Terminology
A glorified dictionary focused on Minecraft exploiting terms
This page serves as a dictionary if you need help understanding some terms.
Pay to Win
Most commonly referred to as P2W, pejorative term for a server that offers a significant advantage to paying over non-paying players. Most of the time, the server leaderboards are filled almost entirely with players who have spent money on the server.
A common misconception is that we target all P2W Minecraft servers, that is not the case. We mostly target P2W gambling servers, which are explained below.
Potatao: Should I play on x minecraft server? It looks really cool!
Other Potatao: You could try playing it, though I've heard people say that it's P2W.
Pay-to-Win Gambling
A subset of Pay-to-Win Minecraft servers that combine traditional P2W mechanics with explicit or crate-style gambling elements. These are the kinds of servers where players buy in-game keys to open glorified in-game slot machines.
You can learn more about this in Our Mission
We don't like these servers.
Potatao: x Minecraft server has finally removed P2W Gambling!
Other Potatao: That's really nice to hear.
Dupe Exploit
An exploit that allows players to duplicate or create items infinitely, as seen in Getting Started.
Crash Exploit
An exploit that overloads or interrupts a server, causing it to shut down or become unresponsive.
Potatao: I just got disconnected from this server.
Other Potatao: Yeah, it just crashed.
Ghost items
Items that strictly exist in your client and not in the server, sometimes while dupe hunting you may trick your client into thinking it has a item which it doesnt, this is called a ghost item they are purely visual, cannot be turned into server acknowledged items and dissapear on any inventory update.
Potatao: Oh look I have duped so many items with packet delay
Other Potatao: No these are just ghost items, they dont really exist.
Lag
The noticeable effect of a server or client being slowed down or stuck processing something.
Lag is usually visible through players standing still or teleporting instead of moving smoothly, items not dropping, hits not registering, and similar behavior.
Potatao: Everybody is standing still and I’m not getting the items from the blocks I’m mining.
Other Potatao: The server is lagging.
Alt
Short for alternate account.
A secondary account used for exploits, ban evasion, automation, storage, or smurfing.
Hack Client
A modified Minecraft client that enables players to perform actions they normally shouldn’t be able to do, such as flying, teleporting, fighting with perfect accuracy, or taking no knockback.
Anti-Cheat
Software designed to detect and prevent players from performing actions they shouldn’t be able to do.
Anti-cheats range from simple movement checks to extremely invasive behavior analysis.
Paper
A commonly used, high-performance fork of Spigot, which itself is a fork of Bukkit, Paper is currently the most popular Minecraft server software.
It includes many built-in patches that optimize performance and fix bugs and exploits. This makes it harder to use dupes that work on Vanilla servers, though most Paper servers are exploited with installed plugins.
Vanilla
An unmodified client or server running the official Mojang software, which does not support plugins or mods. While Vanilla servers used to be some of the easiest to exploit (because Mojang is Mojang), they've actually done a fairly decent job at patching dupes in recent versions. Since then, finding dupes for Vanilla has become increasingly difficult.
Plugin
A server-side mod or add-on that adds new features or commands to a server. Plugins are written in Java (which Minecraft itself also runs on that too!).
Most features you see on multiplayer servers would not be possible without plugins.
Though most plugins contain small flaws that allow exploiters to dupe items, crash the server, or even grant themselves OP permissions.
Operator
Most commonly referred to as OP, this is the highest level of administrative privilege a player can have on a server, though they are pretty limited if the server uses a seperate permissions plugin to manage OP access.
Script kid
Most commonly referred to as a skid, this is a derogatory term for someone who tries to act skilled (they aren't) by using pre-made scripts or tools created by others, without understanding how they work.
Skids love pretending to be scary by dropping random "dox" information like "How's the weather in [city]?" after pasting an IP into ip-api.com.
They treat tools like nmap and msfconsole as some kind of ultimate hacking arsenal, often using them blindly from tutorials or some random ChatGPT clone.
In short: they're loud, unskilled, dangerous mostly to themselves, and couldn't name 5 Python libraries if their life depended on it.
Remote Access Trojan
Most commonly referred to as a RAT, this is a type of malware that disguises itself as something trustworthy (it reeeally isn't!)
to trick users into installing it. Most RATs are made in the form of mods, for example:
Hall of Shame - DupeToolkit.
As the name suggests, a RAT grants the attacker remote access to your system through a backdoor, allowing them to:
- Steal your email - which can be used to reset other accounts.
- Steal your payment information - including credit cards or crypto wallets
- Steal your passwords - via keyloggers or browser credential stealers
- Spy on you - webcam access, screenshots and again, keyloggers
- Download or delete files - they can hold your data for ransom
Potatao: I found this cool mod that lets me dupe on x Minecraft server.
Other Potatao: Don't! That mod is a RAT, you won't get a dupe from it!
Backdoor
A hidden piece of usually malicious code that allows unauthorized access or control by bypassing normal authentication.
There are 2 types of backdoors: Server backdoors and client backdoors.
A server backdoor is usually hidden inside a malicious plugin and allows attackers to run console commands, gain OP, or crash the server. These are relatively rare, but they do happen. Famous cases include 2B2T incidents where "helpful" plugins secretly backdoored the server, allowing some players to spawn items, reset parts of the world among other things.
Client backdoors are much more common, and are usually just called a RAT (see above). These are usually hidden in sketchy mods or executable files.
Potatao: I've found x plugin for free on piracy website
Other Potatao: Don't download that! They're probably backdoored, and your server would get ruined.