SableCraft Standards

SableCraft Standards — the essentials, done properly

Do you have Standards?

Every server command you end up needing, and an economy other mods can drive. /fly, /god, /home, /warp, /tpa, /back, /top, /kit, /vanish, /invsee, mail, mutes, bans — the set every server installs something for, built once and built to be used by other mods rather than merely alongside them.

Your players do not need to install anything. Every command works for an unmodified client off the Mojang launcher: no client mod, no resource pack, nothing to download. The networking channel exists and is deliberately empty.

---

Yet another essentials mod?

Yes. That is the joke in the name — see xkcd 927 — but it exists for two specific, fixable complaints:

• FTB Essentials has no /top.
• Both it and EssentialsX make /fly and /god pure toggles, with no explicit on or off.

That second one is not a nitpick. A toggle cannot be driven from a command block, a datapack or another mod's skill: a spell that wants flight on for twenty seconds and off afterwards has to guess, and gets it wrong half the time — grounding the player mid-air. So every switch here takes on / off / toggle, with or without a target:

/fly            /fly on            /fly @a on
/god Steve      /god Steve off

A human typing /fly still gets a toggle. Everything else gets an answer it can rely on. The whole mod follows from taking those two complaints seriously.

A few that are not what you expect

• /top scans, it does not read the heightmap — so it works in the Nether and from inside a cave, and it stops at a bedrock box rather than blaming you for the shape of the world.
• /tpa narrates itself at both ends. With a warmup set, the requester gets a ticking action-bar countdown the moment they are accepted; the acceptor is told when they arrive, or why they did not. Prompts carry clickable [Accept] / [Deny] buttons that work on a vanilla client. The classic bug this fixes: five seconds of nothing observable, so both people re-run the command.
• /back is a stack, not a bookmark. Every teleport pushes an entry; /back <n> reaches further, and /back list shows what is actually on it — with the distance and the command that made each stop. Other mods' teleports are labelled too, without those mods doing anything.
• /vanish genuinely hides you — unpaired from other players' entity trackers, off the tab list, ignored by mob AI. Not a packet trick. Item pickup is suppressed by default, because an arrow vanishing with nobody standing there gives you away as surely as being seen.
• /pay takes a reason — /pay Steve 500 half of what we dug — carried into the mailbox if they are offline, so a payment made on Tuesday still explains itself on Friday.
• Portable workbenches are denied to everyone by default, operators included. That is the design: a crafting table you can open anywhere is an ability to be granted, not a utility to assume.

The systems underneath

Economy	A built-in ledger, and a provider API so a dedicated economy mod displaces it without either side knowing the other exists. Balances live in save data, so /eco give works on a sleeping player and /baltop answers about everyone.
Homes, warps and spawn	Per-player home limits by permission node, named warps, a server spawn, safe-landing searches that will not drop you in lava or drown you.
Teleports	Warmups with a live countdown, cooldowns, cancel-on-damage, cancel-on-move — all of it available to other mods, so anything that teleports a player inherits the lot.
Groups	A lightweight built-in group system — shared homes, chat tags, group teleports — and a seam other mods register into, so a faction and a party can coexist without either arbitrating.
Chat	Name decorators contributed by several mods at once and ordered by closeness to the name, plus a channel router that cannot be used to sidestep a mute.
Kits	/setkit <name> armour|hotbar|inventory|all captures what you are wearing and carrying — kits are made by equipping yourself, not by writing item ids into a file.
Moderation	Mutes, temp-mutes, bans, temp-bans with the reason shown on reconnect, /invsee, /socialspy, /ignore that actually hides public chat.
Away	/afk by command and by timer, cleared by moving or speaking — including in another mod's chat channel.

Every string is yours

Everything a player can see lives in config/standards/messages.yml, written on first run. Not vanilla translation keys — a stock client does not carry our lang file and would see raw keys — so this is resolved server-side and works everywhere.

{term.*} keys re-skin vocabulary wholesale: set term.balance to credits and every message that mentions money follows, without editing a hundred lines. & colour codes work throughout, including &#RRGGBB hex.

The welcome message knows who it is greeting. /motd, /rules and /info take {player} (their nickname if they have one), {name}, {rank}, {playtime}, {world}, {online} and {max}:

msg.motd.1: "&7Welcome back, &f{player}&7. You are &f{rank}&7."
msg.motd.2: "&7{online} of {max} online. You have played for {playtime}."

A placeholder that does not exist is reported in the server log rather than shown to a player, so a typo is findable instead of embarrassing.

Upgrades keep your edits. New keys are appended under a heading so "what is new in this version" is answerable by scrolling to the bottom, and a message you have not edited is quietly updated to the current wording while anything you have touched is left exactly alone.

Permissions, and one thing to know first

Standards uses NeoForge's own PermissionAPI, which means LuckPerms works out of the box — and so does having no permissions mod at all. Verified both ways: a fresh server with nothing installed gives ordinary players the everyone-commands and operators the op-gated ones, and a LuckPerms grant applies live without a restart.

