EssentialsX

Hi there! We're the team behind EssentialsX, which you might recognise as the free and open source plugin suite now installed on tens of thousands of Minecraft servers.

In 2015, EssentialsX started out as little more than a fork of the original Essentials codebase, updated to work with Minecraft 1.8. We didn't have many resources, so most of our effort went into supporting new versions of Minecraft.

Over the next couple years, more contributors started helping to add new features and assist users with setting up the plugin on their own servers, and EssentialsX began to grow, with more users than ever (our 2017 release was downloaded over 400,000 times across the SpigotMC and BukkitDev websites, plus thousands more downloads of development builds from our build server).

At the end of 2017, we launched the Minecraft Open Source Software (MOSS) community, enabling more users than ever to access support for free, as well as bringing together contributors and users of other open source projects such as FactionsUUID and LWC Extended.

Since then, EssentialsX has continued to grow and evolve - our 1.13 release consisted of over 250 code commits, while over 40 contributors have contributed to subsequent releases, and today EssentialsX reaches 80,000+ players across 60,000+ servers on a daily basis. MOSS continues to thrive with over 9000 members along with 24 open source projects now a part of the community, bringing exposure to and providing a central support hub for many FOSS projects, both big and small.

Those numbers are crazy, but none of this would have happened without the support of our patrons. Since 2018, EssentialsX has been supported by pledges on Patreon, which has allowed us to continue working on such a large project in our spare time, as well as covering costs for the community like running the build server and everyone's favourite bot, Chester.

It doesn't end here though - we've got big plans, including a new Discord addon and a major rework of the core EssentialsX plugin. And since EssentialsX is a completely free plugin with no corporate sponsorships or affiliate deals, all of these developments (as well as our support and bug fixes) are funded by our community.

So if you're reading this and you've got a few dollars to spare a month, we'd appreciate any contribution to the project (especially if your server makes money)! All contributions go into the project to allow us to keep EssentialsX free for everyone, as well as modernising the plugin and adding new highly-requested features.

Thanks for reading, and see you around 👋