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GuidesGuidesAdd floating text and clickable characters to your spawn — info holograms, live leaderboards, and NPCs that run commands or send players to warps — with DecentHolograms and Citizens.
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.
| At a glance | |
|---|---|
| You need | A plugin-capable server (Purpur, PaperSpigot, Spigot family) |
| Plugins | A holograms plugin (DecentHolograms is the maintained pick) and Citizens for NPCs — both from the Plugins page |
| Nice to have | PlaceholderAPI for live holograms |
| Plan | Any |
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:
&6, &l, and so on), the same as most Minecraft plugins.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.
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.
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.
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.
/plugins; re-run /dh create where you're standing.%placeholder% — PlaceholderAPI or its expansion isn't loaded. See PlaceholderAPI./npc command add ... and check permissions.