Protection Plugins
Land claiming, grief prevention and region protection.
WorldGuard
Region-based protection plugin. Define areas with specific flags to control PvP, mob spawning, block breaking and more.
GriefPrevention
Automatic grief prevention using a golden-shovel claim system. Players claim land themselves with zero admin configuration needed.
Towny Advanced
Land management and town/nation system. Players create towns, claim land, form nations and manage taxes and permissions.
Three different jobs
These plugins compete less than it looks. WorldGuard protects areas that you define as admin: spawn, arenas, shops. GriefPrevention lets players protect their own land. Towny turns land into towns and nations with residents, plots and taxes. A sensible setup is WorldGuard for spawn and one of the other two for everyone else.
WorldGuard
WorldGuard needs WorldEdit. Select an area with the WorldEdit wand, run /rg define spawn, then set flags such as /rg flag spawn pvp deny. Where regions overlap, a player needs build rights in all of them unless priorities decide otherwise. Every region starts at priority 0 and higher numbers win, and a child region takes over its parent's members and owners, plus every flag it does not set itself.
The whole world is a region as well, called __global__. Adding members or owners to it quietly makes it behave like a normal region, so outside other regions only those players can build. That is an easy way to lock a whole server by accident.
GriefPrevention
New players get an automatic claim around their first chest, and further claims are made with a golden shovel. Friends are trusted per claim: /accesstrust for buttons, levers and beds, /containertrust adds containers, crafting gear and animals, /trust allows building, and /permissiontrust lets someone share their level with others. /abandonclaim deletes the claim you are standing in.
On a live server, run version 16, which the project calls GriefPrevention Legacy. The maintainers warn that version 17 and newer contain breaking changes and should not be used in production.
Towny
Since version 0.102.0.0 Towny needs Paper, Folia or Purpur; Spigot and CraftBukkit are no longer supported. Land is claimed in town blocks of 16 by 16 by default. An economy is optional, but if you use one, Towny reaches it through Vault or Reserve. Tutorials: WorldGuard, GriefPrevention and Towny.