How do I install CoreProtect and roll back griefing?

CoreProtect keeps track of who did what, and when, to every block, every chest and every bucket. That lets you see who wrecked a base and roll it back without restoring an entire backup. On an SMP with friends it's the most important admin plugin there is.

Installing

1. Open the plugin library in your panel and install CoreProtect, or upload the jar file to the plugins folder. See installing a plugin.
2. Restart the server. CoreProtect creates the plugins/CoreProtect folder with a database.
3. Give yourself or your moderators the permissions. As an op you have everything; with LuckPerms you grant coreprotect.inspect and coreprotect.rollback.

CoreProtect works on Paper, Purpur and Spigot. A standard 5 GB server needs no extra RAM for it; the database does grow on disk, see the bottom of this page.

Seeing who did something: /co inspect

/co inspect

Type the command and then left-click a block to see who placed or broke it, or right-click the spot where a block used to be. On chests you see who took what out. Type the command again to turn inspection mode off. Handy: /co lookup u:Name t:3h gives you everything a player did in the past three hours.

Rolling back: /co rollback

/co rollback u:Name t:2h r:30

• u: the player whose actions you're rolling back.
• t: how far back: 2h is two hours, 3d three days, 30m thirty minutes.
• r: the radius in blocks around where you're standing. Use r:#global for the whole world, but be careful with that.

Examples: /co rollback u:Piet t:1d r:50 rolls back everything Piet did within fifty blocks over the past day. /co rollback t:15m r:10 without a player rolls back all changes nearby from the last fifteen minutes, for example after a creeper explosion.

Undoing: /co restore

Rolled back too much? /co restore with the same parameters puts the changes back. /co undo also reverses the last rollback.

Only certain blocks

With b: you limit a rollback to certain blocks, with e: you exclude them. /co rollback u:Name t:2h r:30 b:tnt,lava only rolls back TNT and lava; e: works the other way round.

Limiting the database size

On a busy server the database can grow to gigabytes within weeks. In plugins/CoreProtect/config.yml, set the retention period to a few weeks, for example:

rollback-items: true
delete-old-data: true
max-days: 21

Then restart the server. Data older than 21 days is then cleaned up automatically. Separately from that, just keep making backups: CoreProtect rolls back actions, but it's no substitute for a backup if the world itself gets corrupted. See creating a backup.