Every gate is a node, never a hardcoded op check, so a donor rank can have ten homes and a builder rank can have standards.craft without anybody being handed /stop.

And now you can grant them without installing anything

With no permissions mod, NeoForge answers every question with the node's own default — which means you cannot grant anybody anything. A trusted regular cannot have flight, a donor cannot have ten homes, and a builder cannot have /craft without being made an operator, which also hands them /stop.

So Standards ships a permission handler for exactly that server. One line in neoforge-server.toml:

permissionHandler = "standards:permissions"

and /rank appears:

/rank group donor create
/rank group donor set standards.home.limit.10 true
/rank group moderator parent add donor      inheritance
/rank user Steve group add donor            works offline
/rank check Steve standards.home.limit.10

Groups with inheritance, per-player grants, standards.* wildcards, an explicit deny that beats everything, and a default group everybody is in without being put there.

It is dormant unless you choose it. NeoForge decides which handler is active, not us — install LuckPerms and nothing here changes, and /rank is not even registered. If you outgrow this, install LuckPerms and change that one line back. No import, no export, nothing to migrate off.

It tells you why. Every hour lost to a permissions system is spent asking why a player has something, and yes-or-no cannot answer that:

> /rank check Steve standards.home.others
  standards.home.others = yes (from donor, via standards.home.*)
> /rank check Steve standards.god
  standards.god = no (nothing set — the node's own default)

That second line matters as much as the first. A bare "no" reads as a rule somebody wrote, and sends you looking for one that does not exist.

Its groups are also groups. Put somebody in moderator and they get their permission nodes, a chat tag, and visibility to every other mod on the server — one edit, no second list to keep in sync. LuckPerms cannot do that half: its groups are a permissions concept, and nothing else on the server can ask about them. That is why this exists rather than being a smaller copy of LuckPerms.

What it deliberately does not have: per-world contexts, temporary nodes, tracks, weights, SQL backends, a web editor. Chasing those loses — a half-built LuckPerms is worse than none, because it looks like it will keep up and then does not. This is enough to run a small server, and honest about it.

For other mods

Six seams, all soft dependencies — add a compileOnly and Standards can be absent at runtime:

API	For
api.economy	spending money, or being the economy
api.chat	name prefixes and suffixes from several mods at once; chat channels that respect mutes
api.groups	group membership by kind, "who owns this chunk", whether PvP is allowed there, and whether mobs may break blocks there. Standards' own permission ranks publish here too, as standards:role
api.PlayerSwitches / api.Stations	driving /fly, /god, /vanish and the workstations from code
api.combat	combat tagging, resolving who was really behind a hit, and whether one player may harm another at all
api.vanish	whether a player is hidden, so a mod drawing a nameplate or a health bar on them can take it down — a floating name over nobody gives a vanish away as completely as being seen

The switches API exists because a skill granting flight should not have to build a command string and hope: the skill is already the authority, so it calls in directly and skips the permission check that gates the typed command.

Combat tagging deserves a line of its own, because it is what stops /home being an escape hatch. Being hit by a player closes the escape routes while the tag lasts — and three rules make it behave:

• An attacker starts a tag, not damage. Fall, drowning, fire and freezing never tag anybody, which is what stops a player trapped by their own bad luck being sealed in by the very feature meant to protect them.
• Tags extend, they never overwrite. Twelve seconds of PvP then a zombie for eight is still twelve, or a shorter tag would rescue exactly the person fleeing.
• Pets are directional. Somebody's wolf biting you is them fighting you through a proxy; you hitting their wolf is not — so nobody can lock you in combat by shoving a pet in front of you.

And Harm.forbidden(a, b) answers whether one player may harm another at all, so a hostile skill — a curse, a snare, a summon — is refused for the same reasons a sword is. Player-on-player damage is gated centrally, so a mod that only deals damage needs no code whatever.

Factions ReForged is built entirely on these — claims, groups, chat and economy — and is the proof they work from the outside.

Requirements

Standards is built for three Minecraft lines. Take the jar that names your version — every file carries it, so standards-1.4.0+mc26.1.2.jar is the 26.1 one.

Minecraft	NeoForge	Java	Jar
1.21.11	21.11+	21	…+mc1.21.11.jar
26.1.x	26.1+	25	…+mc26.1.2.jar
26.2.x	26.2+	25	…+mc26.2.jar

⚠ 26.x needs Java 25, not 21. That is Minecraft's requirement rather than ours, and it is the one thing here that will stop a server booting — with an error that does not obviously say so. If you are moving up from 1.21.11, change the Java your server launches with at the same time.

Built and self-tested against NeoForge 21.11.42, 26.1.2.95 and 26.2.0.72. The floors above are what the jars actually declare, so a later build of the same line is fine.

Install on the server. That is all. No dependencies. Nothing for your players to install, and nothing that stops them joining from a stock client.

Credits and licence

MIT. All original work.

Inspired by Essentials / EssentialsX and FTB Essentials — read for intent, then built better. No code is taken from either.

By Sablednah. Source, issue tracker and full design notes on GitHub.