ClaimGuard

Nothing needs announcing. Every new player is handed a Claim Hearth on their first join, with the instructions written on the item: place it, and the 17x17 around it is theirs.

They right-click the fire to open the claim — size, members, settings, and a button that draws the border. They feed it coal or logs to make it bigger.

If you would rather hand hearths out yourself, set hearth.give-on-first-join to false. /claim hearth still works, and the item is craftable unless you turn that off too.

A square claim going from reach r to r + 1 adds exactly 8 x (r + 1) blocks, so a ring gets more expensive as the claim grows without anybody tuning a table: 72 embers to go from 17x17 to 19x19, 136 at 33x33, 264 at 65x65.

One ember buys one block of ground. Coal is worth 8, a coal block 80, a lava bucket 160 — all configurable, and /claimguide shows YOUR values rather than the defaults.

growth:
  mode: FUEL          # FUEL | BLOCKS | EITHER
  refund-percent: 100 # shrinking hands the fuel back
  fuel:
    COAL: 8
    COAL_BLOCK: 80
    LAVA_BUCKET: 160

/claim grow north 3 moves one border; /claim grow 5 moves all four.

hearth:
  starting-reach: 8   # 17x17 to begin with
  max-reach: 48       # no claim reaches further than this (97x97)
  max-claims: 3       # hearths per player; 0 for no limit

Raise either for a rank with a permission — both take the highest node a player holds: claimguard.claims.10 for ten hearths, claimguard.claimblocks.50000 for a bigger quota when you run the claim-block economy.

ignored-worlds:            # no claiming at all
  - world_nether
  - world_the_end
require-claims-worlds: []   # unclaimed land protected from everyone
public-unclaimed-worlds: [] # unclaimed land free-for-all

Write [lock] on the first line of a sign attached to a block and it becomes yours alone — trusted members and claim managers included. The owner is stored as a UUID inside the sign, so the visible text is decoration and renaming yourself changes nothing.

Locks work on any block rather than a hard-coded list, which matters for spawners and for whatever your other plugins add.

With PlaceholderAPI installed: %claimguard_claims%, %claimguard_claim_limit%, %claimguard_blocks_used%, %claimguard_blocks_allowance%, %claimguard_here_owner%, %claimguard_here_size%, %claimguard_here_embers%, %claimguard_here_is_mine%, %claimguard_here_claimed%.

Each returns a printable value rather than leaving raw %claimguard_...% text in a scoreboard.

New config keys are copied in from the jar on start, and the file is only rewritten when something was genuinely missing — your comments and formatting survive. The log names exactly what was added.

The one thing a merge cannot do is add an entry to a LIST you already have, such as the fuel table. Yours is present, so yours wins; new fuel types are called out in the release notes and the boot line tells you how many loaded.