Setup: Economy SMP

A survival world with a player economy. Players farm, mine and fight in a world that is mostly vanilla, sell what they gather, trade with each other on the auction house, build up stacks of spawners, and win crate keys at timed events. Every week the world border grows and fresh land opens up.

There is no pay-to-win: nothing that helps a player win is sold, and crate keys are earned by playing only.

It is built from well-known free plugins where a good one exists (EssentialsX for homes and teleport requests, WorldGuard for regions, Grim for anti-cheat) and our own plugins for the parts that make this setup what it is: the economy, spawners, crates and events. See "The plugins" below.

A player's first hour

1. Join at the town around spawn: no fighting, no building, no explosions there.
2. New player protection: for the first hour nobody can hurt them (it ends early if they attack someone).
3. /rtp (or /wild) sends them to a safe random spot at least 300 blocks out.
4. Gather: farm, chop, mine and fight like normal survival.
5. /sell turns what they gathered into money. /worth shows what the item in hand is worth.
6. /daily gives a daily reward. Every 7th day in a row adds a crate key.
7. /ah to buy from and sell to other players.
8. /sethome to save a home (three each), /home to go back, /tpa <player> to ask to go to a friend, and /kit starter once for a stone toolset, bread and torches.

Everyone starts with $500.

What is in it

The world and random teleport

• The world starts 2,000 blocks from the centre in each direction (4,000 wide).
• Every Monday at midnight (your server's time zone) the border grows by 500 blocks on every side, up to 5,000. Players get a "fresh land" message.
• /rtp lands players between 300 blocks from spawn and the border, so it follows the border as it grows. Players wait 3 seconds without moving, then can use it again after 30 seconds. It does not work during a fight.
• A bigger world takes more disk as players explore it: about 0.5 GB at the starting size and about 3.3 GB at the largest, if players explore every part of it. Free servers have about 5 GB; if yours fills up, lower Largest size on the settings page.
• The Nether has a fixed border of 625 blocks from the centre (a Nether block counts as 8 in the overworld, so it matches the largest overworld) and the End one of 5,000, so exploring them cannot fill the disk either.
• All three borders are centred on the middle of the world (0, 0), so the Nether border lines up with the overworld's.
• To change the border yourself, use /worldborder or ask your AI. The setup sets the starting sizes only once, on the first start of a new world, and never shrinks a border that has grown.
• Installing on a world you already play in: the setup leaves its size alone, so bases far out are never cut off. Set a border yourself with /worldborder if you want one; the weekly growth only starts once the border is below Largest size.

Money

Prices start from one idea: a diamond sells for $80, and everything else follows from how long it takes to get. A new player earns about $4,000 an hour by playing.

• /sell pays the price in the price list. Selling a lot of one item lowers its price for a while (never below 40 percent), and it recovers by itself.
• The shop sells for 3 times the /sell price, so trading with players is usually better.
• Crafting and smelting shop items never makes money. Raw ores are not in the shop, glass sells for what sand does, and stone for a little less than cobblestone costs. That holds even during Market day with the sell multiplier at 2.
• The auction house takes a 5 percent sale tax from the seller. Each player can list 20 items for 48 hours.
• Players with under 2 hours of playtime can send at most $1,000 a day with /pay, which stops alt accounts passing money around.
• Emeralds cannot be sold. Villagers trade cheap items for emeralds, so selling them would let players turn money into more money.
• The inflation guard is off in this setup, so /sell pays the price list. If you turn it on (Economy section), sell prices drop by up to 20 percent in weeks where much more money is made than spent, which on a new server is most weeks.

Spawners

Spawners do not spawn mobs: they store the loot their mobs would drop, while a player is nearby. In this setup, one spawner makes about:

Spawners use charges, bought with money in the spawner menu (500 for $220). They cost about a quarter of what a spawner makes. Up to 16 stack in one block, 4 spawner blocks per chunk, and 64 spawners per player.

Crates and keys

Two crates, with the odds always shown:

After 50 keys without an Epic or better prize, the next one is Epic or better. A player can get at most 5 keys a day. Prizes stay below what about 10 hours of play can make: no netherite gear, and no spawner above tier 2. Keys can never be sold for real money, on any server on our network.

