Factions is a cool Bukkit server plugin that allows people to work together by joining so called "Factions", which can be referred to as a guild. Towny is a cool Bukkit server plugin that allows people to work together by joining "Towns" (self-explanatory). They are both designed for teamwork, but they have several major differences. I will explain these and help you make the decision as a server player, not an owner.

The first major difference of the two plugins: in both factions and towny worlds, almost everywhere is "Wilderness". This is better described as an area with no faction/town yet created and you are free to claim it. With Factions, you can build in the wilderness, but you must be aware that everywhere can be griefed (destroyed or modified) by anyone who finds it. In Towny, you can't build in the Wilderness whatsoever, unless the configuration file says otherwise. You could say Towny is worse, by saying "You can't build in the wilderness! I can't even place a simple crafting table!", or you could say Towny is better, since that makes griefing virtually impossible if you can't build in the first place.

Aside from the Wilderness, there's also the area at spawn where no one can PVP. Factions does much better of a job at this, for it has it's SafeZone. The server owner usually determines the size of the SafeZone in chunks. In the SafeZone, the following are disabled: Building, destroying, the ability the claim your own faction, hostile mob spawning, and PVP. This means people pretty much can't do anything but walk around and chat, perfect for a spawn area. In addition, Factions also has a WarZone. Usually, after you exit the SafeZone, there's WarZone for a while. As depicted by the name, it is not as safe as the SafeZone: only building, breaking, and claiming factions are denied. This means that people can not only walk around and chat, but they must worry about battling with players and the environment. This allows for a slower transition from safe area to where anything is possible. Towny is not so fortunate. If you would try to replicate a SafeZone, you would most likely create a "spawn" town where PVP, mob spawning, and joining are impossible. To replicate a WarZone, you would most likely create another town (so people can't destroy) where mob spawning and PVP are allowed. Here's a way to summarize the last two paragraphs, in my opinion:



As you traverse the wilderness, you will probably want to create a faction/town. When you create a faction (/f create), you, at first, haven't claimed any land. You can solely invite people to your faction. You must then claim land (/f claim), which claims a chunk of area (16x16 blocks) in the wild. Since your faction now owns this area, no one elsecan build anything there. You can then set a faction home (/f sethome) inside your owned land so you can come back to your faction's land whenever you choose. The equivalent in Towny: In the wild, stand in the first chunk you would like to claim. Then create your town (/t create), which is commonly a large fee. From there, that's it, really, since you've already claimed one chunk and set your home, making a town a slight bit easier to set up than a faction.

Next, how much land can you claim? Obviously, you can't claim land infinitely to take over the whole server. Factions and Towny both have a final limit. Towny's maximum number of claimed chunks works by simply multiplying the number of people in the town by (default) 8. For example, a single person can only claim 8 chunks, while a town with 10 people can claim 80 chunks (quite a large area). You also must buy a chunk and pay taxes for it in Towny. Factions's maximum claimed chunks works by adding up the members' power, a special feature of Factions. Every so much time you play on a server, you gain 1 power point, until you reach the maximum number of power points (by default 10). Every time you die, you lose a number of points (default 4). Theoretically, if you were to never die on said server, the chunks a faction can claim with default settings equals the number of members times 10. If your faction power lowers due to killing or people leaving, and you no longer have enough to claim the land you have previously claimed, anyone can come by and steal part of your faction's land. Some servers have you pay money for claiming faction land. This is once again, your choice:


There are a few features Towny has that I can't compare to Factions at all! In Factions, after people claim chunks, they are pretty much shared by everyone in the faction (except for chests if you have a separate plugin like LWC). In a town, however, players can buy a "plot", a chunk of land the town has claimed. After the plot is purchased, only the owner and town mayor can build, destroy, open doors, etc. in the plot unless the owner chooses to make it a public plot. Since players cannot do anything in plots that are not theirs, it is common for towns to grow much larger as you can invite random people. There are many possibilities with Towns as you can buy pre-built houses, etc. Here are two statements that combine this with the wilderness paragraph:



Towny also has a "level 2 town", so to speak, called a Nation. Nations are often extremely hard to create between large amounts of server money and/or a paid rank. To put it simply: several towns make up a nation. These towns do not have to be in the same general area. Rather, it is simply a group of towns that all support each other. Usually a nation will have a capital. Some nations like to go to war, which is where things can get very complicated. Factions has an equivalent of these things: allies and enemies. However, they're just not the same.

In the end, Factions and Towny have plenty of similarities too. For example, either plugin lets you put yourself in a mode where you talk with everyone in your town when you chat (/f chat, /tc). That was not the point of this blog post, however. To simplify the process of choosing a type of server to play on, I have created a few questions for you to ask yourself:

1. Do you love PVP?
   
2. Do you enjoy the classic survival aspect of Minecraft?
   
3. Do you have multiple close friends to play with? When I say close, I mean you can trust them and call them while you're playing.
   
4. Would you rather be in a smaller, more focused group rather than a larger one?
   
5. Do you want to be able to build anywhere?
   

Now try these questions:

1. Do you hate PVP? Or do you just not want it all the time?
   
2. Do you enjoy being safe from monsters and the other aspects of vanilla Minecraft survival?
   
3. Do you want be with a large community of people to help you with anything?
   
4. Would you rather make it your ultimate goal to become rich, famous, and dominate the server?
   
5. Do you hate griefing (you don't like griefing other people either)?
   

If you answered "yes" more often to the first set of questions, Factions is your type of server. If you answered "yes" more to the second set of questions, you would be more comfortable with a Towny server. It is overall your choice in the end, which type of Bukkit survival server you enjoy the most. Both Factions and Towny servers can become very successful large-scale servers. Thank you for reading!

Here's my personal experience on this topic: I used to play on a Factions server with my friends, long ago, when I just got Minecraft. I was definitely pretty cool. Obviously, Factions appears to be the more dominant type of server (just go look at the top servers). When that server went down for whatever reason, we didn't play Minecraft multiplayer for quite a while. Then, I found a new server. I will not mention the name here, but let's just say, that from first glance, it was much more popular than the old server we used to play on. It wasn't long until I noticed that the server had Towny, instead of Factions. I went ahead and created a town and invited my friends to it. To summarize, it was "different" from Factions. Going back to why I wrote this article, there were some positives and some negatives to Towny, which I will not explain again, but I especially enjoyed the enhanced building experience. For the time being, I just loved Towny due to it's different experience. Even if it's not better, a change is always nice. If I was to say "The only way to find out for sure is to try it yourself," it would be true, but with this article, newbies can decide much quicker.