Holograms and NPCs

A little spawn polish goes a long way: floating text that welcomes players and lists the rules, a leaderboard hovering over a podium, an NPC by the gate that teleports you to the shop when you right-click it. Two plugins cover almost all of this — holograms for the floating text and Citizens for the characters. Neither is complicated; the main thing to respect is that both touch game internals, so keeping them matched to your Minecraft version matters more than usual.

Holograms: floating text

A hologram is just text (or an item) that hangs in the air with no block holding it up. Use them for a welcome banner over spawn, a rules board, signposts, or — the fun one — a live leaderboard.

With DecentHolograms installed, you create and edit holograms with commands, so you can place them exactly where you're standing:

/dh create welcome
/dh line add welcome &6Welcome to the server!
/dh line add welcome &7Right-click the guide NPC to start

Each hologram is saved under /plugins/DecentHolograms/, so they survive restarts. Two things worth knowing:

• Color and formatting use standard color codes (&6, &l, and so on), the same as most Minecraft plugins.
• Live values come from PlaceholderAPI. A line like Top balance: %some_leaderboard_placeholder% updates on its own — that's how you get a leaderboard hologram. Install PAPI and the right expansion first, test with /papi parse me ..., then put the placeholder in the line.

💡 Tip: Holograms are cosmetic and client-rendered — they never affect gameplay or performance in any meaningful way. Add as many as your spawn needs; the cost is essentially zero.

NPCs: characters that do things

Citizens adds non-player characters — they look like players or mobs, stand where you put them, and can react when clicked. Great for a greeter at spawn, a "click me to go to the shop" warp NPC, or a static server mascot.

The basics are all commands. Stand where you want the NPC and:

/npc create Guide
/npc skin Notch          (give it a skin)

/npc create spawns an NPC and selects it; further commands act on the selected NPC (re-select later with /npc select while looking at it). NPCs are saved under /plugins/Citizens/, so they persist.

The feature that makes NPCs useful is commands on click. You attach a command to an NPC so that right-clicking it runs something — often a warp or a menu:

/npc command add spawn      (run "/spawn" when this NPC is clicked)

You can attach server-side commands too (run as the console) for things a normal player couldn't do. Between a skin, a name, and a click-command, you can build a whole spawn's worth of interactive signposts without a single line of code.

🎯 Good to know: Gate the NPC and hologram creation commands behind an admin rank in LuckPerms. You want staff placing these, not every player spawning NPCs at spawn.

The version-sensitivity warning

Holograms and NPC plugins reach into how entities are rendered and networked, deeper than an average plugin. That has one practical consequence:

⚠️ Heads up: After a Minecraft version update, these two are among the first plugins to break — an NPC that won't spawn, holograms that don't render, console errors on load. The fix is almost always "update the plugin to the build that matches your Minecraft version." Don't run a year-old Citizens on a brand-new Minecraft. See updating plugins safely.

Verify it works

Walk to spawn: your hologram should be floating where you placed it, colors and any live values rendering. Right-click your NPC — it should run the command you attached (teleport you, open a menu, whatever you set). If a leaderboard hologram shows a raw %placeholder%, that's a PlaceholderAPI issue, not a hologram one.

Troubleshooting

• Hologram doesn't appear — you may be looking at the wrong spot, or the plugin didn't load. Check it's green in /plugins; re-run /dh create where you're standing.
• A hologram line shows raw %placeholder% — PlaceholderAPI or its expansion isn't loaded. See PlaceholderAPI.
• NPC won't spawn or throws errors on load — almost always a version mismatch. Update Citizens to the build for your Minecraft version and restart.
• Right-clicking the NPC does nothing — the command isn't attached, or the clicking player lacks permission for the command it runs. Re-add it with /npc command add ... and check permissions.
• Config keys don't match a guide you found — these plugins update often; use the plugin's own current documentation for anything past the basics here.

Next steps

• PlaceholderAPI
• Getting started with plugins
• Updating plugins safely