Features

The APIs you know and love

Just because Glowstone is original doesn't mean it can't be familiar.


Use or code Bukkit plugins and they'll work natively with Glowstone, and enjoy first-class Bukkit2Sponge support for your Sponge powered plugins.


Learn more

Simplicity is the mother of performance

Glowstone's simplicity affords it a performance improvement over CraftBukkit and other servers.


By design, our code is simple and doesn't have to work around the official Minecraft server in order to improve performance or functionality.


Benchmarks (Soon)

Any way you want it

Glowstone is open source and community centric.


Anyone can work on Glowstone, so it reflects what our community wants. And, with Glowstone's MIT license, you can modify it to suit your server's needs. Don't know code? Provide your input in the design process!


How to help
Important warning
Glowstone is a small project.

We put all of our efforts into providing efficient and quality software. While the project has been around for a few years, we are not feature-complete in comparison to the vanilla server software.

We update our project frequently enough to follow Mojang's updates, but Glowstone is simply not ready for some production servers. While Glowstone can be used at its best for lobbies, hubs, minigames and creative servers, it is not ready for survival.


More info can be found in the FAQ. You can also ask questions on our Discord chat.

We are proudly sponsored by Aternos

Minecraft Servers. Free. Forever.

Downloads

How to use
Glowstone is a standalone Java server executable. You can run it from your terminal:
  
java -Xms768M -XX:+UseG1GC -jar glowstone.jar

You can read more about the installation instructions here.

Want to test Glowstone out before installing it? Hop on our test server (1.12.2): mc.glowstone.net

Supported versions

Release 2021.7.0
MC 1.12.2 | Changelog
Latest build
MC 1.12.2 | 1.12 branch
Dev build
MC 1.16.5 | dev branch

Plugins

Glowstone natively supports plugins written for the Bukkit, Spigot and Paper APIs. Simply place the Java archives (.jar) in your server's plugins directory and run Glowstone.

Note that plugins that use platform-dependent code (NMS, OBC, etc.) require Linkstone, which is incomplete.

Linkstone plugin
Bukkit plugins
Spigot plugins
Paper plugins

Maven

You can use Glowstone and Glowkit as Maven dependencies directly from our repository:

<!-- Glowstone Maven snapshot repository -->
<repository>
    <id>glowstone-repo</id>
    <url>https://repo.glowstone.net/content/repositories/snapshots/</url>
</repository>

<!-- Glowstone server dependency -->
<dependency>
    <groupId>net.glowstone</groupId>
    <artifactId>glowstone</artifactId>
    <version>2021.7.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
</dependency>