Building Your Own Crate Animations with SpecializedCrates
By PM2, the developer behind these plugins ·
Most crate plugins give you a fixed list of animations. SpecializedCrates ships 25 of them and then hands you the format they are written in, so a new animation is a config entry rather than a Java plugin. This guide covers what the builder can describe, how to test an animation with the in-game editor and the /scrates commands, and the crate types that will play it.
What ships in the box
SpecializedCrates ships 25 crate animations, each a distinct sequence rather than a recolour of the same one, and 8 particle animations that placed crates can run while they wait to be opened. It supports Spigot and Paper 1.8 through 26.2 and costs €12.99 (price at time of writing) as a one-time purchase with free lifetime updates. The plugin runs on its own; crate holograms need DecentHolograms or CMI, NPC crates need Citizens v2, and the placeholders need PlaceholderAPI.
The documentation lists every option the animation files accept. This guide is about the workflow: how to go from an idea to an animation players see, without opening an IDE.
How the builder works
Animations are defined in the configuration files, so creating one means describing it in config rather than writing code. The practical way in is to start from one of the 25 built-in animations that is closest to what you want, copy its entry under a new name, and change one thing at a time. Because every setting is a config value, an animation you build is versioned, diffed and backed up like the rest of your server configuration.
If the builder is missing a setting your idea needs, the documented answer is to open a ticket on Discord and the option gets added; the builder has grown that way. Keep ideas concrete when you ask: what should move, in what order, for how long.
Testing in the in-game editor
Every crate setting can be edited in-game through a GUI, and that is where you attach an animation to a crate and try it. The loop is short: edit, reload, open, check the error list.
- /scrates edit <crate> — Opens the editor for a crate; change any setting, including which animation it plays, from the GUI.
- /scrates reload — Reloads the configuration so a freshly written animation entry is picked up.
- /scrates open <crate> and /scrates forceOpen <crate> <player|all> — Open the crate for yourself, or force an opening for one player or everyone, to watch the animation from different angles.
- /scrates errors — Lists every crate error in-game, which is the first place to look when a new animation does not play.
- /scrates toggleParticles — Switches the idle particle animations on and off while you judge the opening animation on its own.
Particle effects while crates wait
A placed crate can run one of 8 particle animations while it waits to be opened, chosen per crate. This is a separate layer from the opening animation, so a custom opening can pair with any idle style, and staff can toggle the idle particles server-wide with /scrates toggleParticles when they get in the way of a build.
The crate types that will play your animation
An animation is attached to a crate, and SpecializedCrates has more ways to hand a crate to a player than the classic key-and-block combination. Keys and crates exist in physical and virtual form, so a player can hold and send keys without an item in the inventory.
| Crate type | How players get it | Commands involved |
|---|---|---|
| Key-and-block crate | Right-click a placed crate with a key | /scrates setcrate, /scrates spawnCrate <crate> <world> <x> <y> <z>, /scrates giveKey |
| Lucky / miner chest | Appears while mining the blocks you configure; suits prison servers | /scrates luckyChest to switch the feature on and off |
| Economy crate | Pay money to open the crate | Set up in the crate editor |
| NPC crate | Open the crate through a Citizens NPC | Citizens v2 required |
| Virtual crate | Open from the virtual crates menu with a virtual key | /scrates giveKey ... -v, /scrates virtualkeys, /scrates virtualCrates, /scrates claim |
Rewards: guaranteed, fallback and history
Rewards can be guaranteed so every opening hands them out, and any reward can carry a fallback for players who already own it, so a rank reward falls back to something else instead of being wasted. Items from ItemsAdder, Oraxen, AdvancedEnchantments, MMOItems and Head Database work as rewards with their NBT tags, saved from your inventory straight into the configuration file. Players collect pending rewards from the /scrates claim menu, and /scrates listHistory shows the crate history of an online player when someone disputes what they won.
Placeholders and permissions
Everything runs under /scrates, with specializedcrates.admin covering all of it and per-command nodes such as specializedcrates.config, .give, .history, .listcrates, .info, .luckychestcommand, .virtualcrates, .claim and .virtualkeys (with .other and .send) for staff roles. PlaceholderAPI exposes cooldowns, virtual key counts and last-opened information, for example %specializedcrates_cooldown_<crate>%, %specializedcrates_virtual_keys_<crate>% and %specializedcrates_last_reward_<crate>%, so scoreboards and holograms can show what your custom animation just paid out.
Where it sits next to Advanced Crates
Both are crate plugins from the same author. Advanced Crates renders its 17 animations with packets on a separate thread and needs no dependencies. SpecializedCrates has 25 animations plus the config-driven builder for your own, lucky chests found while mining, NPC crates, economy crates and guaranteed or fallback rewards. If the animation you want does not exist yet and you would rather build it than request it, this is the one; the crates hub and the crates comparison cover the rest of the decision.