Nova
Nova Anticheat is an open-source Minecraft 1.8 anti-cheat system built as a learning-oriented successor to Medusa, one of my most successful early anticheat projects. Nova provides newcomers with a clean, modular, and thread-safe foundation for understanding how anti-cheat systems operate under Minecraft’s internals. With production-quality reach detection and precision-focused architecture, Nova bridges the gap between educational resource and operational tool.
Why new anti-cheat developers fail
Most aspiring anti-cheat developers enter the field with enthusiasm but little guidance. They often copy existing code without understanding it, leading to bloated and fragile systems. A common pitfall is attempting to run detections asynchronously, which in Minecraft can lead to severe issues like corrupting world data or freezing server threads. Others build overly simplistic checks that rely on arbitrary values, resulting in either high false positives or undetected cheats. The lack of clean, well-structured open-source examples leaves newcomers without a reliable path forward.
How Nova aims to help industry newcomers
Nova was created to serve as both a reference and a launchpad. Its modular structure breaks detections into clear, self-contained components that are easy to understand and modify. Every system is written with clarity in mind, using safe defaults and documenting design choices along the way. Rather than hiding complexity, Nova exposes the core logic behind detections so developers can learn why a check works, not just that it does. It also demonstrates good plugin development practices, such as running logic on the correct thread and maintaining code readability.
Production stability
Although Nova is built for learning, it holds up in live environments. Every detection runs on the main server thread, avoiding dangerous asynchronous behavior that can destabilize a server. It avoids tampering with networking threads or unsafe data access patterns. Nova's checks are carefully tuned to avoid false positives while still catching common cheats, offering a safe and effective tool even on active servers. This makes it a rare example of an educational project that is also stable enough for real-world use.