Towny Advanced: land management for Paper and Folia servers

A plugin that has outlived several Minecraft generations

Towny Advanced is a Minecraft server plugin for town, nation and land management, and its age is the first fact that matters. The project description calls it one of the oldest still-in-development plugins for Minecraft, and the maintainer notes that it is now over 15 years old.

The lineage explains the age. The original creator, Shadeness, built Towny for the now-defunct server platform called hMod, ported it to Bukkit and left shortly afterwards, returning later to add EnemyWar, later known as FlagWar. The second developer, ElgarL, was active from 2011 to 2014. The current lead developer, LlmDl, has been in charge of the project since 2014 and since the release of Minecraft 1.8, and is the third person to lead it.

That continuity is the reason to care. A plugin that predates several Minecraft generations and is still being released is a plugin whose data model, permission scheme and configuration have been tested against years of server operators, and whose ecosystem has grown around it rather than being rewritten each time the game changes.

It is also a plugin with a community rather than a product. The maintainer is active on Discord answering questions, and the README says bugs are usually fixed the same day they are reported, and that other developers who contribute pull requests get reviews right away. The project also maintains a website portal at townyadvanced.github.io where the add-on plugins the team maintains can be viewed and downloaded.

The description calls it a plugin for Bukkit and Spigot, and the topic tags include both, along with Folia. That last tag matters, because the platform requirement changed.

Spigot support ended with version 0.102.0.0

The clearest technical fact in the README is the platform requirement. As of version 0.102.0.0, Towny requires the use of Paper, Folia or Purpur, and CraftBukkit and Spigot are no longer supported.

That is a significant change for server operators, because Paper, Purpur and Folia are forks of Spigot that add performance work, and Folia in particular changes the threading model of the server. A plugin that wants to run correctly on Folia has to work with regionised, multi-threaded tick handling, which is a different requirement from running on a single-threaded server. The consequence is that a plugin which supported Spigot for years may simply not work on the fork with a different threading model, and the answer from the project was to drop the older platforms rather than to maintain two code paths.

The release line shows how actively the compatibility surface is maintained. The newest listed release, 0.103.2.13, is dated 2026-10-15 and is described as being for MC 1.19.*, 1.20.*, 1.21.*, 26.1.*, 26.2.* and 26.3.*. Two earlier versions landed in the same week, 0.103.2.12 on 2026-10-13 and 0.103.2.11 on 2026-10-08.

There is a distinction in the README between the latest release and the latest pre-release that is easy to miss and easy to get wrong. The latest release supports MC 1.19.*, 1.20.*, 1.21.*, 26.1.* and 26.2.*, while the latest pre-release also supports 26.3.*. A server on the newest Minecraft version therefore needs the pre-release channel, which is a different risk decision from the stable channel, and the version numbers have to be matched to the game version rather than taken as the newest artifact.

The version scheme is also unconventional. A version such as 0.103.2.13 is four components rather than the usual semantic version, which makes it awkward to express in a dependency manager that expects three.

A maintainer policy that ties support to sponsorship

The first part of the README is a long message from the lead developer, and it is unusual enough to be worth summarising carefully because it affects who can use the project and on what terms.

The personal history is given first. The maintainer has worked with Towny since 2011 and has led it since 2014, describing more than 15 years of service to the project, and notes that he has not run a Minecraft server or played the game in over 9 years. The message explains that a career reset in 2021 removed the income that used to subsidise the time spent coding, and that the work on Towny and its add-on plugins is now funded by sponsorship.

Then comes the policy, enacted as of the start of 2024, in two parts. If you are expecting support on the Discord, the maintainer expects you to sponsor, with the note that companies that provide software do not provide support for free, and that a brand new user who needs extra help will probably still get a response, along with a request to report anything not already documented on the wiki so it can be added. If you are not sponsoring, the request is not to make suggestions for new features. The stated reason is underfunding, and the stated remedy is that if sponsorships rise enough for the maintainer to sustain himself and his family, the time available for Towny will expand and the support floodgates will reopen.

