CoralPreserver

Build with living coral outside water without watching it turn into dead coral.

CoralPreserver is a lightweight, server-side Paper plugin that prevents living coral from automatically dying when placed outside water. It also provides an intentional and configurable way for players to obtain dead coral variants.

Features

Preserves every living coral variant outside water.
Supports coral plants, coral blocks, coral fans, and coral wall fans.
Uses BlockFadeEvent instead of repeatedly scanning the world.
Does not affect ice, snow, fire, turtle eggs, or other fading blocks.
Allows players to intentionally dry living coral.
Preserves wall-fan orientation and waterlogged state during conversion.
Includes configurable sounds, particles, tools, and tool consumption.
Provides a configuration reload command.
Requires no client-side installation.
Uses no NMS and has no required runtime dependencies.

Intentional coral drying

By default, a player can turn living coral into its matching dead variant by:

Holding a regular sponge.
Sneaking.
Right-clicking the living coral.

For example:

TUBE_CORAL_BLOCK becomes DEAD_TUBE_CORAL_BLOCK.
BRAIN_CORAL becomes DEAD_BRAIN_CORAL.
BUBBLE_CORAL_FAN becomes DEAD_BUBBLE_CORAL_FAN.
FIRE_CORAL_WALL_FAN becomes DEAD_FIRE_CORAL_WALL_FAN.

The sponge is not consumed by default. Server administrators can change this behavior in the configuration.

Configuration

preserve:
  enabled: true

drying:
  enabled: true
  require-sneak: true
  tool: "SPONGE"
  consume-tool: false
  play-sound: true
  sound: "BLOCK_SPONGE_ABSORB"
  show-particles: true

The drying tool can be replaced with any valid Bukkit material. Sounds, particles, tool consumption, and the sneak requirement can also be enabled or disabled independently.

After editing the configuration, run:

/coralpreserver reload

The command requires the coralpreserver.reload permission, which is granted to server operators by default.

Compatibility

Paper 1.21.8 through 26.2
Java 21+