Creating a Plugin

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

Note

It is suggested to have prior experience with developing in Java! It is also highly recommended to take code examples from the documentation as purely educational resources, as 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. Note that some of the examples may not yet be updated for the latest API revisions!

Contents

• API-Versions
• Build Systems
• Setting Up Your Workspace
  • Setting Up IntelliJ IDEA
  • Setting Up Eclipse
• Setting Up Your Project
  • Setting Up Gradle
  • Setting Up Maven
  • Version Numbers
• Plugin Identifiers
• Main Plugin Class
• Plugin Lifecycle
• Dependency Injection
• Practices
  • Best Practices
  • Bad Practices
• Optionals
  • Optionals Explained
  • Usage Examples
• Logging and Debugging
• Text
  • Creating Text
  • Text Serializers
  • The Pagination Service
  • Message Channels
  • TextTemplates
• Plugin 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
• Configuring Plugins
  • Configuration Loaders
  • Configuration Nodes
  • Serializing Objects
• The Asset API
• The Data API
  • Custom Data
  • Catalog Types
  • 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
  • Entity AI
  • Implement Your Own AITasks
• Items
  • Basic Item Usage
  • Creating an ItemStack
• Trade-Offers
• Effects
• Scheduler
• Services
• Databases
• Permissions
• Bans
• Metrics Collection
• Book Views
• Economy
  • Basic Concepts
  • Using the Economy API
  • Economy API Best Practices
  • Implementing the Economy API
• Placeholders
  • Creating Placeholder Tokens
  • Retrieving and Parsing Placeholders
• World Generation
  • WorldGeneratorModifiers
  • Modifying World Generation
• Plugin Manager
• Game Profile Manager
• Offline Player Data
• Tab Lists
• Plugin Metadata
• Ray Tracing
• Plugin Debugging
• Tutorials
• Implementation-dependent Plugins
  • MCP (Mod Coder Pack)
  • Using MCP in Plugins
  • Access Transformers
  • Plugin Mixins
  • Internal Sponge Classes