The History of Minecraft Servers: hMod to Paper (2010–2026)

The history of Minecraft servers runs almost entirely separate from the game's own update timeline. It's a story of plugin APIs rising and dying, and of server genres bleeding into each other until "economy," "Factions," and "RPG" stopped meaning separate things. The evolution of Minecraft servers is mostly the evolution of the software they run on.

The short version: survival multiplayer arrived in August 2010; hMod introduced server plugins that September; Bukkit replaced it in January 2011 and ran the ecosystem until it collapsed in August–September 2014; Spigot and then Paper inherited everything, with Paper formally hard-forking from Spigot in December 2024. Along the way, Buycraft made it easy to charge real money, and Mojang's 2014 monetisation rules decided what servers could sell.

2009–2010: Before Plugins Existed

Classic-era multiplayer tests shipped standalone server software in June 2009, and NerdNu launched on June 10, 2009. Maddy Miller's community history, A Decade of Survival Multiplayer, counts it as the oldest server still running.

Survival multiplayer proper arrived with Alpha 1.0.15, whose server software was released on August 4, 2010. MinecraftOnline opened two days later, the same day LlamaGrief appeared as the first anti-grief mod. Enforcing survival was close to impossible until Beta 1.0 moved the inventory server-side on December 20, 2010. 2b2t, launched on December 17, 2010, was still online when we checked it for our best PvP servers of all time list in August 2026.

2010: hMod and the First Plugin Genres

On September 3, 2010, hey0 began Minecraft-Server-Mod, soon renamed hMod. It was the first project that let a server load "plugins" through an API that didn't need rewriting every Minecraft version. Genre-defining plugins followed within months:

• WorldEdit (started September 28, 2010) for mass building.
• Towny (October 25): towns, residents and war.
• LogBlock (October 30): block logging, and later rollback.
• WorldGuard (November 14): region protection.
• iConomy (December 15): the first major plugin to give players an in-game currency, which Miller credits as the catalyst for the Economy genre.

hey0 stepped away after a few months and hMod's development stagnated. Work on its replacement, Bukkit, began on December 21, 2010, under a team including EvilSeph, Dinnerbone, Grum, Tahg and sk89q.

2011: The Golden Age of Bukkit

Bukkit was announced on the Minecraft Forums on January 1, 2011, built to be faster than hMod and easier to write plugins for. Most hMod plugins were ported quickly, and Essentials, Permissions, Multiverse and ChestShop followed. Vault (June 28, 2011) gave plugins one interface to every economy, permission and chat plugin: the plumbing that made Economy servers practical.

EcoCityCraft, launched April 4, 2011, became the genre's defining example and was still running when Miller last updated her history in January 2025. Prison servers grew out of it as an offshoot. Buycraft (later Tebex) launched on August 14, 2011 and made it easy to charge real money for in-game content. Minecraft Forge (July 2011) never supported Bukkit plugins.

2012–2013: Mojang Hires Bukkit, and the Networks Arrive

On February 28, 2012, EvilSeph announced that Mojang had hired the core Bukkit team to build an official modding API. That API never shipped, and Bukkit carried on under new volunteers. The fork that would outlive it came from EcoCityCraft: when CraftBukkit++ (from Afforess and HeroCraft) was abandoned, the server had md_5 and its developers continue it as CraftBukkit--, rebranded Spigot on January 15, 2013.

md_5 also started BungeeCord on October 4, 2012, the first major proxy that let separate servers act as one network. Shotbow, formed in February 2012, is credited with the centralised minigame hub and MineZ. Then came the super-networks: Mineplex on January 24, 2013, Hypixel on April 13, 2013, and Wynncraft, a RuneScape-inspired MMORPG built inside Minecraft, on April 29, 2013. Mineplex set a Guinness record of 34,434 concurrent players on January 28, 2015; Hypixel took it later that year.

2014: The Monetisation Rules, Bukkit's Collapse, and Paper's Birth

On June 12, 2014, a Mojang blog post by Owen set out the server monetisation rules. Servers could charge everyone the same access fee, accept donations, run ads and sell cosmetics. They could not sell gameplay advantages, or sell in-game currency for real money.

On August 21, 2014, EvilSeph announced that Bukkit was shutting down. Mojang responded that it had owned Bukkit since hiring the team in 2012, and contributors felt betrayed. On September 5, a CraftBukkit contributor filed a DMCA notice with GitHub over his code, and CraftBukkit, Spigot and related projects came down. Sponge, to be built on top of Forge, made its first API commit on September 7. Spigot shipped its own 1.8 builds on November 28, 2014 and became the de facto Bukkit implementation. Meanwhile PaperSpigot, started on June 23, 2014 by gsand and Z750, would later drop "Spigot" from its name.

2015–2019: Enforcement, the Combat Split, and the Minigame Giants

Mojang began enforcing the EULA around February 24, 2016, threatening to blacklist servers that sold gameplay. Most servers moved their stores into compliance, and profitability fell. On February 29, 2016, the 1.9 Combat Update split the community. ViaVersion let newer clients join older servers, and some PvP servers never updated past 1.8.

Hypixel's Bed Wars reached its full release on June 29, 2017, and SkyBlock opened in Hypixel's Prototype lobby on June 11, 2019, with collections, skills, minions and an auction house. That was arguably the moment "minigame server" and "RPG/economy server" stopped being separate categories at scale. Mineplex declined, which Wikipedia attributes to competition from Hypixel, technical problems and criticism of its monetisation. Under the hood, LuckPerms (May 2016), the Velocity proxy (2018), Fabric (late 2018) and GeyserMC (July 2019) all started in this stretch.

2020–2026: Bukkit to Paper, and the Giants That Fall

On April 17, 2020, Mojang relaxed its rules, allowing servers to sell gameplay-affecting packages as long as they don't give a "competitive gameplay advantage". On December 13, 2024, the PaperMC team announced a hard fork from Spigot, freeing Paper to change the API and update on its own schedule. That completed the long road from Bukkit to Paper.

Mineplex went offline without warning on May 11, 2023, was acquired by Samito on May 27, 2023, was handed to a new owner known as James in March 2026, and relaunched publicly on June 12, 2026. Mojang announced in October 2025 that it would stop obfuscating Java Edition, and 26.1 (March 24, 2026) became the first Java release on the new year.drop.hotfix numbering and the first to ship fully unobfuscated.

To run a server on today's stack, start with our guide to making a Minecraft server. Paper plugin best practices covers the API that grew out of all this. For the game's own timeline, see the history of Minecraft.