FancyNpcs

FancyNpcs is a server-side NPC plugin for Paper and Folia. It spawns characters that can look like any player or any mob, wear real armour, carry a coloured name above their head, and fire a command when someone clicks them. Everything is built with the /npc command while you are standing in the world, not in a config file, and because the plugin sends NPC data to connected clients as packets, nobody has to install anything to see the result.

What this Minecraft NPC plugin adds

The plugin covers the jobs most servers hand to NPCs. A greeter at spawn, a shop button, a warp selector, a quest giver that runs console commands. Each NPC is a saved entry with a name you pick once and edit later, so rebuilding spawn does not mean recreating the whole cast.

• Type: any entity the game supports, so an NPC can be a player model, a cow, a pig, a zombie, or anything else.
• Skins from a player username, a UUID, an image URL, or a PNG file dropped into the plugins/FancyNpcs/skins folder. The @mirror value shows every player their own skin.
• Display names with MiniMessage formatting, plus PlaceholderAPI and MiniPlaceholders values when those plugins are installed.
• Equipment across all six slots, covering helmet, chestplate, leggings, boots, main hand, and offhand.
• Glowing outlines in any colour, adjustable scale, a collision toggle, and control over whether the NPC appears in the player list.
• Click actions that run console commands or send messages, ordered in a list you can reshuffle, with an interaction cooldown per NPC.

Server software it runs on

Paper and Folia are the supported targets, and forks built on the Paper API, such as Purpur and Pufferfish, are expected to work. Plain Spigot, Bukkit, and Sponge are not supported, and there is no Fabric or Forge build, so a modded server cannot load it. That one requirement is the thing to check before you download. If dropping a jar into a server is new to you, our walkthrough on installing plugins on a Minecraft server covers the whole sequence.

Release 2.11.0, published in June 2026, covers Minecraft 1.21.5 through 1.21.11 plus the 26.1.2 and 26.2 drops. A 2.11.0+372 beta build sits above it in the version list with the same game-version range, and a beta channel build is not what you want on a server players are using. Older releases reaching back to 1.19.3 are still listed if you run something older.

Installing FancyNpcs and the first commands

1. 1.Put the jar in your server's plugins folder and restart, then confirm it loaded by running /fancynpcs version.
2. 2.Stand where the character should go and run /npc create shopkeeper, swapping in whatever name you want.
3. 3.Give it a face with /npc skin shopkeeper Notch, or point the same command at a skin image URL.
4. 4.Set the floating label with /npc displayname shopkeeper Shopkeeper, wrapping it in MiniMessage tags when you want colour.
5. 5.Bind a click with /npc action shopkeeper any_click add console_command, followed by the command the server should run.
6. 6.Adjust placement with /npc move_here shopkeeper, /npc center shopkeeper, and /npc rotate shopkeeper.

Permissions and admin access

Every subcommand carries its own permission node under the fancynpcs.command.npc prefix, so fancynpcs.command.npc.create, fancynpcs.command.npc.skin, and fancynpcs.command.npc.remove can be handed out separately. Grouping them through LuckPerms is the usual way to let builders make NPCs without also letting them delete the ones already standing at spawn.

Setup walkthrough

Community walkthrough of FancyNpcs on a Paper server

Watch on YouTube