Towny commands explained: towns, nations and land claims

Towny is a plugin that lets players found towns, claim land in 16 by 16 block squares and join towns into nations, and almost every command you need sits under five roots: /towny, /resident (short /res), /town (short /t), /plot and /nation (short /n). On your first day you only need a handful: /town join or /town new, /town claim, /plot claim, and /towny prices, which tells you what your server charges for all of it.

Looking for a server first? The Towny server list has 6 playable at the latest ping, with 680 players on them. Prices and limits are set by each server, and the cheat sheet below marks where that matters.

Towny in one paragraph

Towny turns a survival world into a map of protected settlements. A player who founds a town becomes its mayor and claims land outward from a home block, and inside those claims outsiders cannot build, break blocks or open chests unless the town allows it. Towns pay daily upkeep, can tax their residents and can join into nations. Towny itself has no raids: conflict comes from politics, trade and, on some servers, a separate war plugin. Because money pays for land, most Towny servers are also economy servers, and many medieval and earth maps lean into roleplay. The plugin is open source, maintained by the TownyAdvanced team, and its October 2026 builds run on Java 1.19 through 26.3.

Residents, towns and nations

You can be in only one town at a time. Mayors can give ranks such as assistant, which usually allow claiming, inviting and kicking. Towny has no money of its own: it uses the server's economy plugin, so the money you earn from jobs, shops or selling items is what buys land.

Your first day: join a town or found one

Join one first. Founding costs money you do not have yet and upkeep is due every day, while a new resident in an established town gets protected land, a spawn point and neighbors who know the server. You can found your own later.

Joining a town

1. Type /town list to see the towns. Many servers also run a web map (Dynmap, BlueMap or squaremap) linked from their website or Discord, with town borders in color.
2. Type /town <name> to open a town's status screen: mayor, residents, whether it is open, and its daily tax.
3. If the town is open, type /town join <name>. If it is not, ask the mayor in chat. They invite you with /town add <yourname> and you accept with /invite accept <town>.
4. Get a plot. The mayor may give you one, or you can buy one that is for sale by standing on it and typing /plot claim.
5. Type /town spawn to get home. It often costs a little or has a cooldown.

Check the tax before you join. Under a flat daily tax, Towny removes you from the town if you cannot pay when the new day ticks over. Under a percentage tax, you pay a share of whatever you have and are never kicked for being broke. /towny time shows how long until the next new day.

Founding a town

1. Type /towny prices and read it. It lists what a new town, a claim, upkeep and taxes cost on this server.
2. Walk to the spot you want as the center. The 16 by 16 townblock you stand in becomes the home block, and the town spawn sits inside it.
3. Type /town new <name>.
4. Claim the townblocks around it with /town claim. New claims must touch your existing ones.
5. Put money in the bank with /town deposit <amount>. Upkeep comes out of the town bank, not your wallet.
6. Type /town toggle open if anyone should be able to join without an invite, then start recruiting.

These are the plugin's defaults, in the server's currency, for servers that never changed them. Most servers do change them, which is why /towny prices exists.

Source: the Towny default config on GitHub.

Claiming land and paying upkeep

A townblock is a 16 by 16 square, full world height, lined up with Minecraft's chunks. Towny's default limit is 8 townblocks per resident, so a solo mayor gets 8 and a town of ten gets 80. Mayors can buy more with /town buy bonus <amount>, some servers use town levels instead, and /town shows your count against the limit.

Before claiming, type /towny map for a small chat map of nearby townblocks, so you do not claim toward a neighbor. For a mine or farm away from town, /town claim outpost claims a detached townblock in the wilderness, at a higher price.

Once per Towny day (24 real hours by default), the server charges each town its upkeep and collects taxes. If the bank cannot pay, the outcome depends on which options the server enabled:

• Plugin default: the town is deleted and every resident is removed.
• Ruins enabled: the town falls into ruin first. After 4 hours (the default) a former resident can take it back for a fee with /town reclaim, otherwise it is deleted after 72 hours.
• Bankruptcy enabled: the bank goes negative up to a debt cap. A bankrupt town cannot claim, invite or build until someone pays the debt with /town deposit.

Keep several days of upkeep in the bank, more before a holiday. A deleted town's buildings usually stay behind as unprotected wilderness, which is where the empty, half-looted towns on older maps come from.

Plots, permissions and flags

Inside a town, land is split into plots. A mayor lists one with /plot forsale <price>, a resident buys it with /plot claim, and from then on the owner decides who can do what on it.

Towny's permissions are four actions for four groups of players:

On town land the groups are residents, nation members, allies and outsiders. On your own plot they are friends, town members, allies and outsiders. /plot perm shows the setting where you stand, a line like /plot set perm outsider switch off changes it, and /res friend add <name> lets one person build on all your plots. /plot perm gui opens the same settings as a clickable menu.

