How to make a SkyBlock plugin for your Minecraft server

The four pieces of a SkyBlock plugin

A SkyBlock server runs on four mechanics, and every one of them is code: create a private island when a player joins, measure how far they have come, give them something to chase, and let them play with other people. Shops, leaderboards and cosmetics all bolt onto those four.

That is what makes SkyBlock different from a normal plugin. A homes plugin does one thing. A SkyBlock plugin carries the whole gameplay loop of your server. If its progression feels like the server next door, your server feels like the server next door.

• Private islands: creation, placement, reset, deletion
• Island level: a score derived from the blocks on the island
• Challenges: goals that unlock rewards and tiers
• Coop: invite, trust, kick, leave an island

Private islands: generate, protect, reset

The first command a player types is /is or /island. Behind it, the plugin drops a starter island at free coordinates, teleports the player, and remembers who owns what. The details that decide how it feels in practice: the spacing between islands, what happens when someone wants to start over, and what a visitor is allowed to touch.

A ready-made plugin already settled those questions for you. When you describe your own, you settle them yourself: your grid, your starter island, your visitor rules. You can even offer several starter layouts and let the player pick one.

• What the starter island holds: blocks, tree, chest and its contents
• The distance between two islands and the build radius around each
• Island reset: allowed or not, on what cooldown, at what cost
• What visitors can do: break, place, open chests, or nothing at all

Island levels: the progression ready-made plugins lock down

An island level is a score. The plugin walks the blocks on the island, gives each one a value, adds it up, and shows a level. Your whole server identity sits in that value table: if stone is worth the same everywhere, everybody plays the same way.

This is also the part that deserves the most detail in your description. Plenty of plugins expose a list of blocks and points, but not the rules around it: a cap once you pass a certain count of the same block, a bonus for rebuilding a biome, a penalty on blocks bought from a shop, a tier that unlocks a command. When you describe your plugin, those rules are your description, not a config file you have to work around.

• Your own per-block value table instead of an inherited one
• A per-block cap so nobody grinds infinite cobblestone for levels
• Tiers that unlock a command, a kit, a world or a rank
• An island top leaderboard, ranked by level or by your own metric

Challenges and quests: giving players something to chase

A challenge is a condition plus a reward. Gather a number of blocks, hit an island level, kill a specific mob, craft an item. The player sees the progress, hands it in, takes the reward, and the next one opens. Without that layer a SkyBlock island is a floating platform with no reason to stay on it.

Write your challenges out as a list, one line each: what to do, what it pays, what it unlocks. A progression written like that lands much closer to your idea than any tweak inside a config file somebody else shipped.

• Chained challenges, where the next one depends on the last
• Repeatable challenges for players who already cleared the rest
• Mixed rewards: items, server currency, access, a title
• A menu or a command to track progress in game

Coop: several players on one island

Coop is the touchiest piece, because it is all about permissions. Who can invite? Can a member break the owner's blocks, open chests, use the farms? What happens to the island when the owner quits? How many members are allowed, and does that cap scale with the island level?

Answer those questions in your description, in plain words. This is the piece where granularity matters most: rights that are too rigid block your players, rights that are too loose let a member empty the owner's chests.

• Clear roles: owner, trusted member, visitor
• A member cap, fixed or tied to the island level
• What happens when the owner leaves: transfer or disband
• The chat messages for invites, joins and kicks

Setting up your SkyBlock server, in five steps

SkyBlock does not exist in the base game: a brand new server gives you an ordinary world, with ground in every direction. So the plugin is half of the server. The other half is the setup, and it fits in five steps.

Minax builds the plugin; it does not host your server. You run it on your PC or with a host that lets you upload your own plugins. Aternos only installs plugins from its own catalogue.

• Pick your version and install Paper: the version your players have, the Java version Paper asks for at startup, then accept the terms of use in eula.txt and run it again.
• Generate the empty world: the island plugin usually creates it itself at first startup; otherwise, set the world type in server.properties before the world is ever generated.
• Drop the plugin into the plugins folder and set the spacing between islands, generously: it cannot be changed once players have built on it.
• Lower the view distance, the simulation distance and the creature cap: on a world made of void, it costs nothing to look at and takes a lot of work off the server.
• Play the first island yourself: starter chest, cobblestone generator, an island level that counts up. Only then give out your address.

How to describe your SkyBlock plugin to Minax

You write the description in plain English, spelling out your commands, your block values, your challenges and your permissions. Minax writes the Java, generates plugin.yml and pom.xml, compiles with Maven, and reads its own compiler errors back to fix them before handing you the .jar. Then you can run that .jar on a Paper server online and type your own commands, before your live server is involved at all.

One honest note about SkyBlock: it is a big plugin. Ask for islands, levels, challenges, coop, a shop and a leaderboard in one shot and the result will be rougher than if you start with islands plus levels, then add challenges, then coop. Splitting works better, and you get to check each piece in game before moving on. On the most technical parts, like a large GUI menu system, a manual pass over the code can still be needed, and that code is yours.

• Name your commands: /is create, /is level, /is invite, /is top
• Give your block value table, even a partial one to start
• Write each challenge on one line: condition, reward, unlock
• Spell out permissions and the exact chat messages players see
• State your Minecraft version and platform: Paper, Spigot or Folia
• Start small, test in game, then add one piece at a time

Frequently asked questions