How to protect your builds from griefing

Griefing, meaning breaking or defacing other people's builds, is the fastest way to lose players. The fix is not one big setting. It is a few layers that each cover a different weakness: who can join, what they can touch, and how quickly you can undo damage.

Layer 1: control who joins

The best protection is not letting strangers in.

  • Use a whitelist for private servers. It is the simplest and most effective measure. See How to whitelist players and give operator permissions.
  • Keep online mode on. With online-mode=true, the server checks players against Mojang's accounts. Turn it off and anyone can join under another person's name.
  • Keep operators few. An operator can do almost anything, so give that power to as few people as possible.

Layer 2: claims

On an open survival server, a claim plugin lets players protect their own land. The most common is GriefPrevention:

  • Players claim land by right-clicking two corners with a golden shovel.
  • A claim is theirs alone, and they can trust others with specific permissions.
  • A stick lets anyone inspect who owns a block.
  • Claims can be limited by size and by how much a player has earned, to stop land-grabbing.

Make sure your rules for claim size match the number of players you expect. Tiny claims frustrate builders, and unlimited ones let one person fence off the map.

Layer 3: protected regions

For places you own, such as spawn, shops and arenas, WorldGuard is the tool. It works with WorldEdit to define regions and set flags:

  1. Select two corners with the WorldEdit wand.
  2. Define a region with a name, for example /rg define spawn.
  3. Set flags to control what happens inside it, such as denying block breaking and placing, creeper explosions or mob spawning.
  4. Use region membership to allow your staff to build there.

Also look at the vanilla setting spawn-protection in server.properties. It stops non-operators building near the world spawn, and the default radius is 16 blocks. WorldGuard gives finer control, so many servers set it to 0 and use regions.

Layer 4: logging and rollback

When damage happens anyway, you need to see who did it and put it back. CoreProtect logs block changes, container use and more, and can undo them:

/co inspect
/co lookup user:PlayerName time:2h
/co rollback user:PlayerName time:2h radius:30
/co restore user:PlayerName time:2h radius:30

/co inspect lets you click a block to see its history. Rollback undoes changes by a player over a time period and area, and restore puts them back if you rolled back by mistake. Always specify a radius and time, because an open-ended rollback can undo far more than you meant.

Layer 5: permissions and backups

Combine all of the above with sensible permissions. A new player should not be able to use world-editing commands or place TNT and lava near others. How to set up LuckPerms ranks and permissions shows how to make a restrained default group.

Finally, backups are your last defence. A scheduled backup lets you restore a whole world if something gets past everything else. Schedule automatic restarts and backups explains how, and Creating and restoring backups covers restoring.

Handling a grief incident

  1. Stay calm and avoid mass punishment, because the culprit is not always who it seems.
  2. Use CoreProtect to see who changed the blocks.
  3. Roll back that player's changes in the affected area.
  4. Ban or mute as your rules say, and write down what happened.
  5. Check whether a gap in your claims or permissions let it happen, and close it.

Clear written rules help more than people expect. A short list posted at spawn and in your Discord saves arguments later.

Still stuck? Open a ticket on Discord - run /ticket in any channel, pick a department, and include your Server ID or Invoice ID so we can jump straight in.