Towny Minecraft Servers for 1.20

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.

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.