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Anti-Cheats

Throughout this guide ‘Anti-Cheat(s)’ may be referred to as ‘AC’ or ‘ACs’

ACs are an integral part of any public server and help with catching hackers, since Minecraft’s built-in anti-cheat is practically useless, it’s better to turn it off than to endure the constant false positives it spews out.

You should change the following settings within the server.properties file.

...
allow-flight=true
...

Within the spigot.yml file you should also set the following values.

...
moved-wrongly-threshold: 100000.0
moved-too-quickly-multiplier: 100000.0
...

For the recommended anti-xray settings click here.

We highly discourage the usage of auto-bans as no anti-cheat is perfect. If you want to auto-ban, consider having something like AntiCheatReplay so that you can undo false bans.

Common Anti-Cheats

This list consists common ACs and some pros and cons of each AC.

Grim Spigot / Paper & forks only

Pros
  • Open-source
  • Great movement checks
  • Predictive technology
Cons
  • v3 is Poorly Optimized; Use v2.
  • Mediocre combat checks

NoCheatPlus Spigot / Paper & forks only

Pros
  • Free and open-source
  • Good movement checks
Cons
  • Poor default configuration
  • Mediocre combat checks

Vulcan Spigot / Paper & forks only

Pros
  • Decent movement and combat checks
  • Good default config
Cons
  • USD 20.00
  • Suboptimal performance when scaled to high player counts (>3% of ticks at 420 players)

Spartan Spigot / Paper & forks only

Pros
  • 14-day money-back guarantee
  • Good Bedrock Checks
  • Decent movement checks
Cons
  • EUR 22.49
  • Poor combat checks
  • Crashes on start up at times
  • Sub-par performance

Matrix Spigot / Paper & forks only

Pros
  • Decent movement and combat checks
Cons
  • Bad default config, but there are some good ones out there
  • USD 20.00 (With 95% Checks) and USD 129.00 (All Checks)
  • Dedicated Server Limit
  • Terrible performance; Ate up >5% of the ticks at 135 players

Themis Spigot / Paper & forks only

Pros
  • Free
  • Proper Geyser-Floodgate (Bedrock Players) checks (Only reason to use this anti-cheat)
Cons
  • Bad Combat & Mediocre Movement checks (Bad Elytra, Timer, KillAura Checks)
  • Lack of checks in general
  • Poor performance


Polar

Pros
  • Great movement and combat checks
  • Works out-of-the-box on most servers
  • Cloud-based detections, which helps reducing stress on server resources
Cons
  • Subscription plans starting at EUR 15/month
  • Limitations on player count, server instances and dedicated servers based on subscription plan

Recommendations

We recommend using Grim since it is both free and relatively capable while still being optimal performance-wise. Take Vulcan into consideration as well since it is a one-time purchase.