Improvements.md

EssentialsX is a continuation of the original Essentials plugin, which was discontinued around 2014. EssentialsX supports all the same features as classic Essentials, and also contains notable improvements over the original Essentials.

This page aims to detail many of the improvements added by EssentialsX. For a more detailed list of changes between EssentialsX releases, see the release changelogs.

Highlights

• Actively maintained and updated for modern Minecraft and Spigot versions, from 1.8.8 to the latest versions.
  • Supports new Minecraft content including new items, enchantments, mobs and trees.
  • Updates Essentials signs to work on all supported Minecraft versions.
  • Supports mob spawners on all supported Minecraft versions.
    • On 1.8-1.12, you can use spawner signs and commands such as /i mob_spawner:51, and the spawners will be updated when placed.
    • On 1.13+, you can use /i blazespawner to spawn in spawners.
• Includes new features in base EssentialsX such as [[BannerMeta|Banner Metadata]] for kits, [[Command-Cooldowns|Command Cooldowns]] and dozens of other new config options.
• Brand new [[Discord-Tutorial|Discord bridge]] addon, and updated versions of all Essentials addons (even XMPP!)
• Includes new item aliases for all Minecraft versions, including 1.13 and above.
• Supports giving spawner eggs with entity ID values and potions with damage values in 1.9-1.12.
• Uses UUID-backed Vault for permissions group and prefix/suffix lookups, as well as a new Vault adapter rewritten to be more robust.
  • Spigot-Essentials implements UUID lookups for zPermissions, but not other permissions plugins.
  • EssentialsX prioritizes Vault, so all queries using the Vault handler should be much faster as they don't need a name-to-UUID lookup.

Other minor additions

• /tppos can now optionally accept a world name.
• Adds a /msgtoggle command to allow people to ignore all private messages.
• Separate permissions for bulk sell and hand sell: essentials.sell.hand and essentials.sell.bulk respectively
• Adds a permission for exemption from SocialSpy: essentials.chat.spy.exempt
• Adds configuration option for the milk bucket "easter egg", which (really shouldn't, but does) allow players to mess with other people's horses: milk-bucket-easter-egg
• Adds configuration option for the "Set fly mode enabled..." message on join: send-fly-enable-on-join

New features

Per-gamemode permissions

You can now limit which gamemodes are available in /gamemode for players to switch to. For example, you might want to let players run /gma and /gms, but not /gmc or /gmsp. You can grant whichever gamemodes you want them to be able to change to:

• essentials.gamemode.creative
• essentials.gamemode.survival
• essentials.gamemode.adventure
• essentials.gamemode.spectator
• essentials.gamemode.all

Note: The base essentials.gamemode permission is still required to let players run the /gamemode command and its aliases.

Kits improvements

Kits have been moved from the main config to kits.yml, and can now be created from in-game and automatically added to your server without needing to manually edit and reload the config.

In addition, commands are now supported in kits with the full set of [[EssentialsX placeholders|Keywords]] - simply add a line to your kit as follows:

kits:
  mykit:
    delay: 1000
    items:
      - stone 1
      - /give {USERNAME} apple 1

EssentialsX also adds new commands to help manage kits:

/createkit

Command: /createkit <kitname> <delay>
Permission: essentials.createkit
If pastebin-createkit is set to false in config.yml, creates a kit from your inventory and puts it in the kits.yml file.
Alternatively, if pastebin-createkit is set to true, creates a kit based on your inventory and pastes an online link with the lines to add to your kits.yml by hand.

/showkit

Command: /showkit <kitname>
Permission: essentials.showkit
Shows a list of kit contents straight from config file.

Forcefully disable teleportation safety

Upstream Essentials only has two values for the teleport-safety option:

• Convert locations to safe teleports (results in plenty of exploits); or
• Deny the teleport entirely.

EssentialsX adds a force-disable-teleport-safety option (defaulting to false). When combined with teleport-safety: true, this disables conversion to safe locations and teleports the user to their exact location.

Note: To disable cross-world teleportation safety, switch to Paper and set disable-teleportation-suffocation-check to true in paper.yml.

Spawner placement fix

If spawners from EssentialsX commands/kits become pig spawners when placed, you can assign essentials.spawnerconvert.* to your default group to automatically convert them to the correct mob type.

Controlled Private Messaging

The new config option last-message-reply-recipient lets you change how /reply works. If set to true, your reply recipient will be whoever you messaged last and not whoever messaged you last. If you don't have a reply recipient, whoever messaged you last will be your reply recipient.

Here's a formatted scenario of the new last-message-reply-recipient feature:

JRoy: /msg mdcfe Hi
JRoy -> mdcfe: Hi
mdcfe: /r Hi
mdcfe -> JRoy: Hi
broccolai: /msg JRoy Hi
broccolai -> JRoy: Hi
JRoy: /r Hi back to you, mdcfe!
JRoy -> mdcfe: Hi back to you, mdcfe!

