically makes it a lot easier for programmers to make plugins and server administrators to install them. The original Bukkit was a modified fork of the official Minecraft server program, which means that the developers took the Minecraft server code and modified it to automatically install and run Bukkit plugins. That project ended when Minecraft publisher Mojang bought the Bukkit team, but you can still use Bukkit plugins with Spigot and CraftBukkit servers.
How Do You Use Bukkit Plugins?
If you want to use a Bukkit plugin, you need to have a CraftBukkit or Spigot Minecraft server. These plugins don’t work with the official Minecraft server that you can download from Mojang. Here are the basic rules to follow if you want to use Bukkit plugins:
Make sure that you are running a Spigot or CraftBukkit Minecraft server.Download a Bukkit .jar file from a trusted source.If the server is running, stop it.Place the .jar file in your Minecraft server plugins folder.Restart the server, and the Bukkit plugin will load automatically if everything is compatible.
Finding the Best Bukkit Plugins
There are tens of thousands of Bukkit plugins, so finding the best ones for your server can be a daunting task. If you’re looking for a new gaming experience for your players, then a plugin like mcMMO that adds massively multiplayer online (MMO) features so you can play Minecraft multiplayer might be what you’re looking for, but there are also plugins that add minigames, create in-game economies, vastly improve the villager non-player characters (NPCs), and more. Here are the best places to find Bukkit plugins:
SpigotMC: Spigot is a fork of Bukkit, and the Spigot team also maintains CraftBukkit. Most Bukkit plugins can be found here. Curse Forge: This is another place that developers are able to post their Bukkit plugins. If you can’t find it on SpigotMC, you’ll probably find it here. GitHub: Instead of using SpigotMC or Curse Forge, some developers simply link directly to GitHub from their official sites. If the official site of a Bukkit plugin links to a GitHub repository, then it’s usually safe to download.
To help you get started, we’ve also pulled together 10 of the most essential Bukkit plugins for your Minecraft server. If you just want to get your server up and running smoothly, or you want to protect and improve an existing server, you can’t go wrong with these. Since a lot of popular plugins don’t work without Vault, it should be one of the first Bukkit plugins you download. While bPermissions is a powerful tool for server admins, it is one of the many Bukkit plugins that require Vault. So make sure to grab that first. EssentialsX is a fork of the original Essentials plugin that runs on newer versions of Minecraft. It requires Vault for some features to work, but it provides all of the same utility as the original Essentials Bukkit plugin. Additional commands make it easy to build walls, copy and paste structures, and even undo mistakes. WorldEdit is also required by some other plugins. WorldGuard requires WorldEdit, so make sure to install WorldEdit first. It also ties into DynMaps, which allows you to see exactly what parts of your world have been assigned. Add-ons for Multiverse also allow you to create portals for regular players to move between worlds without the help of an admin. If you have a large server, and you need more space to grow, Multiverse makes it easy. It’s also great if you want to have multiple different worlds to explore, a separate world for testing things out, or even a basic flat world to strip mine. The default configuration is set up well for most large servers, but you can also modify all of the chat filter rules to suit your needs and the atmosphere of your specific server. Unlike WorldGuard, which requires an admin to use console commands to assign protected areas, GriefPrevention allows players to claim their own spaces within limits. Each player is, by default, given a claim when they create and place their first chest, and additional claims are allowed based on the amount of time that they actually continue playing on the server. GriefPrevention works with WorldGuard and WorldEdit, but you can use it by itself if you don’t want to use those plugins.
