Leasehold

Leasehold

Land you hold by paying for it — that shrinks instead of vanishing.

Free and open source. Paper 1.21+. No dependencies, no database, no economy plugin needed.

The problem

Every server with claims ends up the same way: a map held by people who stopped playing a year ago. New players arrive, walk for twenty minutes, and find every river and every flat hill already owned by someone who will never log in again.

The usual fix is to delete claims after N idle days. That fix costs more players than the problem does, because it also deletes the base of whoever went on holiday, got ill, or had a busy fortnight.

What this does instead

Claims cost rent. Rent accrues by playing. If you run short, your land lapses in an order you control.

Newest first. The speculative outpost and the land grab by the river go before anything you care about.

Your home base is last. You mark it, and it is the final thing on the server to stop being protected.

A suspended claim keeps protecting for the whole grace window — a week by default. This is the holiday case, and it is why the design is safe on a server with real people on it. Being short for a few days costs you nothing.

Past grace it shrinks, it does not vanish. The claim pulls back to a small core around the anchor. Your build stays protected; the empty hectares around it return to the wilderness.

Paying restores everything instantly — full size, full protection, same tick.

Nothing is ever deleted, and a player with one claim is never evicted from it.

The server reclaims empty ground. Nobody loses a build.

Claims are spheres on an anchor, not chunk rectangles

You claim by looking at a block and running a command. The claim is a radius around that block — something you can walk to, see, and point at.

Commands

/leasehold claim — claim the ground around the block you are looking at

/leasehold home — mark the claim you are standing in as the last to lapse

/leasehold list — your claims and their state

/leasehold rent — what you hold, what your land costs, how short you are

/leasehold abandon — give up the claim you are standing in

Aliases /lh and /claim. Admins get leasehold.admin.

Configuration

grace-days (default 7) is the most important number in the file. It is the holiday case. Set it to zero and you have built the same claim-deleting plugin everyone hates, just with extra steps.

core-radius (default 8) is what a lapsed claim shrinks TO. Never zero.

Two deliberate omissions: rent is not a currency — it cannot be bought, traded or sent, because the moment it is transferable one active player can bankroll twenty dormant claims. And AFK pools earn nothing: rent is credited only to players who have moved since the last interval.

Source

https://github.com/Vexoris/leasehold

The decay decision lives in UpkeepLadder: no Bukkit type, no clock of its own, no storage. The promises above are proven by tests rather than asserted in a comment, and those tests are written so a no-op implementation fails them.

GPL-3.0-or-later.