Set up Towny on your Minecraft server

Towny turns a survival world into a map of towns and nations. Players found a town, claim land in a grid of squares, and decide who may build, break or use things on each plot. This guide installs it from the Plugins tab, runs its first-time setup and covers the settings that catch new admins out.

Checked against Towny 0.103.2.0, whose Modrinth page lists Minecraft up to 26.2, October 2026. This is a check against the plugin's published docs and version list, not a run on a server.

What you need

• A Paper or Purpur server. Towny 0.103.2.0 lists Paper, Purpur and Folia, so Vanilla, Fabric and Forge servers are out. Check the type in JAR Manager, as Change your Minecraft version or mod loader explains.
• Vault or Reserve, only if you want towns and plots to cost money. Towny needs one of them to talk to an economy plugin, and Set up Vault on your Minecraft server covers it.
• A backup. Create one in the Backups tab before adding any plugin.

Install Towny

1. Open your server and select Plugins.
2. Pick the Modrinth button, type Towny in the search box and press Install on the Towny row.
3. Open the Console tab and press Restart (or Start if the server is off).
4. Wait for the server to finish starting. Towny writes its files to plugins/Towny on that first start, including settings/config.yml.

Towny's chat features, such as town and nation channels, come from a separate jar called TownyChat. The Towny release zip on GitHub includes it beside Towny.jar, and TownyChat also has its own releases page in the TownyAdvanced GitHub repository. You only need it if you want Towny to change how chat looks.

Run the first-time setup

Make yourself an operator in the Players tab (How to whitelist players and set operators), join the server and run this in game:

/ta install

/ta is short for /townyadmin. The command works for operators and for anyone with the towny.admin permission. It asks you a short run of questions: whether the wilderness is usable, whether unclaimed land reverts to how it looked before, how many plots a town gets per resident, and what a new town, a new nation and a claimed plot cost.

If you skip it, /ta toggle wildernessuse lets players build and break outside towns, and /ta toggle regenerations switches off explosion repair and land reverting. The other settings, such as those for new towns and nations and the economy, are in config.yml.

Settings worth checking

Stop the server before editing, then open plugins/Towny/settings/config.yml in the File Manager.

• town_block_size: 16 sets the size of a claim square, 16 by 16 by default. Towny's wiki says it cannot be changed later, so decide before players claim land.
• using_economy is true by default. With no economy plugin, set it to false.
• With the economy on, the default config prices a new town at 250.0 and a new nation at 1000.0.

Towny stores its data in flat files by default, which is the setup to keep. Plans don't include MySQL databases.

Once the server is running, /ta reload config reloads config.yml and /ta reload perms reloads townyperms.yml. Give your own admins towny.admin through a permissions plugin such as LuckPerms (Set up LuckPerms on your Minecraft server). Towny's townyperms.yml already gives out almost every other permission node, so you rarely need to add more.

How players start

• /town new <name> creates a new town.
• /town claim claims the square they stand in, and /town claim auto claims as many as the town can afford.
• /town add <player> adds a resident, /town spawn teleports to the town spawn.
• /plot claim buys a plot the town has put up for sale.
• /nation new <name> lets a mayor found a nation.

For a town without a player founder, run /ta town new <name> npc as an admin.

Common problems

• Players bounce back to where they logged in. Towny has gone into safe mode because its data files are damaged, and it freezes players to stop griefing. Stop the server, rename plugins/Towny/data to olddata, then in the File Manager open plugins/Towny/backup, use Extract here on the newest archive and move the data folder it contains into plugins/Towny. If Towny is still in safe mode on the next start, repeat with an older archive. Towny makes a backup on each start and each new day.
• Residents can build on plots they don't own. A mayor runs /town set perm off, then /town set perm reset.
• Nobody can build outside a town. That is the default. Run /ta toggle wildernessuse.