Every plugin you install costs tick time. Each one runs code inside the 50ms your server has to finish a tick, listens for events, and adds a little to every tick whether you notice it or not. So the goal is a lean plugin list where every entry earns its place, plus a habit of auditing the list so the plugins you stopped using are not still charging you for nothing. This post is the starter kit: the plugins a healthy SMP actually needs, grouped by the job they do, with one short paragraph each on what it does and why you want it. Where a plugin deserves its own walkthrough, we link down to it rather than repeat it here. It is a companion to the main guide on running a Minecraft SMP, which places these choices in the wider stack.
Before you install anything, install the thing that lets you measure the cost of everything else. That is the principle the whole list rests on: run a small, well-established set, and profile it so you know where the tick actually goes rather than guessing. If you want the full method for hunting down where time is spent, the Minecraft lag checklist is the companion piece to this one.
Performance and diagnostics
The first plugin on any server is spark, the profiler. It samples what your server is doing and shows you where the tick budget goes, broken down by plugin, by task and by call. Without it, every performance decision after this is guesswork, and guesswork on a live server usually means blaming the wrong thing and buying hardware you did not need. Install spark first, learn to read a profile, and then make every other choice on this list with evidence behind it. When you profile, drag-select the worst moment rather than reading an average, because an averaged profile hides the spikes your players actually feel. The lag checklist walks through reading a spark profile step by step.
Permissions
Permissions are the layer that decides who can run what, and the established standard is LuckPerms. It is fast, it is well maintained, and it gives you groups, inheritance, per-world permissions and a clean web editor, so you can build a sensible ladder from default player up to admin without editing fragile text files by hand. Almost every other plugin on this list checks permissions through it, so it is worth setting up properly early rather than bolting on later. Our full walkthrough is in setting up LuckPerms.
Alongside LuckPerms you will want Vault, which is not a feature plugin so much as a bridge. It gives other plugins a common way to talk to your permissions and economy, so that, for example, a shop plugin can read a player's balance and a chat plugin can read their group without each one needing its own integration. You install it, you rarely touch it, and a surprising number of other plugins expect it to be there.
Protection
The plugin you will be most grateful for is CoreProtect, and you will be grateful the first time someone torches a base. It logs block changes, container access and more, so when grief happens you can see exactly who did what and roll it back in seconds rather than restoring a whole world from backup. It is cheap to run for what it gives you, and it turns a disaster into a two-minute fix. The full recovery workflow is in our guide to grief protection and rollback.
CoreProtect cleans up grief after the fact. A land-claim plugin stops most of it happening in the first place, by letting players fence off what is theirs so nobody else can build or break inside it. GriefPrevention is the common choice, with a golden-shovel claim system that players manage themselves, which keeps your staff out of every boundary dispute. The same grief protection and rollback guide covers how claims and CoreProtect work together, because you want both: prevention for the honest mistakes, and rollback for the deliberate ones.
Core utilities
EssentialsX is the quality-of-life bundle almost every SMP ends up running. It covers homes and sethome, warps, spawn, teleport requests, kits, the /back command, private messages and a simple economy through Vault. It is broad by design, which is its strength and its trap: enable the modules and commands you actually want and leave the rest off, because every feature you turn on is a little more surface area and a little more tick cost. We cover the sensible configuration, and what to switch off, in the EssentialsX guide.
World management
Chunk generation is one of the more expensive things a server does, and by default it happens live, the moment a player sprints into fresh terrain. Chunky moves that work forward in time: it pre-generates your world out to a set radius before anyone is there, so the map is already on disk when players arrive and the tick is not spent carving new terrain during play. Run it once when you set a world border, let it finish, and you remove a whole category of live lag spikes. How to size and run a pre-generation pass sits in our guide to world management and pre-generation.
Version compatibility
Minecraft players update their clients on their own schedule, and forcing everyone onto one exact version is a good way to lose the friends who have not updated yet. ViaVersion lets players on newer clients join a server running an older version, and ViaBackwards handles the other direction, so a wider spread of client versions can all connect at once. They are close to set-and-forget, and they save you a support headache every time a new Minecraft release lands and half your players jump on it before your server does.
Community
If your community lives partly in Discord, DiscordSRV ties the two together. It bridges in-game chat and a Discord channel both ways, posts join and leave messages, can mirror your console into a private channel, and supports linked accounts so a player's Minecraft identity and Discord identity are connected. That linking is what lets you sync Discord roles to in-game LuckPerms groups, so someone who becomes a supporter or a moderator in Discord gets the matching in-game group automatically. The full setup, including bot permissions and account linking, is in connecting your server to Discord with DiscordSRV.
A live map
A web map gives players, and you, a browser view of the world. BlueMap renders a 3D view, Dynmap renders a lighter 2D one, and both let people see the shape of the map, find their way, and admire what has been built without logging in. It is optional, and it does have a cost in CPU to render and disk to store the tiles, so it is worth understanding the trade before you commit to one. We compare the two, and how to keep the render cost sane, in live maps with BlueMap and Dynmap.
Moderation and anti-cheat
On a small whitelisted server of friends, moderation tooling is mostly overkill, and an anti-cheat costs tick time you do not need to spend. On a public or PvP server it is a different story: an anti-cheat that catches flight, reach and speed hacks is worth what it costs, and a set of staff tools for muting, warning and reviewing reports keeps the place liveable as it grows. The honest bit is that anti-cheat is a genuine trade of tick time against protection, so scope it to the server you actually run. We go through the options, and when each is worth it, in moderation and staff tools.
Keep the list lean
That is the starter kit, and for most SMPs it is close to the whole list you need. The discipline that matters is the one we opened with: every plugin you add spends a little of the same 50ms budget, so add deliberately, profile with spark after each change, and audit the list every so often to strip out what you no longer use. A lean, well-understood set of plugins on a box that is genuinely yours will out-tick a big pile of half-used ones every time.
If you would rather run all of this on hardware built for it, our Minecraft hosting runs dedicated boxes you can spec with a large-cache X3D part, so the tick has the headroom to carry a sensible plugin set without stuttering.