What Towny Gameplay Is
Towny replaces vanilla Minecraft's individual survival experience with a structured society simulation. A player founds a town by running /town new [name], which costs a configurable amount of in-game currency. The town starts with a single claimed chunk where only residents can build. As more players join the town and pay taxes, the mayor can expand the claim and build out districts. Towns can join together into nations, with the capital city's king able to declare war or form alliances with other nations. The gameplay loop is social and long-term: towns that manage their treasury well, recruit active players, and participate in diplomacy grow into powerful nation capitals, while abandoned towns fall and their land opens back up for newcomers. The whole system runs on an in-game economy, so configuring your economy correctly before opening to players is essential.
The Towny Plugin
The Towny Advanced plugin is the only supported implementation for modern Paper servers. It is a single jar that handles town and nation management, land claiming, tax collection, resident permissions, plot types, and a built-in siege war system. Download it from the Towny Advanced GitHub releases page and place it in your plugins folder. On first startup it generates a complete configuration tree under plugins/Towny/. The most important files are config.yml for core behavior, economy_config.yml for all price settings, and the town_block_size value in config.yml if you want to change the claim unit from the default of one 16x16 block chunk. Towny requires a Vault-compatible economy plugin to function; without one it will disable itself on load. Check the console on startup for any dependency warnings before testing commands.
Setting Up Towny Config Basics
Several config values have an outsized effect on how your server plays. town_foundation_cost and town_upkeep in the economy config determine how easy it is to start and maintain a town. Set foundation cost too low and the map fills with one-chunk ghost towns. Set upkeep too high and only veterans with established income can keep towns alive, discouraging new players. A good starting point is making upkeep roughly equal to the daily income a two-player town would earn from their first shop. max_plots_per_town controls how large towns can grow in chunks; tying this to town level (which scales with resident count) encourages recruitment. The town_level list in the config defines each growth tier, the outpost limit, and any perks like bonus plots. Setting up three to five town levels gives mayors achievable milestones to build toward.
Economy Integration with Vault and EssentialsX
Towny reads and writes balances through Vault, so you need an economy provider that Vault can hook into. EssentialsX Economy is the most common choice because most servers already run EssentialsX for basic commands. Install both EssentialsX and Vault, then confirm Towny's startup log shows "Vault economy found" before proceeding. Once the economy is live, configure the tax schedule: Towny can collect daily town taxes automatically from residents and route them to the town bank. Residents who cannot pay tax are either evicted or placed in debt depending on your config. Town banks fund land expansion and nation membership fees, creating a genuine resource management layer. For more detail on configuring Vault and EssentialsX together, see our guide on how to set up an economy server.
Complementary Plugins: Dynmap-Towny and QuickShop
Two companion plugins significantly improve the Towny experience. Dynmap combined with the Dynmap-Towny extension renders every claimed town and nation on a live web map, color-coded by nation. Players can see where rivals have settled, plan expansion routes, and show off their builds to friends without logging in. Dynmap is a resource-intensive plugin so running it on dedicated hardware rather than a shared VM matters; our guide on how to install Dynmap covers the setup and the web map configuration. QuickShop Hikari is the shop plugin that pairs best with Towny because it lets players create chest shops inside their town plots, turning town centers into real player-run markets. Setting up a central market district at spawn and encouraging mayors to build storefronts creates organic economic activity that keeps players returning even on days they are not building.
Getting Your Free Towny Server
NetSkyway provides free Minecraft hosting on Intel i9-13900K and AMD Ryzen 9 9950X hardware with DDR5 RAM and NVMe storage. Towny servers generate large persistent worlds over time as towns expand, so fast disk and generous RAM headroom matter more here than for short-session game modes. Request a free slot by joining the Discord at discord.gg/QXKNwaWVJ2 and posting in the server request channel. No credit card is required. You manage everything through panel.netskyway.net, including uploading existing worlds if you are migrating from another host. The hibernation system keeps the server paused when no one is online and wakes it in under a second when a player connects, so your Towny world stays alive and persistent without burning resources during quiet hours.