There are thousands of plugins and you need about six. This is the set that solves problems almost every server actually has, organised by the job rather than by name, because names change and jobs do not.
By job
| Job | What to look for |
|---|---|
| Permissions | A permissions manager. Everything else assumes you have one. |
| Land protection | Claims, or region protection. The difference between a survival server and a grief report. |
| Basic commands | Homes, warps, teleport requests, spawn. Players expect these and will ask on day one. |
| Block logging | Who placed or broke what, and a rollback. This is what turns griefing from a disaster into an inconvenience. |
| Performance insight | A profiler, so «it lags» becomes a name and a line number. |
| Anti-cheat | Only once you are public. Before that it costs performance and catches nothing. |
It only records from the moment it is installed. Adding it the day after a grief tells you nothing about the grief. It is the cheapest insurance on this list and the most commonly bought too late.
Six plugins added at once, then a broken server, is six suspects. One at a time turns a debugging session into a thirty-second check.
Why a short list matters
Every plugin is code running inside your server with full access to it. Each one is a thing that can conflict, leak memory, break on the next Minecraft version, or be abandoned by its author.
A server with six well-chosen plugins updates in an afternoon. A server with forty is a research project every time Minecraft releases, and that is how servers end up stuck two versions behind.
Questions worth asking before installing anything
- What problem does this solve that I actually have?
- «It looked cool» is how you get forty plugins.
- When was it last updated?
- A plugin untouched for two major versions is a future migration you have not planned.
- Does something I already have do this?
- Overlapping plugins fighting over the same events is a top cause of strange behaviour.