Events

The top 3 on the weekly event leaderboard get event keys. Times use the time zone on your settings page (UTC to start with).

Setting up your spawn

A few things need a place in your world. Do them once, standing in the right spot:

1. King of the hill: stand on a small hill near the edge of town and run /shevents set-location koth 6.
2. Airdrops: stand in the wild and run /shevents set-location airdrop 400. Airdrops land within that many blocks.
3. Crates: look at a block (a chest looks nice) and run /shcrates place daily, then another for /shcrates place event.
4. Leaderboards: /holo board richest money 10 puts the richest players on a hologram where you stand.
5. Warps: /setwarp market, /setwarp events and so on.

Until 1 and 2 are done, King of the hill and airdrops are skipped (your console says so). Your AI can walk you through this.

Settings

The setup's settings page has these sections: Economy, Spawners, Travel, World, Crates, Events and seasons, Rewards, Daily and vote prizes, Safety, Leaderboards and holograms, General, and Names and commands, plus Homes and teleport requests and the World section for the border. See Setup settings and menus for how the page works. The world border growth lives only in the World section; the Events section lists the other events. Each event's times, length, settings (such as Market day's boost or the airdrop loot) and prizes by place are fields of their own. Key sources this setup does not have are not on its page.

Your AI can change most settings for you. It must ask you first for: the crate odds and prizes, the key types, the items crates may never give, the spawner types and loot, how many spawners stack and how fast they drop or cost to run, explosions knocking spawners loose, each event and its times and prizes, the season length and what a season end resets, the largest world size, weekly prizes, the daily and vote prizes, the shop markup, starting money above 5,000, a sell multiplier above 2, a total boost above 3, and turning on keys from add-ons. Everything about the safe town at spawn is Ask too: turning it off, its size, and allowing fighting, building, explosions or monsters there. It can never change the lists of commands rewards may run (both are empty in this setup) or how many data backups are kept. Crate odds are always shown and keys are never for sale, on every server.

What the AI cannot touch: any file that hands out money, items, keys or spawners (the daily and vote rewards, crates, events, spawner loot, the price list, and EssentialsX's kits and costs). The AI can propose new daily and vote prizes on the settings page, and you say yes or no. Even a file written by hand, or by an AI that was fooled, cannot give more than 100,000 money or 2,304 of an item in one prize, and never a netherite set, an elytra, a mace, an enchanted golden apple, a totem, a spawner, a spawn egg or an operator item. A command in a prize cannot create money either. Your AI can edit holograms and warps directly, and can list and stop events, but not start one early, since events pay prizes.

Anti-cheat

The setup includes Grim, a well-known free anti-cheat, set to alert only: when a check flags a player often enough, staff with the grim.alerts permission see an alert in chat. Grim never kicks or bans anyone on this setup, and its alert levels are set higher than its defaults so fewer false alarms reach you. Your AI cannot change this.

Seasons

The world is permanent. A season only ends when you end it (/shevents season end) or set a season length on the settings page. A full backup is always saved first. See Events, leaderboards and seasons.

The plugins

The free plugins are downloaded when the setup is installed, never bundled by us. Each is pinned to an exact version and checked (its hash, then our jar check) before it goes on your server.

Two choices worth knowing:

• One economy. EssentialsX has its own money commands, and they are switched off, so there is one balance, one /pay and one /sell. We left Vault and economy-based add-on plugins out on purpose: they would run a second set of money outside our limits. Plugins that need Vault will not find an economy here.
• No permissions plugin yet. Players get a fixed list of EssentialsX commands, and staff who are server operators can do everything. If you add LuckPerms, EssentialsX uses it instead, so give your default group the same commands (essentials.home, essentials.tpa and so on) or players lose them.

Teams and land claims are not part of day one. Also not here yet: a second currency (shards), buy orders, a safe /trade window, and an AFK area. You can add plugins for these yourself, or build on our add-on kit: see Add-ons for setups.

Good to know

Like all premade setups, this one only runs on our network. Your world and your own files are always yours to download. See Premade setups.