If this feature is enabled, EssentialsX will also use the last-message-reply-recipient-timeout setting. This setting allows you to control how long in seconds before the player's reply recipient is reset. After this duration, when a player receives a message, their replies will start going to the last person who sent them a message.

/seen by UUID

You can now check when a player was last seen using either their username or their UUID. For example, typing /seen SupaHam and /seen 5552e21d-de79-40bc-89da-62ee63244fb2 are now both valid methods of checking when a player was last seen.

Per-world /time setting permission

In classic Essentials, players with the permissions essentials.time and essentials.time.set were able to set the time in any world, even if they didn't have the permissions set in that world in the permissions plugin. If world-time-permissions is set to true in the config, users will need a specific permission to set the time in each world - see the table below. This feature is disabled by default.

Permissions

Permission	Description
essentials.time.world.<world>	Permits the user to set the time in <world>. <world> is the world name with spaces replaced with _. e.g. My World becomes, my_world.
essentials.time.world.all	Permits the user to set time of all worlds. This will override essentials.time.world.<world>.

AFK Player List name

This build introduces the afk-list-name config property which is used to control how AFK players appear in the player list.

The property has two placeholders:

• {USERNAME}: The player's name
• {PLAYER}: The player's display name.

Here's an example of "[AFK] SupaHam":

afk-list-name: '&7[AFK] &o{USERNAME}'

Nickname color permissions

EssentialsX adds new permissions for nickname colours and formatting, which match the names used by Mojang in the Minecraft chat component system. These permissions also cover chat messages (if you have EssentialsX Chat installed) and more. You can see a list of these new permissions [[Color-Permissions|here]].

You can now also use the essentials.nick.changecolors permission to restrict players' nickname changes. When players have this permission, they can only change the colour and formatting of their nickname, and not the text content. For example, if player SupaHam has the essentials.nick.changecolours and essentials.nick.color permissions, they can change their nickname to &5SupaHam, but cannot change it to &5TheSupaHam as the text content doesn't match their username.

Teleport to spawn when joining

This feature was added in build 361 (b673630).

Requested in #345. Administrators can now specify whether joining players are to be teleported to spawn using the spawn-on-join option found in the config.yml file.

spawn-on-join accepts several types of values:

1. true/"*" - all players will be teleported to spawn when joining.
2. false - no players will be teleported to spawn when joining
3. String - The value is treated as a group name. If a player is in the group, they will be teleported to spawn when joining.
4. List of Strings - The value is treated as a list of group names. If a player is in any of these groups, they will be teleported to spawn when joining.

When spawn-on-join is true, all players will be teleported to their group spawn point. If no group spawn point has been set, the default spawn point set with /setspawn will be used instead.

If admins wish to exempt certain players from this feature when spawn-on-join is true, they can give them the essentials.spawn-on-join.exempt permission and they will log in where they left off, assuming no other plugin is interfering.

AFK message

Requested in #590; PR in #664.

Players can set their AFK message when using the /afk command to notify others of their situation. When a player sends a message with /msg to an AFK player, they will see the AFK player's message.

By default, when a player sets their AFK status, the message will not be broadcast to the whole server. However, this can be changed in the [[Locale|locale file]] by adding {1} to the userIsAwayWithMessage message, where {1} will be replaced by the player's AFK message.

To set your AFK message, simply type /afk <message...>. For example: /afk I'm walking my dog.

In order to use this feature a player must have the essentials.afk.message permission. However, if a player is muted, they will not be able to supply a message as it can be used to exploit their punishment.

Pay toggle

Requested in #413; added in 2493c65.

Players have the ability to disable any and all payment via the /paytoggle command. This can be used to combat players using /pay as a means of spam towards other players, like celebrities on your server.

paytoggle also has the following aliases: epaytoggle, payoff, epayoff, payon, epayon

payoff will always disable payments to prevent errors. On the contrary, payon will always enable payments.

Command confirmations for /pay and /clearinventory

Requested in #1032; added in 5f83766.

You can now specify whether players are prompted to confirm /clearinventory and /pay commands before they are executed using the default-enabled-confirm-commands section of the config.

In addition, players can turn confirmations on or off for themselves with /clearconfirm and /payconfirm respectively.

Teleport to exact coordinates

This feature was implemented in (0a563b9).

This feature introduces the teleport-to-center configuration feature. When set to true (default), all teleportations are centered to the block; technically, setting the x and z coordinate decimals to .5 and .5. When teleport-to-center is set to false, all teleports are performed to the exact location as given.

Mail chat formatting

Requested in #1560; added in 665229b.

This feature introduces the ability to format /mail messages using & formatting codes - [[Color-Permissions|click here]] for more information.

Helmet slot hat

Added in 7958cd0.

If allow-direct-hat is enabled in the config.yml, then players with the permission essentials.hat can click on their helmet slot to place any block on their head, not just helmets.