Prison Minecraft Servers for 1.20

Mine, rank up, and do it again with better tools

Prison servers put you in mine A with a stone pickaxe and a rank ladder to climb. You mine a block, sell it, buy your way to the next rank, and the mines get better as you go. A through Z, then prestige and start over with multipliers that make the early ranks trivial.

The interesting part is the enchant and token economy. Pickaxe enchants such as explosive, jackhammer and fortune are bought with tokens earned by mining, and the order you buy them in is the difference between a week and a month at rank F. Most servers have a spreadsheet floating around Discord; it is worth asking for.

There are two broad styles. OP prison hands out huge multipliers and moves fast; classic prison keeps the numbers near vanilla and takes real time. Neither is wrong, but check which one you joined before deciding the grind is broken, and check whether the best-paying mines have PvP switched on.

Where 1.20 servers sit now

Trails & Tales was the archaeology update: brushes, suspicious sand and gravel, and pottery sherds you assemble into decorated pots. It also added cherry groves, camels, the sniffer, bamboo and cherry wood sets, hanging signs, the chiselled bookshelf and armour trims, which together gave builders more to work with than any release since the Nether Update.

Two of its point releases mattered more to owners than the headline features. 1.20.2 changed how clients negotiate a connection, and 1.20.5 replaced item NBT with data components, which broke a great many plugins and forced a long wave of updates. Servers that parked on 1.20.4 usually did it for exactly that reason.

Plenty of servers still run 1.20 because their plugin stack works and their players do not mind. Expect something stable and well tested, with no trial chambers, no crafter and no mace. Check whether newer clients are allowed in through ViaVersion before you go and add an old profile to your launcher.