Articles on: Minecraft

Which anticheat is best for my Minecraft server?

No anticheat plugin will ever be 100% accurate, but there are certainly some which are renowned to be more accurate than others. We'll outline some of the most popular ones below, and both of them support plugin-based Minecraft versions (e.g. Paper) 1.8 through to the latest.

Please keep in mind that you should only run one anticheat at once otherwise their checks may conflict with each other, and although most modern anticheats are written with performance in mind, running multiple at once will certainly not be helpful.

We don't recommend auto-banning players who trigger anticheats as there can be many reasons why the player could potentially be falsely flagged. These include:

The player could be experiencing high latency/ping, which causes them to "rubberband" (teleport around) and flag the anticheat – see bottom of this article
The server could be experiencing lag, which can be checked by installing Spark and running spark health to view TPS
The player could have certain client-side mods enabled which could falsely flag the anticheat
The anticheat might be interpreting the player's actions wrongly, which can lead to a false flag

Instead, we suggest having your staff team closely monitor any players who are consistently flagged for cheating. It can then be at their discretion (rather than a piece of software's) as to whether to punish the player or not.

If you're running a survival server, make sure Paper's Anti-Xray is configured as per their guide here as it's a great first line of defence against x-ray cheats

🌋 Vulcan (Paid)

Purchase on SpigotMC

Vulcan is commonly regarded to be the most reliable anticheat at the moment, at a relatively low price point and typically producing a low rate of false positives. It's easy to configure and even has a Discord integration which allows your staff to be notified when they're not online about potential cheaters:

☠️ Grim (Free)

Download on SpigotMC or GitHub

Pro tip: if you want to download the latest version of an open-source plugin (like Grim) but it hasn't yet been published to Spigot, some plugins may have a "GitHub Action" set up which automatically compiles pre-release jars so you don't have to! Just press the "Actions" tab at the top of any GitHub repository to see if it's available.

Grim is one of the latest anticheats and has a "1:1 simulation of the player's possible movements", allowing it to effectively detect some movement and combat cheats. As with all anticheats, it has its bugs, but seems to be well reviewed – especially for a completely free plugin! Grim also has a Discord webhook system similar to Vulcan's.

How can I tell if a player has high latency/ping?

You can use Spark to view a player's ping with the /spark ping --player <username> command, and it'll return a value in "ms" (milliseconds). Here's what ping typically indicates:

< 75ms – player has near-instant response from the server, giving a great advantage in PvP
75-120ms – player has slightly higher ping which isn't perfect for PvP, but still feels very smooth
120-180ms – player may struggle in PvP situations but can play survival gamemodes
180ms-250ms – very noticeable lag which can heavily impact gameplay and hurt the experience
250ms+ – practically unplayable, user has network issues or is on the opposite side of the world!

However, high ping from a user cannot rule out the fact that they may be cheating. A technique used by cheaters called "ping spoofing" allows them to fake having high ping, making server owners consider that their irregular movement/combat may be due to the player's lag.

Updated on: 01/03/2025

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