Hi gang!

Editorial (intro)

It was a Friday evening. My gf & me had been playing remotely on our (modded & private) LAN server for several hours during the past weeks, but today we we're together at my place. It was getting later in the evening and the both of us had a few drinks. My friend Aya went for a quick bathroom break and was also going to grab some snacks on her way back, while I was still in-game. And then it happened: a flying menace was heading straight for her, and I was not going to let that happen.

The only problem: I didn't have a weapon and I was also dangerously close to her storage...while also in creative mode. She hadn't made any buildings or such yet because we were still busy testing out plenty of mods, but she had been playing in survival for dozens of hours already and thus also collected plenty of mats. In fact... if I recall correctly there were 5 double chests and 3 or so "Iron chests" or variants thereof (iron chests are single block chests that provide even more storage than a standard double chest).

Well... I think you can guess where this is going: here I was trying to smack the flying hostile away and while doing so also managed to break several of Aya's chests: stuff went flying everywhere. When I realized what was happening I immediately salvaged all I could by /give'ing me plenty of chests and dumping all of Aya's stuff in there, but the damage had already been done. You see: this wasn't just about the items, but Aya had also set up a whole system for her stuff. She knew exactly what went where, but now it was all of a sudden a complete mess. Yes, we had a little argument and Aya was not happy, but she also realized that I really didn't mean to do any of that. Even so... it did ruin the evening quite a bit.

Never again!

So I immediately started looking for "land claiming" mods. During the past 18 months we've played with several of them but now we finally found a mod which we both very much enjoy.

What is land claiming? (briefly)

Simply put: landclaiming is all about protecting your stuff from other players. Players are allowed to 'claim' areas of the world after which they will be able to decide who can do what in that area. In the screenshot above I'm in an area which my friend Aya has claimed for her own (notice the coloration in my minimap?), and as you can see I'm not allowed to break blocks here. Despite the fact that I'm actually the server admin!

Now, there are many awesome mods available to protect your stuff, but nothing comes close to the ease of use with this one.

Open parties and claims mod

Open Parties & Claims is a mod that was developed by Xaero. The same person behind the amazing "Xaero's world map" and "Xaero's mini map" mods. In case you haven't heard of those:



This is an example of "Xaero's world map" and as you can see... it fully integrates with the mini-map mod (that's the reason why you get to see 'entity dots' here) as well as the open parties & claims mod: notice the colored areas? These two "map mods" are a huge favorite with us because they're very light weight and allow you to customize just about everything you can imagine, and probably a lot more. For example: in my first screenshot you can see Aya's player icon in my minimap: that was set up by me. And I didn't just stop with other players: every "human-like" entity gets displayed that way, so including villagers, pillagers, witches and even vampire hunters!

And the same thing with the minimap: you can configure its shape, its size, transparancy, the kind of entities you want to see on your 'radar', whether it should support "lighting", the zoom level... even any extra information you may want to see (we decided on only showing the coordinates and the current biome you're in).

But anyway... this is about the claiming mod.

So the main reason why we love this one is because you can literally claim an area by simply pointing & clicking using the map shown above:



So here I am near a structure. I pulled up the map and then selected an area with the right mouse button. As soon as I made the selection you get to see the menu as shown above. Notice the option where my mouse cursor is at? That would allow me to claim the selection as my own. It's seriously that easy.

Now... there is a small caveat here: if you look closely then you may notice that each selected "block" is actually a full 'chunk': a chunk in Minecraft is a 16x16 block area. You can see as much by pressing F3 + G: this will show you the so called "chunk borders" in your game. Or, you can read its full description on the Minecraft wiki. A chunk is of course quite a large area, and may be considered a bit "crude" in comparison to mods that allow you to claim specific regions. Even so... you can't deny the sheer ease of use here and another thing: by using standard Minecraft "areas" the mod also reduces quite a bit of stress on your server. Instead of having to constantly check for custom selections it can simply focus itself on existing regions which you constantly enter and exit anyway.

Maybe also good to know: notice the blue area around me? That's the maximum distance in which I can make new claims. Anything beyond that will be out of reach.

Customizing your claim ("laying out the law!")

Once you've made a claim you can open the main menu (as shown earlier) after which you can check your player config shown here: this shows you everything you can change in your claim. So the fun thing is that while this may look a bit daunting at first it's honestly very straight forward. By default you simply protect your claim from anyone else. Easy, right?

So what if you want to give other players access to your claim as well? Simple: then you should create a new party. A "party" is basically your personal group of players who will get (more) access to your claim. Once you created your party you can then invite other players to join you and once they accepted your invitation they get more access. That is another limitation here: you can't apply rules for individual players, only your party as a whole. And... allies. If you want to give players "partial" access to your claim(s) then you can define their party as an "ally". After that you can change certain protection rules to give those players specific access.

For example.... Aya has set it up that her claim is protected from allies, but not other members of her own party. She then enabled chest & barrel access for allies, and defined my group as an ally. So now I can access her storage, but I can't break anything. Simple, right?

Why can't this mod do "more"?

Sometimes I see people wonder about protection on modded servers (such as (Neo)Forge and Fabric): if you stop to think about it then you'll notice that there aren't all that many mods available which can do land claiming and protection, why would that be? Well, this blog post explains that perfectly: why isn't WorldGuard available for (Neo)Forge? Trust me: it's a very good read.

But don't worry: Xaero is very busy trying to expand on this mod as best as they can. Rumor has it that they're even looking into adding "(Create) clipboard protection".

Customizing the mod itself?

Fun fact: this LAN server is currently running Windos 10 (as you can see) but because this computer doesn't support hardware encryption I can't upgrade to Windows 11. So I'm going to do something much better: I'll soon be upgrading to FreeBSD instead.

But anyway, as you can see the mod provides several config files which will give you even more control over its behavior. For example... at the time of writing I can't use Tetra's workbench on Aya's claim. Well... easily solved after I set this option (ForcedBlockProtectionExceptionList).

Just keep in mind that you don't want to edit these files as long as your server is up & running, because if you do then you'll risk your changes to get undone as soon as the mod saves its own configuration.

In conclusion

If you're looking for a good way to protect your (modded) server and you already happen to be using Xaero's map mods then I can highly recommend looking into Open Parties & Claims. 31 million downloads can't be wrong ;)

More seriously though: this mod may take getting used to, but don't worry if you get a little overwhelmed when you first start using it. No rush, no fear: it provides very sane default settings, just take things one step at a time. However, I do highly recommend that you finetune the mod to your own needs. For example: I can easily foresee doom in your near future if you'd allow every player to "forceload" a dozen of so chunks on your server, that's going to be very hard on said server in the long run.

(forceloading will ensure that an area of the world is always active, even if there are no other players around. Awesome for player farms, but not so awesome for the total load on your server).

One thing is for sure though: it will definitely make sure that 'stupid' admins such as myself can't accidentally destroy your storage for whatever dumb reason, that's definitely a pro!

I hope this was useful for you, thanks for reading!