Creating a Plugin

This section is intended for developers who wish to develop plugins with the Sponge API. The articles cover various aspects of the Sponge API and the concepts behind it. It is important to understand that the intent of this section is to help developers get started with the Sponge API, not to cover every concept. The Javadocs will be of great help to you once you are comfortable with the API.

Note

It is recommended to have prior experience with developing in Java! Copying-and-pasting examples from the documentation likely will not work, especially without modification.

Tip

The Cookbook is a collection of fully functional plugins that each demonstrate a specific part of the SpongeAPI. These plugin “recipes” are standalone and are compilable via Gradle or Maven. Some of them demonstrate how to create plugins using other JVM languages such as Scala and Kotlin.

Contents

• Build Systems
• Setting Up Your Workspace
  • Setting Up IntelliJ IDEA
  • Setting Up Eclipse
• Setting Up Your Project
  • Setting Up Gradle
  • Setting Up Maven
• Plugin Identifiers
• Main Plugin Class
• Plugin Lifecycle
• Dependency Injection
• Practices
  • Best Practices
  • Bad Practices
• Optionals
  • Optionals Explained
  • Usage Examples
• Logging and Debugging
• Commands
  • Building a Command
  • Argument Parsing
  • Command Flags
  • Child Commands
  • The Command Manager
  • Low-Level Command API
• Events
  • Event Listeners
  • Event Causes
  • Event Filters
  • Custom Events
• The Asset API
• Configuring Plugins
  • Configuration Loaders
  • Configuration Nodes
  • Serializing Objects
• Text
  • Creating Text
  • Text Serializers
  • The Pagination Service
  • Message Channels
  • TextTemplates
• The Data API
  • Custom Data
  • Using Keys
  • Data Manipulators
  • Transactions
  • Serializing Data
• Blocks
  • Concepts
  • Accessing Blocks
  • Modifying Blocks
  • Tile Entities
  • Virtual Block Changes
• Entities
  • Spawning an Entity
  • Modifying an Entity
• Items
  • Basic Item Usage
  • Creating an ItemStack
• Trade-Offers
• Effects
• Scheduler
• Services
• Databases
• Permissions
• Bans
• Book Views
• Economy
  • Basic Concepts
  • Using the Economy API
  • Economy API Best Practices
  • Implementing the Economy API
• World Generation
  • WorldGeneratorModifiers
  • Modifying World Generation
• Plugin Manager
• Game Profile Manager
• Offline Player Data
• Plugin Debugging
• Tab Lists
• Plugin Metadata
• Ray Tracing
• Tutorials
• Implementation-dependent Plugins
  • MCP (Mod Coder Pack)
  • Using MCP in Plugins
  • Access Transformers
  • Plugin Mixins
  • Internal Sponge Classes