For an adopter, this is a straightforward trade to make explicitly. The software is free and the codebase is public, but community support is a paid service and feature requests are limited to sponsors. A server owner who expects unlimited help on Discord should look elsewhere; a server owner who wants a maintained plugin and can fund a small sponsorship gets a very responsive maintainer.

The message also notes that 99% of Towny server admins are not sponsoring, which is stated as a fact about how open source work gets funded rather than as a complaint, and it cites a 4.7/5 rating on Spigot with 145 reviews as the state of the project.

The add-on ecosystem around the TownyAPI

Towny is the core of a family of plugins, and the README describes the relationship with some candour. The maintainer is in charge of several side-plugins that are not uncommon on Towny servers: SiegeWar, Dynmap-Towny, iConomy5, TownyResources and TownyProvinces, with TownyChat, TownyFlight, TownyCultures and others playing smaller roles, and servers tending to use a lot of the maintainer's plugins if they use Towny at all.

The mechanism that makes the family work is the TownyAPI, described as a codebase the maintainer has spent years building, and the point of it is that an add-on can be created from nothing but code and that API. That is the difference between a plugin with a community and a plugin with a closed core, and it is the reason the portal site exists: the add-on plugins the team maintains are listed there and can be downloaded, and the SponsorPlugins repository gives sponsors access to additional ones.

The history in the README also illustrates the fragility of this model. The maintainer recounts how Goosius stopped working on a fork of Towny that had SiegeWar built into it, after a little over a year of intense development, and how that developer simply logged out and left, with the SiegeWar community then willing to pay anyone who would continue the work. The maintainer has since pulled SiegeWar from the ashes twice.

That story is a fair description of the risk in adopting any plugin with a single dominant maintainer, and Towny is honest enough to publish it. The counterweight is the API: an add-on built on a public API can be maintained by somebody other than the author of the add-on, and the maintainer's own account shows what happens when that is not the case.

The repository also carries a `crowdin.yml` file, which points to the fact that the plugin's strings are translated through Crowdin, and the wiki is linked as the place to read about the features.

A Maven project with a wiki as its real documentation

The repository layout is that of a Java project built with Maven. There is a `pom.xml` at the root, a Maven wrapper with `mvnw` and `mvnw.cmd` plus a `.mvn/` directory, so a build does not need a system Maven install. The plugin code itself is in the `Towny/` directory, with a separate `providers/` directory alongside it, and there is a `jitpack.yml`, which is what lets the project be consumed from GitHub rather than from a plugin repository.

The documentation lives outside the repository. The README links the project wiki for the features list, and the site at townyadvanced.github.io for the add-on portal, and the instruction for anyone who finds something undocumented on the wiki is to report it so it can be added. The README is therefore a mix of a project history, a maintainer statement and a set of pointers, with the operational detail in the wiki.

The licence deserves attention from anyone who intends to build on it. The repository is recorded with a custom licence that GitHub cannot classify, with the LICENSE file named as the place to look, and the file in the repository is `LICENSE.md`. The project also carries a CodeFactor badge, which is a code quality service rather than a licence statement, and the project is not archived with the last push on 2026-10-19.

For a server administrator, the practical sequence is short. Check that the server is on Paper, Folia or Purpur rather than Spigot, pick the build that matches the Minecraft version, noting that the newest game version needs the pre-release channel, drop the plugin into the server and consult the wiki for configuration and permissions, and then decide how you intend to interact with the maintainer.

Editorial conclusion

Towny Advanced suits a Minecraft server owner who wants a land management and town economy system with a fifteen year track record and a large add-on ecosystem, and who is running Paper, Folia or Purpur. It does not suit a server on Spigot or CraftBukkit, since version 0.102.0.0 dropped support for both, and it does not suit a server that wants community support on Discord without funding the project, because the maintainer's stated policy since the start of 2024 is that Discord support is for sponsors. Before installing, read the release notes to pick the right build for your Minecraft version, and check the LICENSE file, since the repository is recorded with a custom licence that GitHub cannot classify.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. Issues
2. Project website
3. README
4. Releases
5. TownyAdvanced/Towny on GitHub