Rarities
Every server owner knows the feeling: a player picks up a legendary blade and the chat barely reacts because everything looks the same. Rarities fixes that in seconds. This lightweight add-on reads your server's config and displays each item's rarity with a custom color of your choosing, turning ordinary loot into something players actually notice.
What Rarities Does for Your Server
At its core, Rarities is a display and configuration tool. It checks the rarity assigned to an item in your config file and renders that item's name in the matching color. If an item has no rarity specified, it simply defaults to Common, so nothing breaks and no item is left unlabeled. That default behavior matters: you can roll the add-on out gradually, tagging only your most important gear first and filling in the rest later.
The real selling point is flexibility. You decide which colors map to which tiers, which means your rarity scheme can match your server's existing theme instead of forcing you to redesign around a preset palette. Whether you run a survival world, a skyblock network, or a heavily modded RPG-style server, the color logic stays entirely under your control.
Live Reloading with /rarities reload
Nothing is more frustrating than editing a config and then restarting the entire server just to see the change. Rarities avoids that entirely with a simple command: /rarities reload. Run it and your updated config applies immediately, no downtime, no player disconnects, no waiting.
This makes balancing sessions painless. You can test a new color for your epic tier, see how it reads in chat and tooltips, tweak the hex value, and reload again, all while players are online. For staff teams that iterate quickly, that single command saves hours over the course of a season.
Why the Default-to-Common Behavior Helps
- New items added by other plugins or datapacks never appear broken or colorless.
- You can introduce rarity tiers in phases without a full config rewrite.
- Players always see a consistent, readable item name, even for untagged loot.
- Server admins avoid the "why is this item blank" support tickets entirely.
Supported Versions and Loaders
Rarities is built for modern Minecraft, with support spanning the widely used 1.16 through 1.21 release lines, including the popular 1.20.x and 1.21.x branches where most active servers now live. It runs on both Paper and Spigot, so if your network is already built on either of those server platforms, you can drop it in without changing your stack. Bukkit-based setups generally work as well, though Paper is recommended for the smoothest performance.
If you manage a mixed network, keep in mind that each server instance needs its own config file. Rarities reads locally, so a shared config across a proxy setup will not behave the way you might expect. Copy your tuned file to each backend server instead.
How to Install Rarities
Getting started takes only a few minutes. Here is the standard process:
- Download Rarities for Minecraft from the official project page and confirm the file matches your server version.
- Stop your server, then place the jar file into the
pluginsfolder. - Start the server once to generate the default configuration files.
- Open the config and assign colors to your rarity tiers using standard color codes or hex values.
- Save the file and run
/rarities reloadto apply changes without a restart.
For anyone who prefers a faster route, the foxygame.net launcher bundles Rarities directly into its add-on catalog, letting you install it with a single click and keep it current through automatic updates. That approach sidesteps manual jar management entirely, which is a genuine convenience when you are running several servers at once.
Tips for a Clean Rarity Scheme
Resist the urge to use every color at once. A tight palette of four to six tiers reads far better than a rainbow, and it helps players learn your server's hierarchy at a glance. Reserve your brightest, most saturated color for the rarest tier so it genuinely stands out, and keep Common understated. Test your choices in both light and dark chat backgrounds, since some colors that look great in a config editor become unreadable in-game.
Final Thoughts
Rarities is one of those small additions that quietly improves the whole feel of a server. It costs almost nothing in performance, respects your existing setup, and gives players a clear visual language for loot. Between the custom color options, the sensible Common default, and the instant /rarities reload command, it earns its place in any plugin folder. Download Rarities, spend ten minutes on your config, and let your best items finally look the part.