Grief protection: regions, claims and rollbacks

Grief protection comes in three layers. Prevent it: WorldGuard regions for spawn and key areas, GriefPrevention claims for players. Find it and undo it: CoreProtect logs every block and rolls back a player's changes with one command. Insure against it: permissions through LuckPerms instead of OP, plus backups. An anticheat adds a fourth layer by catching the cheats that make griefing faster: Nuker, Fly, Phase.

WorldGuard: regions for spawn and key areas#

WorldGuard protects areas an admin marks out: spawn, the market, arenas, events. It only works together with the WorldEdit plugin (the Bukkit version): WorldEdit selects the area, and WorldGuard turns it into a region.

1. 1

   Select the area

   Grab the WorldEdit wand (//wand) and mark two opposite corners: left-click for the first, right-click for the second.

2. 2

   Create the region

   /rg define spawn — a new region immediately blocks building for everyone who isn't a member.

3. 3

   Add your builders

   /rg addmember spawn g:builders lets the builders permission group build; add individual players by name.

4. 4

   Set flags

   /rg flag spawn pvp deny turns PvP off; flags against fire, lava and explosions are below.

One important detail from WorldGuard's docs: to stop players placing and breaking blocks in a region, don't touch any flags — by default only members can build. Leave the build flag alone, and note that block-break deny stops even members, and pistons inside the region, from breaking blocks.

Flags against fire, lava and explosions

/rg define spawn
/rg addmember spawn g:builders
/rg flag spawn tnt deny
/rg flag spawn creeper-explosion deny
/rg flag spawn fire-spread deny
/rg flag spawn lava-flow deny
/rg flag spawn lighter deny

To stop building across the whole “wilderness”, WorldGuard's docs recommend the global region's passthrough flag rather than build: /rg flag __global__ passthrough deny. Then players can only build where they're a region member.

GriefPrevention: claims players make themselves#

On survival you can't draw a region for every player by hand. GriefPrevention lets players claim land themselves: a new player's first chest gets a claim around it automatically, and further claims are made with a golden shovel — mouse only, no commands. The land allowance grows with time played on the server, and idling doesn't farm it.

Inside a claim, outsiders can't break or place blocks, open chests or move blocks with pistons; TNT and creepers destroy nothing, and fluids don't flow in from outside. The owner hands out access:

• /trust Name — build in the claim;
• /containertrust Name — chests, crafting gear, animals, buttons, levers and beds;
• /accesstrust Name — just buttons, levers and beds;
• /untrust Name revokes access, /abandonclaim deletes the claim you're standing in.

For admins: /deleteclaim deletes the claim you're standing in, even someone else's, and /deleteallclaims deletes all of a given player's claims. Outside claims, GriefPrevention can stop fire from spreading and explosions from breaking blocks above sea level.

Supported platforms are Spigot, Paper and Purpur. For production servers the developers recommend version 16, “GriefPrevention Legacy”: version 17 and up contain breaking changes and aren't meant for production yet.

CoreProtect: who broke it and how to roll it back#

Even with claims, something will get broken — on unclaimed land, or by someone the owner trusted. CoreProtect logs block and chest actions and rolls them back.

/co inspect
/co lookup u:Name t:1h
/co rollback u:Name t:1h r:#global #preview
/co rollback u:Name t:1h r:#global
/co undo

/co inspect (or /co i) toggles the inspector: click a block to see who placed or broke it. A rollback without r: defaults to a 10-block radius around you, so for griefing across the map add r:#global, and #preview shows what will change first.

Spawn protection, permissions and backups#

server.properties has vanilla spawn protection: spawn-protection sets the side of the square around spawn as 2x+1 (the default 16 gives 33×33), and 0 turns it off. Operators bypass it, and if the server has no operators at all, it doesn't apply. Explosions, pistons and dispensers get around it too, so a WorldGuard region is the safer choice for spawn. More on the file in server.properties.

The most common hole is permissions. A griefer with OP, or a hijacked moderator account with WorldEdit, is more dangerous than any cheat. Hand out permissions by group through LuckPerms, not OP; keep WorldEdit and rollbacks to a trusted team. If your server lets players in without a paid account, then without an auth plugin anyone can join under an admin's name — see offline-mode servers.

The last line of defence is scheduled backups. CoreProtect rolls back what it logged; a backup saves you when the world itself or the log database is damaged.

What an anticheat covers#

An anticheat doesn't make claims, but it catches the cheats that make griefing faster and easier. Nuker flattens a build in seconds, FastBreak breaks faster than the tool allows, Fly and Phase get into sealed bases from above and through walls, GhostHand opens chests and hits through walls.

DGuard checks each of them and works silently — no setbacks, no cancellations — so a griefer doesn't realise he's caught while evidence builds up. Every ban comes with a report breaking down the evidence, which is handy to compare with CoreProtect's history before a rollback. DGuard runs on Paper and Leaf, free up to 30 players online.

FAQ#