Set up BloodMoon on your Minecraft server

BloodMoon adds a recurring night event to survival. Every few days the night turns dangerous: mobs have more health and hit harder, they apply nasty effects, they drop better loot, and hordes can spawn near players. You choose how often it comes and how hard it is. This guide installs the BloodMoon plugin by SpectralMemories by hand and covers its commands and per-world config.

Checked against BloodMoon 0.8.1, the latest file on its SpigotMC page, October 2026. The page lists Minecraft 1.16 to 1.18, and the last update was in May 2022.

Before you start

• Several plugins are called BloodMoon. This guide covers the one on SpigotMC whose description is "A BloodMoon shines every couple of nights". Its commands are /bloodmoon show, start, stop and reload. If yours differ, you have another plugin.
• You need a Paper or Purpur server. The plugin lists Minecraft up to 1.18, and its author calls it young and not tested over a long time. The author doesn't say whether it runs on newer versions, but in a test it enabled on Paper 26.3 with no error and bloodmoon show world answered from the Console. Try it on a copy of the world first, with a backup from the Backups tab.
• By default, players who die during a BloodMoon lose their items and experience. See the warning below before you open it to a crowd.

Install BloodMoon

The Plugins tab searches Modrinth, CurseForge and Hangar, so a SpigotMC plugin is a manual upload.

1. Download the jar from the BloodMoon page on SpigotMC on your own computer.
2. Open your server, select File Manager and open the plugins folder.
3. Press Upload (the upload arrow on a phone) and pick the jar, or drag it onto the file list.
4. Open the Console tab and press Restart (or Start if the server is off).
5. Select Plugins, press Installed and check BloodMoon is listed.

On start the plugin creates a BloodMoon folder inside plugins. A config.yml is generated for each world, so for a world called world you edit plugins/BloodMoon/world/config.yml. Messages live in plugins/BloodMoon/locales.yml.

Try it

Join as an operator (How to whitelist players and set operators) and run:

• /bloodmoon show for the time left until the next BloodMoon. Everyone can use it. From the Console tab it needs a world name, as in bloodmoon show world.
• /bloodmoon start to begin one immediately.
• /bloodmoon stop to end it.
• /bloodmoon reload to reload the locales and config files. Run it in game, not from the Console tab: on Paper 26.3 the console version fails with a NullPointerException error.
• /bloodmoon spawnzombieboss to spawn a zombie boss, /bloodmoon killbosses to remove bosses, and /bloodmoon spawnhorde to spawn a horde.

Start, stop, reload and the boss commands are operator-only by default. Their permissions are bloodmoon.start, bloodmoon.stop, bloodmoon.reload, bloodmoon.spawnzombieboss, bloodmoon.killbosses and bloodmoon.spawnhorde.

Tune the event

Stop the server and open the world's config.yml in the File Manager. The defaults the plugin writes include:

• BloodMoonInterval: 5, the number of days between BloodMoons.
• MobHealthMultiplicator: 3 and MobDamageMultiplicator: 2, whole numbers only.
• ExperienceDropMult: 4, and ItemDropsMinimum: 0 to ItemDropsMaximum: 4 items per mob death.
• BloodMoonSpawnMobRate: 25. The file says 0 means no mob at all and 25 is average.
• PreventSleeping: true, so nobody can sleep the event away.
• HordesEnabled: true and EnableZombieBoss: false.
• PermanentBloodMoon: false. Set it to true for a world that is always in a BloodMoon, and the interval is ignored.

IsBlacklisted: false decides whether the event runs in that world. The comment above it says a restart is needed after changing it.

Loot comes from DropItemList, one line per item as ITEM:amount:weight, such as IRON_INGOT:5:10. An item's chance is its weight divided by the total weight.

Save, then run /bloodmoon reload in game (not from the console), or restart from the Console tab.

If it doesn't work

• No event happens. Check IsBlacklisted is false for that world and use /bloodmoon show to see the countdown. /bloodmoon start tests it straight away.
• The plugin didn't load. Read the first error in the Console tab after the restart.