How to Make a Minecraft Prison Server: Mines, Ranks and Prestige

The pieces of a prison server

Mines: closed-off areas that refill themselves with blocks every so often, each one with more valuable ores than the last. Ranks: A, B, C… each one unlocks its mine and is bought with money. Selling: a command or a sign that turns what you've mined into money. Prestige: on reaching the last rank, you go back to the first in exchange for an upgrade (more money per sale, a title in chat).

The Prison plugin, free and open source, brings all of that together: mines that reset, ranks with /rankup, /sellall and prestiges. It's the short route. The long one is putting loose plugins together (one for mines, one for ranks, EssentialsX for selling); it gives you more control, but to get started it isn't worth it.

They're plugins, so the server has to be Paper (or Purpur). At NapNodes, Minecraft servers are delivered on Paper; if you switched yours to Fabric or Forge, this won't work.

Installing it

Prison uses another plugin's money, so you need an economy: EssentialsX with VaultUnlocked (the bridge used by plugins that ask for Vault), as in the economy guide. And LuckPerms, so each rank grants its permissions (entering its mine, using its commands).

1. Make a backup

   If your server has backups, make one in “Backups” before you start: if something goes wrong, you can go back in a minute.

2. Install the economy and permissions

   In the panel, “Mods & plugins”: search for EssentialsX, VaultUnlocked and LuckPerms and press “Install” on each one.

3. Install Prison

   Search for it in “Mods & plugins” with “Search on: CurseForge”. If it doesn't show up for your Minecraft version, download the .jar from its official page and upload it to the plugins folder from “Files”. Check on that page which versions it supports: sometimes it takes a while to support the latest one.

4. Restart and check the console

   On startup, Prison says whether it found the economy and the permissions. If it says no, one of the above is missing or hasn't loaded: the console says which.

Mines and ranks in a minute

On a freshly installed server (no mines or ranks yet), type /ranks autoConfigure. Prison creates the ranks from A to Z, one mine per rank with more valuable blocks in each, the sell prices for those blocks and the permissions each rank grants. It only works if you haven't created anything by hand yet.

Those mines are born “virtual”: they exist, but they aren't anywhere in the world yet. Build a space for them (or use a ready-made prison map) and place them with /mines set area followed by the mine's name. Each version explains it with /mines help and /ranks help: type them to see the options in yours.

Everything else is tuned with /mines (each mine's blocks, how often it resets) and /ranks (each rank's price). Changes are saved in the plugins/Prison folder.

What players use

/rankup buys the next rank if you have the money; /ranks shows the list with what each one costs; /mines tp takes you to a mine you have access to; /sellall sell sells everything you're carrying that has a price in one go. On reaching Z, /prestige.

So that new players get going on their own, set up a spawn with signs that explain it (“mine, /sellall sell, /rankup”) and protect everything that isn't a mine with WorldGuard or GriefPrevention, or the prisoners will end up mining the spawn.

How much RAM and CPU it needs

A prison server doesn't use much RAM: the map is small and no terrain gets generated. What weighs is the processor: players break blocks nonstop and every mine, when it resets, changes thousands of blocks at once. For a group of friends, 3 GB is plenty; for a community of 15 or 20 people, 4 GB is a reasonable starting point, and it's best if the mines aren't huge and don't all reset at the same time.

If you notice stutters right when a mine refills, check “Performance” in the panel and run spark (it has its own guide): it'll tell you whether it's Prison, another plugin or a farm. The NapNodes RAM calculator fine-tunes it for your players and plugins.

At NapNodes you can build it and try it out on the free Minecraft server, which is a normal Paper with “Mods & plugins”, and if it takes off, move to a plan with the same world to keep it always on and with backups.

Frequently asked questions