Marcelektro2 min readA leaderboard system is a must-have if you plan to make your game a little more competitive, or just want to keep the high scores visible to the players. However, often times such system could seem difficult to implement, given the design must be optimized, light on the CPU and I/O, and also functional to cover the entire game and player demands.
When developing marCloudMC, we ran into the same problem. We needed something that's fast, and just works, and works well.
In the past we have used many different solutions, and all of them were missing something.
The first one we tried was LeaderHeads. A now unavailable (RIP) project that created such leaderboards based on PlaceholderAPI values. It worked very well and was super lightweight, but was limited to incremental values only. So for example, 'games won' would be counted nicely, but the max 'high score', not really. Especially for temporal boards like daily/weekly/etc, this required a specialized solution.
Then, we tried ajLeaderboards since LeaderHeads was no longer maintained and closed source. Created by a very nice developer, contributor of Bedwars1058, it implemented the features LeaderHeads had. While initially it worked well, over time the database growed in size, and sometimes caused OOM errors due to not closed database connections. This could be a me problem, but since I always wanted more features, I decided to build my own.
A few years later, when I finally was in the mood to create it, I built marCloudMC Leaderboards — a super lightweight plugin that had the full coverage of all earlier mentioned projects, except it's schema design and plugin implementation were made with near-zero overhead in mind. Today is the day I finished it, which is why I'm posting this blog post right now.
Here's where I needed the temporal high score feature for:
marCloudMC lobby parkour temporal leadearboard example:
It works well. So far. But if anything breaks, I can fix it myself.
If the system works well, I might publish the source code and the plugin to the public.
We live in the era of vibe coders who, if prompted well, could generate anything within hours. Selling a plugin in 2026 doesn't seem viable to me at all. Most of the people I know just send the description of an app to Claude and have it remake it. Unless I'm wrong, then please let me know if there's still any hope.
Anyway, hop on marcloud.net and get on top of the weekly leaderboard. You'll be rewarded with being displayed as last week's winner for the next week ^^
C you in game!
