Pillar

Pillar

Pillar handles the communication between your servers, so your plugins don't have to.

Pillar exists to make communication between your servers easier: send information and get a response back, fast and reliably. One of the biggest challenges in a server network is making sure that exchange arrives intact, with an equally solid response coming back. Pillar brings server presence, task dispatch, messaging, and distributed locks together in a single set of tools.

It's practical in proportion to what you need. You don't need a network with hundreds of servers for it to be worth it: it solves anything from a single specific problem to becoming the pillar of an entire network.

A single jar runs on both sides of your network, on your Paper servers and on your Velocity proxy. They coordinate through Redis, so there is no central coordinator to deploy and no extra service to keep alive. Pillar builds only against stable Paper and Velocity API, with no NMS and no server internals, so the same jar keeps working on newer builds.

A problem it solves

Your network runs several Skyblock servers. Two players ask to load island 123 at the same moment, and the requests land on different servers. With no coordination between them, both servers load the island, both accept edits, and one copy silently wins when the world saves. Duplicated items, reverted builds, a support ticket nobody can reproduce.

With Pillar, the servers settle ownership before anyone touches the world: exactly one server gets the island, the rest of the network knows who has it, and the claim releases on its own if that server goes down.

Features

• Presence. Servers announce themselves. A crashed one drops out on its own, with nothing to clean up.
• Messaging. One-way sends, network-wide broadcast, and request/response, without blocking the main thread.
• Distributed locks. Exactly one server owns a resource at a time, and the claim expires by itself if that server dies.
• Health-aware routing. Servers report tick time, memory, and player count, so players land where there is room.
• Player transfers. Send a player to a specific server, or let Pillar pick one. Either way you learn whether it worked.
• Degraded mode. A Redis outage degrades Pillar instead of taking your server down. Recovery is automatic.
• Live diagnostics. /pillar fleet, status, ping, doctor, and reload, identical on Paper and Velocity.

For developers

The API ships as a separate artifact on Maven Central:

br.com.markineo.pillar:pillar-api:0.6.0

Plain Java, no Redis or platform types in any public signature. PillarSon is a small open-source plugin showing it in use.

Requirements

• Redis
• Velocity 3.4+ on the proxy
• Paper 26.1.x on game servers
• Java 25 on every node

Pillar is a platform library. It contains no game logic, no world management, and no economy — those belong to your plugins, and Pillar exists to coordinate them.

Documentation

Installation, configuration, and developer guides live at pillar.markineo.com.br.

Support

Questions and help: Discord Bugs and feature requests: GitHub issues

Privacy

Pillar collects nothing. There is no telemetry, no analytics, and no phone-home of any kind. Nothing about your network leaves your infrastructure.

Contributing

Pillar is open source under the Apache 2.0 license, and contributions are welcome on GitHub. The contribution guide covers coding standards, environment setup, and the PR flow.