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.

Our story

EssentialsX started out in 2015 as 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 have joined the team and helped to add new features, and other members of the community stepped up to assist users with setting up the plugin on their own servers. EssentialsX began to grow, with more users than ever - our 2017 release had over 400,000 downloads across SpigotMC and BukkitDev, and even more ​direct downloads of development builds!

At the end of 2017, we launched the ​Minecraft Open Source Software (MOSS) community, enabling more users than ever to access support for EssentialsX, 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 countless contributors have contributed over 1000 commits to subsequent releases. Today EssentialsX reaches ~80,000 players across tens of thousands of servers on a daily basis. MOSS continues to thrive with 9000+ members now a part of the community, providing a place for 20+ FOSS projects (both big and small) to call home.

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

The future

It doesn't end here though! We've got big plans, including a new and improved website, new Discord account linking features and a total reworking of EssentialsX to support chat components. And since EssentialsX is completely free to use with no ads or sponsorships, all of these developments (as well as our support and bug fixes) are funded by our community.

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

Thanks for reading, and see you around 👋