Clans on a Minecraft server: clan, faction and team plugins

In short: for clans without land there's ClansLite (free, MIT, Paper and Folia, chat, allies and enemies, a friendly-fire toggle, chest locks) and Ultimate Teams (free, GPL-3.0, Paper, Purpur and Folia, team and ally chat, databases from H2 to PostgreSQL, sync across a network). For clans with land and wars there's FactionsUUID (paid on SpigotMC, chunk claims by power or DTR, versions 26.2–26.3) and KingdomsX (paid on SpigotMC, land claims, nations, invasions and turrets). The classic SimpleClans last had a release in August 2023. The clan tag goes into the tab list and scoreboard through PlaceholderAPI.

Clan plugins compared#

Each plugin in brief#

ClansLite

A lightweight clan plugin: /clan create, invites, a clan home, clan transfer, points for PvP. There's no land — the author says plainly that it has no grief-prevention tools, only locks on single chests (/clanchest lock). Data lives in clans.yml. Without PlaceholderAPI the clan tag is only available to the EssentialsX chat format; with it you get a set of placeholders for the tab list and scoreboard.

FactionsUUID

Classic factions. Land is claimed by chunk: in power mode a faction holds as many chunks as it has power, power drops with every death, and once the land outgrows the power, enemies can break blocks in its territory. In DTR (deaths 'til raidable) mode the land depends on the number of members, and every death lowers DTR — at zero the faction's base can be raided. Leaders set territory permissions with /f set perms, and there's a bank, taxes and more than 20 faction upgrades. Chat is MiniMessage, with colours by the speaker's faction relation.

KingdomsX

A plugin "like Factions" with its own mechanics: land is claimed straight from the map, kingdoms unite into nations, an invasion lets you take another kingdom's land, and turrets protect it from invaders. The author says the plugin is designed mainly for PvP servers. Vault is needed only for the bank and taxes, PlaceholderAPI for placeholders; mods aren't supported.

Ultimate Teams

Teams instead of clans, with the same feature set: team and ally chat, allies and enemies, a home and warps, a bank through the economy, promotion to team manager. Over MySQL and a message broker, data syncs across the servers of a network in real time; shared ender chests update for every viewer at once — the authors say outright that this avoids dupes. Bedrock players through Floodgate are handled automatically.

The clan tag in the tab list and above heads#

Clan plugins expose the tag and clan data as PlaceholderAPI placeholders, and the tab plugin displays them. An example for TAB and FactionsUUID: %factionsuuid_faction_name% is the faction name, and %factionsuuid_faction_only_space% is a space only when the player is in a faction, so solo players don't get a stray space.

_DEFAULT_:
  tabprefix: "%luckperms-prefix%%factionsuuid_faction_name%%factionsuuid_faction_only_space%"
  tagprefix: "%luckperms-prefix%%factionsuuid_faction_name%%factionsuuid_faction_only_space%"

• Test the placeholder before editing the config: /papi parse me %factionsuuid_faction_name%.
• The tag's colour outside the clan comes from the group prefix: build a gradient LuckPerms prefix with the prefix generator; colour codes are in the colour codes table.
• The tag in chat comes from your chat plugin — see chat plugins. FactionsUUID has its own chat format, so a separate plugin isn't required.

First commands#

/clan create Wolves
/clan invite Steve
/clan ally add Alex
/clan pvp
/clanchat Meet at the base

/f create Wolves
/f claim
/f claim --radius 2
/f relation Ravens ally
/f set home

In ClansLite an ally is added by the other clan owner's name (/clan ally add <owner>). Hand out command permissions to groups in LuckPerms, not to operators.

Which one to pick#

• Survival or minigames where you just need a clan with a chat and a tag — ClansLite; land is then protected by a separate claims plugin — see grief protection.
• A network of several servers on Velocity — Ultimate Teams: it syncs teams across servers. How a network is put together is in Minecraft network.
• A factions PvP server with base raids — FactionsUUID or KingdomsX; KingdomsX if you want nations, invasions and turrets.
• Towns and nations instead of clans — look at Towny: Modrinth has builds up to 26.2.

Clan wars and cheaters#

A clan server lives on wars, raids and leaderboards — and one cheater in a clan decides a war. KillAura and Reach win fights, Velocity cancels knockback, and Fly carries a raider over the walls of an enemy base. Worst of all, the honest clan loses and leaves the server together. DGuard — the best anticheat for a modern Minecraft server — checks combat, movement, packets, inventory, building and the world and covers all 47 kinds of cheats in our comparison.

In combat, AI Combat does the work — DGuard's own combat AI model: it's trained on billions of gameplay data points collected in cooperation and testing with the most popular PvP servers, and today it's the strongest AI model in anticheats. It's included in DGuard on every plan, and DGuard is free up to 30 players online.

FAQ#