Towny Minecraft Servers for 1.17

Survival with borders, taxes and neighbours

Towny is survival with local government. You found a town, claim chunks with town blocks, invite residents, set plot permissions and pay upkeep out of the town bank every day. Towns join nations, nations trade or declare war, and the map slowly fills with borders that were negotiated rather than drawn by a plugin.

It plays slower than factions and is much friendlier to people who mostly want to build. Grief is handled by permissions rather than by fighting, and most conflict is about land and taxes. Outposts, farm plots and embassy plots let a decent-sized town run a real internal economy without ever leaving its own walls.

Joining an existing town skips the hardest part, which is daily upkeep on an empty treasury. Ask what happens when a town falls — some servers unclaim the land and let it go wild, others keep the buildings standing — and check the tax rate before you accept a residency invitation.

1.17 is deliberately half an update

Caves & Cliffs Part I shipped in June 2021 with the blocks but not the terrain. Copper, amethyst geodes, deepslate, candles, the spyglass, the lightning rod, powder snow, axolotls, goats and glow squid all arrived. The new cave and mountain generation was held back to 1.18, six months later.

That split is worth knowing before you join. You can mine copper and amethyst, but the world still generates the old way, with a floor at Y=0 and the narrow cave systems of earlier versions. Ore distribution follows the old curve too, so diamonds sit at the depths people learned in 1.16 rather than down near the new bedrock.

Very few servers stay here by choice now. The ones that do are normally running a modpack or a plugin that never got updated, or they are an established world that did not want a visible 1.18 terrain seam through the middle of it. It plays fine — it is just an unusual place to start.