Cascade is an experimental anti‑bot system designed for modern Minecraft proxy environments.
It is currently in beta and not recommended for production servers.
Unlike traditional anti-bot systems that perform heavy verification steps, introduce visible delays, or require players to complete challenges, Cascade takes a minimal and seamless approach. Its design focuses on intercepting and queueing connections with almost no overhead, allowing it to absorb sudden bursts of traffic—even 1000 bots joining at once—without causing legitimate players to wait more than 10 seconds to enter the server. This makes Cascade significantly lighter than most verification-based solutions while still providing strong protection for your backend.
Cascade inserts itself into the player's connection path before they reach your real server.
The flow looks like this:
- Client connects to the proxy
- Cascade intercepts the connection and redirects the player, while disabling Mojang authentication, to a lightweight limbo server
- The Cascade server queues the login request
- After the client queued, Cascade issues a transfer packet sending them to the real server
- If the client fails, the connection never reaches your backend
This approach blocks bots before they can join your lobby or overload your backend or your proxy with authentication requests.
Place the Cascade plugin JAR into your proxy’s plugins/ folder.
If you want to run the Cascade verification server separately, set:
cascade = "127.0.0.1:<port>"If running separately:
java -jar server.jar <port>