Best Minecraft minigame plugins: BedWars, SkyWars, Duels, lobby and network

In short: for BedWars look at ScreamingBedWars, BedWars1058 (and its fork BedWars2023) or the paid MBedwars; for SkyWars — MythicSkywars or RealSkywars; for duels — Duels Optimised. A lobby comes from Akropolis or Hubbly, parties from Parties, a network queue from ajQueue, and separate arena worlds from Multiverse-Core. We don't score plugins: the list goes by mode, alphabetical within each, and the data comes from their own pages. The backbone every server needs — permissions, logging, versions — is in best server plugins.

Minigame plugins compared#

Each plugin in brief#

BedWars

• BedWars1058 — open source under GPL-3.0 since 2021. Four ways to run it: SHARED (next to other minigames), MULTIARENA (its own server with a lobby), BUNGEE-LEGACY (one game per server) and BUNGEE (many arenas per server, new ones cloned when needed; lobby servers need BedWarsProxy). Per-player language, arenas grouped by type (4v4, 50v50). Its Modrinth page lists versions up to 1.21.4.
• BedWars2023 — a BedWars1058 fork since March 2023, aiming at new features and a modernized codebase. The same run modes; it needs the TAB plugin for the scoreboard — see TAB.
• MBedwars (Marcely's Bedwars) — a paid plugin with its own site and add-on store: unlimited arenas on one server, BungeeCord and standalone, SQL, cloud systems, no dependencies.
• ScreamingBedWars — BedWars plus variants such as EggWars, CakeWars and AnchorWars; several shops per arena, BungeeCord and Velocity integration, Vault rewards, spectators, fast arena rebuilding. Arenas are set up with /bw admin commands.

SkyWars

• MythicSkywars — solo and teams, multiple arenas, BungeeCord and Velocity, cages (WorldEdit schematics included), voting on time, weather and chests, events such as arrow rain and a shrinking border, kits, parties, MySQL, statistics and rejoining a match after a disconnect (/rejoin).
• RealSkywars — SkyWars driven by menus rather than config files: solo and teams, ranked maps, three chest tiers with refills, events, kits, coins through Vault, parties, leaderboards via PlaceholderAPI, map reset after each match and a BungeeCord mode.

Duels: Duels Optimised

Duels Optimised is an optimized fork of the Duels plugin: 1v1 duels and team-vs-team party duels, kits and a kit editor, arenas and queues with signs and menus, Elo rating, item and money betting, spectators, fight replays and rounds. It supports Folia. Old Duels add-ons don't work with it.

Lobby: Akropolis and Hubbly

• Akropolis — a lobby core based on DeluxeHub, for Paper 1.21+ only: hotbar items, menus, scoreboard and tablist, chat formats, broadcasts, music from NBS files and a lobby fight mode.
• Hubbly — a compass server selector, launchpads, a boss bar, player visibility, void-fall protection, world event control (block breaking, damage, hunger, weather), blocking /pl and /version.

Menus, NPCs and holograms for the lobby have their own articles: menu plugins, NPCs, holograms.

Network: Parties and ajQueue

• Parties — parties with chat, ranks, levels, friendly-fire protection and teleport; the party follows its leader across worlds and servers. Data goes to YAML, H2, SQLite, MySQL, MariaDB or PostgreSQL, and a whole party can join BedWars1058 together. Needs Java 11+.
• ajQueue — a queue for a server that's full or restarting: a separate queue per server, priority through the ajqueue.priority permission, queue position in the action bar, pausing a queue. It goes on the proxy; put the same jar on a game server if you want the queue in menus and NPCs.

How to connect the lobby and modes behind a proxy, where each plugin goes and how to share bans is in Minecraft server network.

Resetting arenas after a match#

After every BedWars or SkyWars match the map has to go back to how it was. Mode plugins handle that themselves, each in its own way:

• BedWars1058 restores the world from a zip archive. Its authors warn that this gets heavy on HDDs and weak CPUs, and for faster restores recommend Advanced Slime Paper (1.20 or newer) — the plugin hooks into it on its own, with no extra setup.
• ScreamingBedWars rebuilds the arena, and blocks marked as breakable are refreshed with the rebuild.
• RealSkywars resets the map after each match by itself.
• Advanced Slime Paper is a Paper fork using the Slime world format developed by Hypixel: worlds load faster and take less space. Keep in mind it's a core change: DGuard officially runs on Paper and Leaf.

Arenas are easiest to keep in separate worlds, which Multiverse-Core creates and loads.

Which to pick for your case#

An anticheat for minigames: DGuard and AI Combat#

A cheater in a minigame ruins the match for everyone else: KillAura and Reach decide fights, Scaffold bridges to a bed faster than any player, Blink drops him onto someone else's island. DGuard — the best anticheat for a modern Minecraft server — checks all 47 cheat types in the comparison on every front at once: combat, movement, building, inventory and packets. It goes on every game server of the network running Paper or Leaf 1.21–26.3; the main version is 1.21.11, and the other versions are supported but not yet proven on live servers.

On top of that, DGuard reads combat with AI Combat — its own AI combat model, trained on billions of gameplay data points collected while working with and testing on the most popular PvP servers. Today it is the strongest AI model in anticheats; it works in DGuard's cloud check and comes with DGuard on every plan. More on the AI Combat page; which cheats break BedWars and SkyWars and how to set the strictness is in anticheat for PvP and minigames.

FAQ#