Daub is a plugin that lets your players draw pixel art on a live canvas inside Minecraft, with no resource pack and no client mods required. They open an easel, paint with their crosshair, then hang the finished piece on a wall as a real map or publish it straight to Discord. Setup takes about a minute and works out of the box.

NO RESOURCE PACK, NO MODS

The entire interface is just a Minecraft map. Daub composes the canvas and toolbar into an image every tick and pushes it to the player, so the vanilla client renders it like any normal map and has no idea it is a live app. Your players download nothing, and you host nothing. It simply works the moment they join.

PAINT WITH YOUR CROSSHAIR

Aim at the canvas and hold right-click to draw. Scroll the mouse wheel to size the brush, press Q to undo, press F to cycle tools. Aim is resolved server side from where the player is looking, so it is pixel accurate at any angle and at any distance. That is the whole learning curve.

A FULL TOOLBAR, IN GAME

Daub ships a real paint toolbar rendered onto its own map panel: pen, eraser, line, rectangle, ellipse, fill, eyedropper, a filled-shape toggle, a brush slider, undo, redo, clear, and a 24 colour palette. Every control is clickable with the crosshair. Switch the whole look with a click on the wordmark.

HANG YOUR ART

Export a painting to real maps and put it on the wall of a build, a shop, or a community gallery. Export at full size as a map wall (one map per tile) or merged onto a single map. Exported art is stored, so it survives a server restart.

PUBLISH TO DISCORD

Let players post their creations to a Discord channel with one command. Point Daub at a webhook URL in the config, and /daub publish sends the painting as a clean embed. Perfect for community art events and showcases.

PERFORMANCE

Daub only recomputes its render when something actually changes, so an open but idle easel costs almost nothing on the server thread. The toolbar is cached and the canvas is diffed per tile, so map packets only fire when pixels really change. Heavy work like saving and publishing runs off the main thread.

SAVES THAT SURVIVE RESTARTS

Player save slots and exported wall art are kept in a database so nothing is lost on restart. SQLite works out of the box with zero setup, and H2 or MySQL are one config line away. Easels float on invisible frames and place no blocks, so nothing gets griefed or left behind, and they auto pack up when a player walks away.

REQUIREMENTS

• Paper 1.21.4 or newer - one build runs through 1.21.11. Built for Paper; it does not run on Spigot, CraftBukkit, Folia or Velocity.

• Java 21 or newer.

• No resource pack and no client mods.

COMMANDS

/daub open [1|2|3] open an easel, /daub close put it away, /daub save <name>, /daub load <name>, /daub saves, /daub delete <name>, /daub export [single] <name>, /daub publish [name], /daub color <#hex>, /daub brush <1-24>, /daub theme <name>, and /daub reload for admins. Tab completion is wired for everything.

PERMISSIONS

Everything defaults to on for players except the admin reload, so it works right away. Gate drawing, saving, exporting and publishing separately with daub.open, daub.save, daub.export and daub.publish, use daub.admin for reload, or daub.* to grant it all.