Minecraft SMP plugins, written for your server

Lifesteal sounds simple: kill a player, take a heart. In practice the plugin changes each player's max health attribute, so it must store that value across restarts, apply it again on join and keep it inside your limits. A PersistentDataContainer on the player or a small data file both work.

The details are where SMPs differ. Do falls, lava and creepers cost a heart, or only player kills? Can hearts be withdrawn as items and traded? What happens at zero: a temporary ban, spectator mode until a revive, or the end of that player's season?

Max health is set through the attribute API, and that API moved. In 1.21.3 the attribute GENERIC_MAX_HEALTH was renamed MAX_HEALTH. A lifesteal plugin copied from an old tutorial fails to compile on a current server, and one written for 26.x will not run on 1.20.

When you pick your server version, the AI knows which API exists at that version and writes against it. Maven compiles the plugin on our side; build errors go back to the AI and are fixed before you download. The .jar matches the server you actually run.

Many SMP players come for survival as Mojang designed it. The plugins that last remove friction without turning the server into a hub: a home limit, a teleport request that expires, a grave that keeps items for ten minutes.

Check vanilla first. Since 1.17, setting the playersSleepingPercentage gamerule lets one sleeping player skip the night, no plugin needed. Spend your daily generations on what the game cannot do on its own.

An SMP rarely runs on one plugin. Yours can read LuckPerms groups, respect WorldGuard regions, pay rewards through Vault, use WorldEdit selections, or send hearts and playtime to your scoreboard through PlaceholderAPI.

You do not declare these libraries yourself. When the generated code imports Vault, PlaceholderAPI, WorldEdit, WorldGuard or LuckPerms, the build adds the dependency automatically. Install the same plugins on your server and name them in your description so they are listed in plugin.yml.

Ask for every number to live in config.yml: heart cap, cooldowns, ban length, messages. Balancing a season is faster with a file edit and a reload command than with a new version of the plugin.

Name permissions explicitly, such as lifesteal.admin and lifesteal.withdraw, so your permission plugin can grant them cleanly. Then iterate in the editor with requests like "add a 30 second cooldown to /withdraw". Each change counts as a modification in your daily quota, and the version history lets you roll back.