Do not grief
Griefing is breaking, flooding, lava-casting, TNT-ing or otherwise wrecking someone else’s work without a clear yes. “It was a prank” is not a defence if the other person cannot undo it in five minutes. On hardcore SMPs a single wither at spawn has ended a season. If the world allows PvP or raiding, it should say so out loud, in the rules, before you log in. Silence means leave their base alone.
Do not steal
A chest you did not place is not a communal chest. Farms you did not build are not your shops. Taking “a few” diamonds from an unlocked storage room is how unlocked storage rooms become locked, and then become banned. If a world wants a public mine or a food chest at spawn, someone will label it.
Cheats stay in your own world
X-ray texture packs, duping, kill auras, freecam through claimed land, and stolen accounts wreck a survival economy. Using them in single-player is your business. Bringing them to a server that did not ask is a ban, and sometimes a hardware ban. Creative mode on a survival world, “just to fix one thing”, is the same category unless an operator asked you to.
Land, chat, farms, credit
- Claims. If the server has a claim tool, use it. Building in a marked plot, or at spawn because the view is nice, is how you get rolled back.
- Chat. No slurs, no sexual talk at minors, no doxxing, no spam, no advertising your own server in someone else’s. Screenshot and report. Do not start a second pile-on.
- Farms and redstone. A clock that keeps a chunk loaded, a wither farm next to spawn, or a zero-tick contraption on a tired server is a staff ticket with your name on it. Ask before you light it. How the machines work is the redstone page; whether you may run them is this one.
- Credit. A schematic, a build tutorial, a skin or a mod is still someone else’s work if you only changed the signs. Say where it came from.
Small worlds should write the local version of this list before they need it. That is Realms and small SMPs. The licence underneath all of it is the EULA.