Flags switch whole behaviors on or off: /town toggle for the town (pvp, fire, explosion, mobs, open, public) and /plot toggle for one plot. Servers can force some, for example PvP off everywhere.

Plots can also get a type with /plot set <type>: shop, arena (PvP stays on), embassy (players from other towns may buy it), inn (anyone may use the beds), farm, wilds, jail or bank. Which types exist is up to the server.

Nations, allies and war add-ons

A mayor founds a nation with /nation new <name>: their town becomes the capital and they become its leader. Towns are invited with /nation add <town> and accept with /town invite accept <nation>, or join an open nation with /nation join <nation>. Nations name allies and enemies and can tax member towns, and under a flat nation tax a town that cannot pay is removed from the nation.

Towny has no war built in. Servers that want it install an add-on, and the Towny war hub lists SiegeWar, FlagWar and EventWar, which let nations fight over towns and land. Some servers allow fighting only at set hours, some let towns stay peaceful, many have no war at all, so ask before you settle near a border.

Command cheat sheet

The third column says what a server can change and how to check it. Aliases such as /t and /n work on most servers but can be renamed.

For every resident

For mayors and assistants

For nations

Towny on earth maps

Most earth servers run Towny on a map built from real elevation data at a fixed scale. You found a town on a real place, nations often borrow real country names, and borders follow claims, not the real world. Live: 3 earth servers playable now, with 352 players.

Scale decides how the game plays. At 1:1000, one block is one kilometer, so the planet (about 40,000 kilometers around) is about 40,000 blocks wide and Paris to Berlin (about 880 kilometers) is under three minutes of sprinting on flat ground. At 1:500 everything is twice as far apart. Servers publish their scale on their map page or in Discord.

What changes compared with a generated world:

• Famous places go early. Real capitals, coastlines and river mouths are usually claimed first.
• Travel matters more. Look for rail lines, public warps or nation spawns before settling far from everyone.
• The map took months to build, so a reset is a big event. Ask how the server handles a new map.

Towny servers in numbers

Mode	Listed	Playable now	Players now	Players, 7 day average	Busiest hour	Votes, 30 days
Economy	48	23	968	1,622	15:00 UTC	8,436
Towny	12	6	680	1,358	13:00 UTC	4,300
Factions	12	6	735	849	16:00 UTC	3,841
Earth	6	3	352	371	17:00 UTC	45

A server tagged with three modes counts in all three, so the rows overlap and do not add up to the network total.

Measured 19 Oct 2026, 22:55 UTCHow we measure

As of 18 October 2026, 12 listings on serverlist.net carry the towny tag (live: 12). Eight were playable at least once in the 7 days to 17 October, together averaging about 1,350 players, and the busiest listing alone averaged about 710, roughly half. Four of the twelve were playable at least 99% of the last 30 days and four were never playable at all, so a listing is not always a town waiting for you. Earth is smaller: 6 listings, 4 playable that week, about 390 players together. Live: 7 Towny listings playable in the last 7 days, 1,358 players on average, 52% of them on the busiest listing.

Peak 13:00 UTC

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Times in UTC

Busiest at 13:00 UTC with about 1,937 players, quietest at 22:00 UTC. The busiest hour holds 2.7 times the players of the quietest.

Measured 19 Oct 2026, 22:55 UTCHow we measure

Towny players are busiest around 13:00 UTC and quietest around 22:00 UTC in your time zone. Over the 28 days to 17 October 2026 that was 13:00 and 22:00 UTC, three hours earlier than all listed servers together, which peak at 16:00 UTC (16:00 UTC then, more in when Minecraft servers are busiest). Looking for a town? Join near the peak, when mayors are online and recruiting.

FAQ

Towny or factions?

In factions, your land is only as safe as your faction's power, raiding with TNT cannons is the point, and inactive groups get overclaimed. In Towny, land stays protected as long as the bank pays upkeep, unless the server switches on Towny's optional overclaiming, which lets towns take land from a town that has claimed more than its limit. You can still fight in the wilderness or in towns that switch PvP on, but nobody breaks into a town unless the server runs a war add-on. Builders, traders and roleplayers usually prefer Towny, raiders prefer factions.

Do Towny servers reset?

Many run one persistent map, because a town is weeks or years of work. Some reset when they move to a new map or a big game version. As of 18 October 2026, none of the towny listings on our list had declared a season length (live count: 0). Ask in the server's Discord how it handles a new map before you build something big.

Can Bedrock players use Towny?

Yes, on crossplay servers that let Bedrock players in through Geyser. Commands are typed in chat the same way, and Towny's menus appear as Bedrock inventories. Bedrock names usually carry a prefix, a dot by default, so you invite a Bedrock friend with /town add .TheirName. Right now 5 of 6 playable Towny listings also answer on their Bedrock port. Java and Bedrock together explains what else differs, and Minecraft server types A to Z covers the modes you will meet next to Towny.