How to Enable Skins on a Minecraft Server in 2023
Have you ever wondered how you can enable skins on your Minecraft server?
Enabling skins on Minecraft servers ensures a healthy player base, and keeps your server popular.
However, when newbies start their first Minecraft server can’t find the switch to turn on Minecraft skins and let players display their active skin.
So in this tutorial, we will explain to you step by step how you can enable skins on a Minecraft server for both offline and online servers.
Table of Contents
What are Minecraft Skins and who can use them
Minecraft skins are PNG images with special designs, which can be seen while playing on multiplayer servers.
When starting you will have the default skin “Steve” or “Alex”, however, you can always change your Minecraft skin.
You can choose to create your Minecraft skin, use an already made skin, or pay for a custom Minecraft skin. Each of these options is doable but can be time-consuming or costly.
To use a Minecraft skin, you will need to have the game purchased. When you have an original copy of Minecraft and not a pirated copy, you have a unique ID assigned to your account (UUID).
Mojang has assigned the UUID because the players can always change their Minecraft in-game name.
While the premium Minecraft users receive UUIDs, those who have a pirated version of the game cannot get a UUID assigned to them, and therefore cannot change their Minecraft skin.
It may sound disappointing, but if you play Minecraft in a single-player world, you can edit your skin file and play with any skin in the game.
If you try this on a multiplayer Minecraft server, it will not work, as others will not be able to see your skin.
However, offline Minecraft servers have started using Minecraft skin plugins, which let players choose any Minecraft skin and assign it to their username.
These skins can only be seen and used on the server they play, but if a player goes to another server, which offers a skin-supporting plugin, they can again change their skin.
Why are Minecraft skins not showing on an offline servers
Each server on Minecraft is connected and backed up by the Mojang API. These servers are also known as online Minecraft servers.
The Mojang API is used to communicate between the Mojang server and each server client. It helps protect your servers with authentications and shares information when a player joins.
When a player joins an online server, his UUID is being read and if it is legit, the server will display the account information, such as his Minecraft Name, UUID and skin applied.
While online servers work under the Mojang API for security purposes, offline Minecraft servers do not use it.
This lets players with cracked Minecraft clients join the server, without the need for authentication.
But since there is no authentication for those players, their skins will not be seen or applied to any server. While it may sound disturbing for your skin not to be seen, there are certain ways to fix this.
How to enable skins on your Minecraft server
Offline Minecraft servers may not seem a perfect solution for most server owners, due to security, but in most cases, it is better than using their API. I will explain this later.
So now you are looking for a way to enable skins on your Minecraft server and you need a quick way to do this.
It is no secret that Minecraft has a large repository of over 30,000 Minecraft skins in Spigot, and perhaps twice the amount created and sold by companies.
This leads us to the potential of Minecraft skin-restoring plugins, which let players enable skins on a Minecraft server.
One of the best skins for enabling skins on a Minecraft server is SkinsRestorer. It is regularly updated and is always up to date by our standards.
How to install SkinsRestorer
As usual, you will need to download the plugin from Spigot and once you have acquired the file, you can simply install the plugin on your Minecraft server.
1. Grab and drag the file to your plugins folder, then restart your Minecraft server.
2.Once the server has been completely restarted, you should notice that the plugin has a folder.
3. Make sure that everything is working fine, you can log back into your Minecraft server and type in /plugins to see if the plugin is listed in green.
Once you have verified that the plugin is working and you can enable skins on your Minecraft server, you can start using its commands.
Conclusion
Playing with skins on Minecraft and also Minecraft servers is a crucial part for every gamer. A skin can represent the person, or what character he likes.
In certain cases, it may be just a funny skin to joke around, but if Minecraft had no skins, things would never be as they are now.
Passionate about blogging, as well as playing games like Minecraft. Aside from working on MinecraftGuider, Rad also enjoys working on personalized SEO tips and strategies for small business owners. In his free time, Rad likes to join his Minecraft world and find peace, while stopping pillager raids.