Before there were vanilla flat worlds, players had to use mods, map editors, and plugins to create them. CleanroomGenerator, despite not changing for over a year, still has a better feature set than most of them. It’s got an elegant configuration method. You append the generator line with the layers of materials you desire. (eg. CleanroomGenerator:5,wool:2 creates 5 magenta wool layers) Simple, works, useful. We use this on our server to generate all air blocks on custom and Alpha.

You won’t find this on bukkit.org, but SethBling created this plugin specifically for PitFrenzy and his other mini games that use dispensers. What it does is simple. If a dispenser dispenses an item, it checks if it’s within a defined infinite dispenser area. If so, it’ll max out the stacks for each slot in that dispenser. We use this for some mini-games on the custom world as it makes operating them much easier as we don’t have to refill all the dispensers manually. You could say it’s indispensable. 😉

This is a lightweight plugin that listens for redstone activity when you run a scan command. The moderator can then teleport to the location of redstone activity and see if it’s a problem. This is really useful to find some resource-draining redstone clocks and pulsars — redstone that updates really fast in a loop. While clocks aren’t a problem by themselves, they can contribute to lower performance on a large server.

The server policy is that if you’re running a redstone clock, it must be toggle-able in some fashion. You can’t just leave them running, or we’ll disable them. We’re MORE than happy to show you how to make them toggle-able. It’s actually more fun to do it that way. We just can’t have dozens of clocks running on the server all the time because at a certain point it’s going to hurt performance.

Now this is an elegant plugin. I chose to use this because I thought allowing redstone to interact with jukeboxes was an obvious missing feature that fit perfectly within Minecraft. It’s intuitive. It’s immersive. It allows people to be more creative. I just wish jukeboxes were more sophisticated now, because there’s no way to turn it off without taking out the disc. Minecraft doesn’t know how long a song is playing. In fact, a person can’t hear a song playing unless they’re around when it is first triggered. Still, I was able to take this simple plugin and create an album music player with very simple redstone to power it, which you can see in my first video blog.

First we should look at why we needed a currency plugin in the first place. Since we use PhysicalShop to trade, there doesn’t seem to be a use for currency. However, we wanted a sort of arcade-style ticket system for our mini-game world to reward players (sounds fun!). Using a currency system that uses Vault means tons of plugins can hook into it, and then I can also manipulate each person’s account with CommandHelper. It keeps us flexible, whereas having it stored just in CommandHelper would mean no other plugins could interact with it.

Most currency plugins seem to be relatively similar, and since they all seem to tie into Vault (a currency API, allowing plugins to interact with all currency plugins without having to have custom code for each) it didn’t seem like a huge deal which one I chose. The most popular is iConomy, but I ultimately selected BOSEconomy since it seemed to have the best support at the time. However, it’s still a pretty trivial choice as long as it hooks into Vault. Some plugins allow you to customize how the currency is stored (how many decimals, mysql/file, etc), what they currency is called (in our case, “coins”), and maybe some help messages. Still, I don’t think you could go wrong with either BOSEconomy or iConomy. (and a few others that I can’t seem to remember)

Any server with more than a few players has (or should have) a permissions plugin. This manages who can do what on a server. Now there are a few decent permissions plugins to choose from right now: PermissionsBukkit, bPermissions, and PermissionsEx (GroupManager exists, but I avoid Essentials). Each seems to have its own strength and weaknesses, so why did I choose PermissionsBukkit?

Initially I chose it because it was compatible with MCMyAdmin and was a full SuperPerms plugin (as opposed to an older system used by the previously popular Permissions plugin). SuperPerms was a newish permissions system developed by the craftbukkit team to unify all permissions. Despite some negativity in the community regarding the method of SuperPerms, I knew it was the future and chose to adopt it so that I wouldn’t have to transition later. But would I choose PermissionsBukkit today?

PermissionsBukkit has a single config file, which is nicer (imo) than the several in bPermissions or PEX. I find it much less confusing to use than the alternatives. It also doesn’t change that often, as such it’s the longest running plugin on our server without an update. This makes it pretty stable, which can’t be said of PEX, even if it does have a ton more features. Still, it does feel forgotten and poorly documented, even if it is simple and solid. Also, if I could have my way, I’d probably split the users away in a different file from the groups. This would make text editing the documents just a little more easier. (it’s still heads and tails above bPermissions, imo) I would also add a couple more specific commands.

So, would I choose it again? I think so. I’m not a fan of the PEX developer and bPermissions seems more awkward to use despite its similar feature set.