Beat You to It

The Game

Beat You to It (BYTI) is a team-based point-race minigame for Paper servers. Teams compete to be the first to legitimately obtain a series of randomly-drawn "targets" — items, enchantments, potions, structures, advancements, and mob/boss kills — spread across 10 difficulty tiers worth 1 to 50 points each. First team to reach the custom point goal wins.

Every tier always has exactly one active target. The moment any team obtains it, through crafting, mining, looting, smelting, trading, or killing (no /give, no creative mode), that team scores the tier's points, and a new random target is immediately drawn for that same tier. The board is always changing, and there's always something new to chase.

Why play it?

• Turns a normal survival world into a structured competitive game without needing a custom map, datapack, or separate minigame server — drop it into an existing world and go.
• Massive built-in target pool. The bundled list covers roughly 1,700+ items, enchantments, potions, structures, advancements, and mob/boss kills, fully editable in a plain CSV file if you want to add, remove, or re-balance anything.
• Built for actual family/friend group play, not just solo testing. Custom team names, unlimited team count and size, a solo free-for-all shortcut (/byti soloteams), and a vote-to-skip system for when a target turns out to be unreasonable.
• Clear, always-on information. A sidebar and Tab-list view show every tier's current target at a glance, color-coded and letter-tagged by type (kill/enchantment/potion/structure/advancement), hidden until the game actually starts so nobody can scout ahead.
• In-game help that doesn't require memorizing anything. Run /byti for a clickable command menu, or /byti info for a full plain-English explanation of how the game works.

Things to know

• This is a Paper plugin, not a Bukkit/Spigot plugin, and not a datapack. It relies on modern Paper-specific APIs (chat component rendering, registry lookups, scoreboard number formatting) that do not exist on plain Bukkit or Spigot — installing it there will fail to load. It works on Paper and Paper-based forks (e.g. Purpur).
• Built and tested against Minecraft 26.2. It may or may not work on other versions depending on what changed in Paper's API between releases — check the version compatibility list on this page before installing on something else.
• No permission nodes are enforced yet. Every /byti command (including team management and starting/resetting the game) is currently usable by any player, not just server operators. This is fine for a private server among people you trust, but if that's not your setup, be aware admin-level actions aren't gated yet. However, some gate-keeping has been guilt into prevent someone from ruining the game.
• The target list is a live, editable file, not hardcoded — targets.csv in the plugin's data folder — so you can tune point values or add/remove targets to fit your own server without needing a new build.

Commands

Run /byti in-game for the full, up-to-date, clickable command menu (organized into Game, Teams, Display, and Skip-Voting sections), or /byti info for the complete rules explanation. Both are kept current inside the plugin itself rather than duplicated here, so they can't drift out of sync with what's actually installed.

Compatibility summary

• Server software: Paper and Paper-based forks only (not Bukkit, not Spigot, not Vanilla)
• Minecraft version: 26.2 (see the Versions tab for what's actually been published)
• Java version: requires the JDK version Paper 26.2 itself requires to build/run

Feedback and issues

This plugin was built iteratively based on real playtesting feedback, and the target list in particular is expected to need ongoing tuning as more of the ~1,700 entries get tested in actual play. If you find a target that's misclassified, a naming mismatch that fails validation on startup, or a display/gameplay bug, reports are welcome.

Credits

Beat You to It builds on the idea of a plugin I played years ago called First to Find. I can’t seem to find any info about it now, but thank you to whoever it was who created it.