Welcome to the Bukkit Project

Bukkit is an up-and-coming Minecraft Server mod that will completely change how running and modifying a Minecraft server is done - making managing and creating servers easier and providing more flexibility. Learning from the mistakes made by other mods, Bukkit aims to be different and fill the void left by them: built from the ground up we've focused on performance, ease-of-use, extreme customisability and better communication between the Team and, you, our users. The overall design of Bukkit has been inspired by other mods and our experience as Minecraft players just like yourselves, giving us a unique perspective and advantage going into the creation of the Bukkit Project.

Your server, your way
Creating the dream Minecraft server you have always wanted has never been easier. Bukkit will provide you with the tools necessary to completely shape your server exactly how you like and makes it easy to maintain it through the use of a built in plugin install, uninstall and updating system. Unlike other mods, Bukkit will not force any functionality on you that isn't absolutely necessary to run a Minecraft server. This results in less bloat and, as a result, better performance. With a click of a button or the entering of a command, you can have a plugin installed onto your server with ease.

More, for less
Having ran a large Minecraft server utilising over 40+ hMod plugins, I can honestly say that keeping performance in mind is key. Though it may not be evident to most of you, the way hMod is designed results in a significant dip in performance that wouldn't be there without it. That's right: most of you who are having performance issues are experiencing them due to hMod doing things in an inefficient manner, like locking everything into one thread - preventing Minecraft from doing more than one thing at a time.

Ease of use
The days of guessing what a command or feature does are over. From the start we've kept in mind the difficulties we've faced when using the other mods available for the Minecraft server and the Minecraft server itself. Up until I got involved in the hMod project, there was an extreme lack of documentation for the mod - making it more complicated than it should have been to run your Minecraft server. When it comes to the Bukkit project, we'll be providing clear documentation and as many resources as we can to make it easier for our users and interested developers. On top of this, we'll be trying our best to make our commands - and encourage plugin developers to make their commands - follow a logical naming scheme that hopefully tells you exactly what a command will do.

Getting and using plugins: as I run a server with 40+ plugins, I completely understand how difficult it is to find plugins, download plugins and keep them up to date with each Minecraft release. With Bukkit, we'll be making things extremely easy thanks to an integrated plugin management system that allows you to update, install and uninstall plugins with the click of a button, thanks to our Plugin Repository http://fill.bukkit.org. Not only will this site allow you to find and download plugins manually, Bukkit will have a built-in command that makes installing a new plugin as easy as typing a simple command.

A supportive Team and community
As users of other Minecraft mods, we understand that you're often left feeling ignored. Having provided a large amount of support for hMod myself, I have a close understanding as to what difficulty users were having with the mod and what users wanted. My philosophy of caring for our community and our users extends throughout the rest of the Team. The Bukkit Project's philosophy is to be involved with our community, not aside from it as much as possible - letting you have input into how you believe things should be done, within reason.

The possibilities are endless
For players and server admins: when designing Bukkit we made sure to provide plugin authors with as much control over the Minecraft server as is possible. This design choice will allow plugin authors to create many new features not possible on other mods due to poor design or lack of support. With a more feature rich API, you can expect much more out of the plugins that you will be offered for your Bukkit-based server, from entity anti-gravity to controlling different players seeing different blocks, your server will be guaranteed to be unique from any other.

For developers: one of the biggest advantages Bukkit has over other Minecraft mods is how extensible and easily customisable it is. This advantage is further extended by our design choice to keep in the mind the possibility of 3rd party Minecraft servers needing a modding and plugin interface. That being said, when any 3rd party developed Minecraft server becomes stable, Bukkit will be there to allow our collection of plugins to work with them too through a new interface, without any work required for the plugin author to make it compatible.

If you're not a fan of Java (we don't blame you), Bukkit's design allows for plugins to be written natively in any language with ease.

You're in good hands
Much of the Bukkit team consists of people who were Minecraft users first and then hMod plugin developers giving the Bukkit Project a unique and varying view of what a Minecraft server mod should be providing. Along with experience as developers, many of our Team members, including myself run popular and large Minecraft communities and servers.

Furthermore, the core Bukkit Development Team consists of the people who have been maintaining hMod for the past few months. In fact, the birth of the Bukkit Project resulted from a discussion between Dinnerbone and myself about the many changes we were interested in making to hMod which would result in complete breakage of current hMod compatibility. That being said, we have a few months of experience under our belt already maintaining and developing mods (both our own and by other people).

If you have any questions, please feel free to join us on our chat through Mibbit or by connecting to #bukkit on irc.esper.net.

For the latest information on Bukkit, please visit our official site and community at http://bukkit.org. For a list of the people responsible for the Bukkit Project, see the Bukkit Team section on our Team page.

We hope to talk to you soon to hear what you think of our new project!
-EvilSeph
On behalf of the Bukkit development team