Choosing a Minecraft Crates Plugin

What actually matters when choosing

A crates plugin sits in the busiest part of your server: it hands out the items players paid or voted for, it plays an animation in front of everyone at spawn, and it gets opened hundreds of times a day. A chest bursting open with particles looks great in every store page GIF — the differences that matter only show up later, when you are balancing odds across six key tiers or watching tick times dip while ten players open crates at once. Before comparing specific plugins, free or paid, fix the checklist.

• Reward system depth — Weighted chances, one-time-only rewards, duplicate prevention within a single opening, linked rewards, and command execution are what separate a loot table you can balance from a flat item list.
• Key handling — Physical keys are items players can hold, trade, and lose, while virtual keys live in storage — make sure the plugin supports the model your economy needs, ideally both.
• How animations are rendered — Animations built from real entities cost main-thread tick time, while packet-based animations are sent straight to clients without the server processing them — ask which approach a plugin uses before putting a crate at spawn.
• Editing workflow — Hand-editing YAML for fifty rewards is slow and error-prone; an in-game editor that saves changes live, with no reload or restart, changes how often you will actually tune your crates.
• Version range, dependencies, and resource packs — Check that the plugin covers your exact server version and what else it makes you install — required libraries and client-side resource packs are part of the real cost of adoption.
• Integrations — If you run ItemsAdder, Oraxen, or similar custom-item plugins, rewards need to flow through them natively, and PlaceholderAPI support keeps crate stats visible on scoreboards and tab.

The free options are genuinely good

Crates are one of the oldest plugin categories in Minecraft, and the free end of it is mature — for many servers a free plugin is the right answer, and we would rather say that plainly than pretend otherwise. CrazyCrates is free, distributed on Modrinth and SpigotMC, and offers unlimited crates with 11 crate types, including both physical and virtual crates and keys; note that current builds target Paper servers. ExcellentCrates is likewise free on SpigotMC and covers a lot of ground you might expect to pay for: an in-game GUI editor for crates, rewards, and keys, physical and virtual keys, custom-item support for plugins like ItemsAdder, Oraxen, Nexo, and MMOItems, built-in holograms, reward limits, and milestone rewards. CrateReloaded takes the freemium route: a free Mystery Crate edition on SpigotMC, listed for 1.8 through 1.20.x, with a separate premium edition sold alongside it.

So when is paying worth it? In our view, on three axes. Mechanics: whether a plugin models the exact crate loop you want — say, crates discovered through mining in survival, or a specific animation style — rather than a close approximation. Tooling: editors, animation creators, and pre-built content that turn an evening of YAML into minutes of clicking. And rendering: how animations behave once dozens of players open crates simultaneously. Run the free options against those three axes first; if they cover you, keep your money. The split is similar to the one we describe for chat plugins in LPC Free vs LPC Pro — free covers the core loop, paid buys depth and tooling.

Our three crates plugins, compared

We sell three crates plugins plus one add-on pack, and the three plugins are genuinely different products aimed at different servers — not three tiers of the same thing.

Advanced Crates is built around physical crates: stationary crate blocks players right-click to open (left-click to preview) and placeable lootbox crates, with keys in physical and virtual form, animated by 17 packet-based animations, plus five particle animation styles, that run async, off the main tick loop. It has an in-game editor — drop an item into a GUI to add it as a reward, build crates from scratch, edit any config live with no restart — plus permission-tiered reward rerolling and three animation visibility modes (everyone, opener-only, or proximity-based). It runs standalone with zero required dependencies and supports Spigot and Paper 1.8 through 26.2 at €19.99 (price at time of writing).

InfiniteCrates is the newer plugin, built around the /crates virtual crate selector and resource-pack crate models. Players run /crates and open any crate they hold keys for from anywhere — no walking to a block, though stationary and lootbox crates are still supported. It ships 26 crate models, 7 key models, 4 GUI textures, and 25 GUI animations, all included, plus built-in holograms so no separate hologram plugin is needed. It supports Spigot and Paper 1.20.6 through 26.2 at €21.99 (price at time of writing). One honest caveat: the crate model animations need the bundled texture pack applied on the client; the textures themselves are included free. Advanced Crates and InfiniteCrates share the same async, packet-based performance core; the difference is design philosophy, physical-first versus virtual-first.

SpecializedCrates is the one for servers that want to build their own animations. It ships 25 crate animations plus a config-driven builder for creating new ones without programming, and 8 particle animations for placed crates. Its lucky chests appear when players mine the blocks you configure — a natural fit for prison servers — and it adds economy crates that cost money to open, NPC crates through Citizens, guaranteed and fallback rewards, and virtual keys players can hold and send without an item. Crate holograms need DecentHolograms or CMI. It supports Spigot and Paper 1.8 through 26.2 at €12.99 (price at time of writing).

Which one should you actually get?

Match the plugin to the server, not the other way around — including the case where the right plugin is not one of ours.

• A free plugin is enough if… — You need a handful of key tiers, standard opening animations, and rewards handed out by a vote or store plugin — CrazyCrates or ExcellentCrates will do that well at zero cost.
• Advanced Crates if… — You want physical crates at spawn on anything from 1.8 to 26.2, with packet-based particle animations, configurable animation visibility, tiered rerolls, and no dependencies to babysit.
• InfiniteCrates if… — Your server runs 1.20.6 or newer and you want the modern loop — /crates openable from anywhere, 26 resource-pack crate models, GUI animations, and built-in holograms — and applying the included texture pack is acceptable for your players.
• SpecializedCrates if… — You want to design your own crate animations from configuration, or want lucky chests that players find while mining — prison servers especially — with NPC crates and guaranteed or fallback rewards on top.

The Crates & Keys Pack: skip the tier setup

If you do go with Advanced Crates, the slow part is not installation — it is designing key tiers: naming them, theming them, and balancing reward pools so a Legendary drop actually feels legendary. The Crates & Keys Pack is a €9.99 add-on (price at time of writing) that ships 50+ pre-configured keys on a six-tier ladder — Common, Uncommon, Rare, Epic, Legendary, Mythic — plus seasonal and event keys, each with themed, rarity-weighted loot tables.

It is plug-and-play: drop the pack folder into your Advanced Crates config directory and reload — no restart. Every key is a normal Advanced Crates config file you can keep, edit or delete, and the tier ladder is designed to map onto common progression hooks like first login, voting, playtime, and store purchases. One clear limitation: it is an add-on for Advanced Crates only — it does not work with InfiniteCrates or SpecializedCrates, whose reward and animation architectures are different.

Sources

• CrazyCrates on Modrinth — accessed Jul 17, 2026
• CrazyCrates on SpigotMC — accessed Jul 17, 2026
• Crazy-Crew/CrazyCrates on GitHub — accessed Jul 17, 2026
• ExcellentCrates on SpigotMC — accessed Jul 17, 2026
• Crate Reloaded (free edition) on SpigotMC — accessed Jul 17, 2026
• CrateReloaded documentation (Hazebyte) — accessed Jul 17, 2026