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Bounties

Put a price on a player's head. The stake is held in escrow the moment you place it, and only a real player who kills the target collects.

How a bounty pool works

A bounty is a pool of coins attached to one player. You pay into that pool when you place the bounty, the coins leave your balance at that moment, and the pool holds them until they leave again by exactly one route: a payout to a killer, a refund to a contributor, or nothing at all while the bounty stands.

That is what escrow means here. Coins sitting in a pool are never lost, never duplicated and never paid twice. Two design choices carry the guarantee. First, a pool has no stored total: the total you see is always recomputed from the live list of contributions, so a stored number can never drift away from the coins actually held. Second, on a claim the pool is removed from the records before the killer is paid, so a death event that fires twice finds nothing left to pay out.

Several players can pay into the same head, and each contribution is tracked as its own entry with its own amount, its own anonymity flag and its own timestamp. That is what makes a single-person refund possible: you can withdraw what you put in without touching anyone else's stake.

Placing a bounty

/bounty opens the hub. From there, Place opens a picker of online players, and choosing a head opens the amount screen. You cannot place a bounty on yourself, and the picker leaves out anyone the target rules protect from you. For an offline player, or when you already know the name, /bounty on <player> [amount] does the same job from chat.

Placement is a single atomic step. The rules are checked, then the money is taken, and if the withdrawal fails nothing else happens at all. Only whole coins go into a pool; fractions are floored away. The charge is drawn through the normal payment cascade, so it takes from your bank account first, then your wallet, then coin notes in your inventory, and the affordability ticks in the menu are computed from that same cascade rather than from your wallet alone.

The target finds out. If they are online they get a message when the bounty lands, with your name hidden if you went anonymous; if they are offline they are told the next time they log in. The pool is written to disk before any of those messages are sent, so a failed notification can never cost anyone their escrow.

The screens

The whole system is driven from six 54 slot menus, all of them built on player heads so they render correctly through Geyser for Bedrock players.

The amount screen is where the design matters most. The centre card tells you the amount you have dialled in, the total you will be charged, whether you can afford it, and what the pool and its tier will look like afterwards. Around it sit four minus buttons and four plus buttons in steps of 100, 1,000, 10,000 and 100,000, with the largest pair moved up a row in a later layout pass so no live money button sits in a border column. Below them are five presets, 500, 1,000, 5,000, 25,000 and 100,000, each carrying a live tick or cross for affordability.

There is no typing anywhere in these menus and no writable slot anywhere either. Entering an amount is pure tapping and redrawing, every click is cancelled before it is read, drags are refused outright, and you never hold an item that could be lost or handed back when the window closes. A name search inside the menu was deliberately left out to keep that property; /bounty on <player> covers the case instead.

Collecting a bounty

A pool is paid out when the target dies and the death has a real player killer. That is the only payee the system knows. Deaths to mobs, to the void, to fall damage, to a self-inflicted end or to anything else with no player behind it leave the bounty exactly where it was. Village NPCs count as mobs, so a hired worker landing the killing blow pays nobody.

When a claim goes through, the order is fixed: the pool is removed, the reclaim timestamp for that killer and victim pair is written, the coins are deposited, the lifetime stats of both players are updated, the file is saved, and only then does anyone get a message. The killer takes the entire pool in one payment. Every contributor is told their stake was collected, and if the pool was at or above the broadcast threshold the server hears about it.

You do not have to be online to be paid. Deposits go by player ID, so a contributor refund or a killer payout reaches an offline account. The payout is taxed like other income, which means it is one of the earnings the faction tax reduction buff can lower.

The same death handler feeds the Duelling skill discipline. A player kill is that discipline's only source of experience, and it rides on this listener rather than on a separate one.

The guards against farming

Four gates sit between a kill and a payout. Each one blocks the payment and leaves the pool standing; none of them destroys or refunds anything, so a blocked claim costs the contributors nothing.

Behind those four sits the plain cost of dying. A victim drops their inventory into a grave and has to go and get it back, which is what makes an arranged trade of kills expensive even where the gates allow it.

Cancelling, expiry and parked pools

You can withdraw your own stake from the detail screen, or with /bounty cancel. You get back what you put in minus a 10 percent cancellation fee, and that fee is destroyed rather than left in the pool. Your entry is then gone; if you were the last contributor, the bounty disappears with it. A second cancel finds no entry and pays nothing, so a refund cannot be taken twice, and no cancel ever returns more than you contributed. Cancelling is a setting rather than a law, so a server can switch it off.

One state is worth knowing about. If the bounty system is switched off while pools exist, those pools are held rather than refunded: placing, claiming, cancelling and the expiry sweep all stop, and the coins stay parked until staff clear the bounty or the system comes back. This is a known rough edge rather than intended behaviour you should plan around.

Danger tiers

Every pool carries a badge based on its total. The tiers exist to make the board readable at a glance.

The tier is cosmetic and nothing else. It never changes what a killer is paid, never affects which gates apply, and never touches any economic path. A Legendary badge means the pool is large; it does not mean the rules are different. The amount screen previews the tier your contribution would produce before you confirm it.

Where the coins come from and go

In economic terms a bounty is a burn followed by a mint. Placing destroys your stake plus the placement fee; claiming creates the pool again in the killer's hands. Set against each other, the system removes exactly the fees from circulation and nothing else. With the shipped numbers the placement fee is zero, so the only structural drain is the 10 percent taken from a cancelled stake.

The payout itself is taxed like other earned income, and it is one of the payout kinds that no booster can multiply. It pays at the plain rate, it always has, and that is a deliberate decision rather than an oversight.

There is one place where bounties feed a different income stream. Job pay runs through a chain of sixteen steps, and Bounty Rush is step ten of that chain, worth x2.0. It multiplies job earnings, not the bounty pool. To give it a sense of scale, here is a stack with no action chain running: a dangerous zone at x1.5, night at x1.3, low health at x1.5, a dimension bonus at x1.5, no armour at x1.25, a secondary trait at x1.5 and Bounty Rush at x2.0 comes to about x16.4 before rank, and roughly x49 with a Legend rank on top.

Commands and current limits

/bounty is the whole player surface, and /bounties and /wanted are aliases for it. Everything the menus do has a typed mirror, which is what makes offline targets reachable.

Two things are deliberately absent. There is no name search inside the menus, because adding one would have meant a writable slot; and there is no WANTED nameplate floating above a bountied player, which was left out rather than risk breaking the faction, job and cross-platform logic that already shares those nameplates. Staff can clear a bounty and refund its contributors when something goes wrong.

One known limit is worth stating. A killer's balance and the bounty records are held separately, so a hard crash in the split second between the two writes could leave them disagreeing. The bounty file is internally consistent either way, since the pool removal and the cooldown record are written together.