Anti-Cheats
Throughout this guide ‘Anti-Cheat(s)’ may be referred to as ‘AC’ or ‘ACs’
ACs are an integral part of any public server and help with catching hackers, since Minecraft’s built-in anti-cheat is practically useless, it’s better to turn it off than to endure the constant false positives it spews out.
You should change the following settings within the server.properties file.
...
allow-flight=true
...Within the spigot.yml file you should also set the following values.
...
moved-wrongly-threshold: 100000.0 moved-too-quickly-multiplier: 100000.0
...For the recommended anti-xray settings click here.
We highly discourage the usage of auto-bans as no anti-cheat is perfect. If you want to auto-ban, consider having something like AntiCheatReplay so that you can undo false bans.
Common Anti-Cheats
This list consists common ACs and some pros and cons of each AC.
NoCheatPlus Spigot / Paper & forks only
Pros
- Free and open-source
- Good movement checks
Cons
- Default configuration will spam false movement positives all over the place, you should buy a good config (eg. MarkElf’s) OR make your own
- Mediocre combat checks
Grim Spigot / Paper & forks only
Pros
- Open-source
- Great movement checks
- Predictive technology
Cons
- Currently WIP, not ready for production servers
- Mediocre combat checks
- Quite unoptimized
Vulcan Spigot / Paper & forks only
Pros
- Great movement and combat checks
- Good default config
Cons
- USD 20.00
- Suboptimal performance when scaled to high player counts (>3% of ticks at 420 players)
Spartan Spigot / Paper & forks only
Pros
- 14-day money-back guarantee
- Good Bedrock Checks
- Decent movement checks
Cons
- EUR 22.49
- Relatively poor combat checks
- Crashes on start up at times
- Sub-par performance
Matrix Spigot / Paper & forks only
Pros
- Decent movement and combat checks
Cons
- Bad default config, but there are some good ones out there
- USD 20.00 (With 95% Checks) and USD 129.00 (All Checks)
- Dedicated Server Limit
- Terrible performance; Ate up >5% of the ticks at 135 players
Themis Spigot / Paper & forks only
Pros
- Free
- Proper Geyser-Floodgate (Bedrock Players) checks (Only reason to use this anti-cheat)
Cons
- Bad Combat & Mediocre Movement checks (Bad Elytra, Timer, KillAura Checks)
- Lack of checks in general
SoaromaSAC (Config 6) Spigot / Paper & forks only
Pros
- Free
Cons
- Bad Checks
- Infinite False Positives
- Fake Open Source Link. Leads to a Rick Roll
Negativity v1 & v2 All major Java platforms
Pros
- Free & Open Source
- Paid Version (v2) is Open Source
- v2 supports a lot of platforms (Minestom, Sponge, Fabric & more)
Cons
- Lacks some important checks (No Elytra Checks, NoSlow Checks etc)
- Poor movement and combat checks
Astro
Pros
- Great movement and combat checks
- Good default config
- Great performance - very light on the main thread. Ate only .01% of ticks at 430 players
- Decent Bedrock Checks, obviously do not auto-ban in case of violations
Cons
- USD 30.00
- Timer checks false incredibly often
- Poor reliability; has broken at least once per quarter so far
- Atrocious ToS which states that you are not allowed to mention that your server is using Astro. Also, to purchase the anti-cheat, the server must have an active player count of 50 or above
Polar
Pros
- Great movement and combat checks
- Works out-of-the-box on most servers
- Cloud-based detections, which helps reducing stress on server resources
Cons
- Subscription plans starting at EUR 15/month
- Limitations on player count, server instances and dedicated servers based on subscription plan
Recommendations
Both Astro and Vulcan offer a great price to performance ratio. However, Astro will be significantly lighter on system resources. Also, Vulcan will support Bedrock in the near future. Astro already supports it.