The basics

How Minecraft prison servers work

A Minecraft prison server is a mining and rankup loop. You spawn inside a prison with a wooden pickaxe, mine the blocks in the mine you have access to, sell what you mined, and use the money to buy access to a better mine. That is the whole spine, and every prison server on earth is a variation on it.

The five parts

• The mine. A cuboid of ore that regenerates on a timer or when it hits a percentage mined. Mines are named A through Z, and each one holds more valuable blocks than the last.
• Selling. Usually /sell all, a sell chest, or a sell wand. The price per block is the number that governs the entire economy, so it is the first thing worth checking on a new server.
• Rankup. /rankup spends your balance to move from mine A to B, and so on. The cost curve is the difficulty setting: a linear curve expects you to play, a steep one expects you to buy.
• The plot world. Land you claim with /plot auto or similar, for storage, shops and building. On older servers this is where the community actually lives.
• PvP warps. Optional combat zones, often with their own drop rules. On classic prison this is the endgame; on OP prison it is usually vestigial because gear gaps are too large.

What happens after Z

Reaching mine Z used to be the end. On modern servers it is the halfway point, and what comes next is prestige, rebirth or both. See ranks, prestige and rebirths.

The first fifteen minutes on any prison server

1. Run /warp mine or /mine and confirm the mine you can access actually resets.
2. Mine a full inventory, sell it, and note the figure.
3. Check /rankup cost against that figure. That ratio is the server's pacing.
4. Time the A to B rankup, then B to C. If C takes four times as long as B, you have found the wall the store exists to sell you past.
5. Check whether a free rank exists. Several servers, including our number one at play.talonmc.net, grant one with /freerank on first join.

Common commands

Not standardised, but these work on most prison servers: /rankup, /prestige, /sell all, /pv or /backpack for extra storage, /warp pvp, /plot auto, /pickaxe or /enchant for the pickaxe menu, /gang, /crate or /keys, and /token or /tokens.

Next in the prison wiki

• Prison ranks, prestige and rebirths explained A to Z is the tutorial. Prestige resets your rank for a multiplier, rebirth resets your prestige for a bigger one, and that loop is the real game.
• Prison pickaxe enchants: what each family actually does Custom prison enchants fall into four families: block breaking, money, utility and proc-chaining. Knowing which is which tells you where to spend.
• Prison economies: sell prices, multipliers and inflation Every prison economy is one ratio, sell price against rankup cost, and one failure mode, multiplier inflation with no sink.
• Prison PvP: warps, drop rules and combat versions Prison PvP lives at dedicated warps with their own drop rules, and the combat version the server runs decides how it feels.