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Expeditions

Instanced group dungeons for parties of one to five: arena floors, waves, minibosses and five boss encounters. Not yet live.

What an expedition is

An expedition is a private dungeon run for a small party. You form a group in the normal world, pick a tier from 1 to 5, and the server builds you an instance of your own in a separate dungeon world. Each floor is a sealed arena with something to fight, a reward chest, and a descent to the next floor. The last floor holds a boss.

Nothing about the run is shared with anyone outside your party. The instance exists only while you are inside it, and it is torn down entirely when the last member leaves: every mob, every boss, every marker and every cached chest goes with it.

The tier you choose sets the length of the run, how hard the enemies scale, what the reward chests can roll, and which boss waits at the bottom.

Floor count is always three plus the tier. The rolls column is the weighted part of a chest only; guaranteed drops are added on top, and a separate cap trims the result. See Loot below.

Forming a party and getting in

Everything runs through /expedition, aliased /exp. Typing it with no arguments prints a sectioned help screen grouped into Party, Run and Info.

Party size and tier

A party is one to five players. One is allowed and is a real solo mode, with its own shorter bleed-out rule. The tier is picked in the party GUI; if nobody picks one, the run uses the number of members plus one, capped at 5.

The Dungeon Compass

The leader must be holding a Dungeon Compass to press Begin. That single check covers both the button and the automatic start, which fires 60 seconds after the party readies up. On entry, one compass is consumed from every member who has one. It is not refunded when you come back out. A member without a compass is still taken in, so the cost in practice is one compass per stocked player per run.

What happens between Begin and the arena

Your party moves through a short state machine. Membership is locked from the moment entry is committed.

The instance is not written in one tick. Block placement is paced across ticks under a budget of 200 blocks per tick, and the party is teleported in only from the build-complete callback, so you can never land in a half-built volume. Before the build begins, every member's current location is recorded, and that record is what sends you home later.

Inside a floor

Every floor is the same shape: one open arena, 25 by 25 blocks with 8 blocks of interior height, sealed on all sides. There is a spawn pad, a ring of eight mob spawn points, and a fixed central point that holds either the boss or the reward chest. You never walk between floors. Clearing one and readying up teleports the party to the next.

The geometry is deterministic. The same dungeon id and floor index always produce the same arena, and the detailing is drawn from a seeded pass over walls, ceiling and the flat floor plane so nothing raised can bury the chest or block a spawn point.

The three kinds of floor

• Wave. The default. Every non-final floor that is not the miniboss floor is a wave.
• Miniboss. One mid-run floor, placed just before the final boss where the run is long enough to fit it. A single tanky champion at the centre with a telegraphed ground slam.
• Final boss. Always the last floor.

How a wave actually works

A wave floor does not spawn its whole quota at once. The floor has a total kill count, and only a small concurrent batch is alive at any time: the smaller of the total and either three or the tier plus two, whichever of those is larger. The rest sit in a backlog. Every kill on the floor respawns one replacement at the arena centre and takes one off the backlog, so the arena stays occupied until the quota is exhausted, then drains and clears. The wave bar counts the whole thing, alive plus backlog, so the number you see is honest about how much is left.

Enemies scale to what you are wearing

At entry the system reads the party's equipment and derives a gear level from 1 to 5, leather through netherite. Armour is weighted two to one against your weapon, and an enchanted main-hand weapon adds one level. By default the party's levels are averaged, which is fairer to a mixed group than taking the best-equipped member.

That level then layers on top of the tier scaling. Mobs are armoured to whichever is higher, the tier or the gear level. Melee humanoids receive a tier-appropriate weapon, with no drop chance; ranged and caster types keep their own kit, because arming a pillager with a sword only makes it hold a sword it never swings. Health rises 18 percent and damage 12 percent per gear level above leather, each bounded at three times base. From diamond upward, roughly one mob in five gains a readable perk: Speed or Strength with a glow telegraph, and sometimes a telegraphed ground slam that spares anyone mid-dodge.

The dodge, and the descent

Inside a dungeon you have a dash. Double-tap sneak and you lurch, with a short window of invulnerability on the frames that matter. It exists nowhere else on the server and is cleared the moment you leave, change world or disconnect. A downed or waiting player cannot dash.

When a floor clears, the party readies up. The gesture is a sustained sneak hold with a green progress bar; releasing sneak resets it, exactly like the revive channel. /expedition ready is an instant alias for players who prefer the command. The party descends when everyone is ready, or when the timeout expires.

Floor themes

Five themes set both what you fight on a floor and what the floor looks like. The theme is a pure function of depth, so the first floor of every dungeon is a crypt and the fifth is an abyss. Runs longer than five floors cycle the harder back half, illager, nether and abyss, rather than starting over at the easy end.

Two details are worth knowing. The abyss floor used to be wall-to-wall guardians and was retuned by composition rather than by weakening the guardian: three drowned to one guardian, so the floor is fought on land and the guardian is an accent. And no vex will ever appear in a dungeon, whatever an evoker tries; vex spawns in the dungeon world are cancelled outright. Evoker fangs still work, because fangs are not creatures.

Boss encounters

Five bosses exist, one per tier, hand-written rather than generated. Each has a boss bar and at least one phase change tied to remaining health.

The miniboss floor is separate from these. It spawns a Champion for your tier, from the table in the first section, with four times its base health scaled again by run difficulty and by the tier, armoured one step above the tier, and named and labelled with its floor. It does not despawn.

Bosses and their summoned minions are tracked the same way ordinary floor mobs are, which is why a wipe, an abort or a server shutdown cannot leave one alive in a volume that will later be reused.

Riddle rooms

Four riddle types are written, and a riddle room picks one of them at random with equal odds. Each is a different kind of problem, and one of them is a group problem by design.

Loot: your chest is yours

There is no shared loot pool and no roll-off. A cleared floor places one chest block at the fixed centre of the arena, and every member of the party opens that same block. What each of you sees is different.

Opening the chest does not open the block. The open is intercepted and you are redirected into a 27-slot container of your own. That view is created exactly once, the first time you open the chest, and the container that is created is the storage from then on. Taking and depositing change it in place. Reopening returns the same container with your exact contents.

What a chest holds

Your roll is made with the party size pinned to one, so the reduction that normally removes a roll from parties larger than three never applies to a personal chest. The weighted roll count is 2, 3, 4, 5 or 7 by tier. Guaranteed drops are then appended, and those are unaffected by any death or wipe penalty. Finally the whole result is capped at four items per floor chest.

The pool holds coins, food, ingots, gems and a short list of the server's own utility items. Elytra was removed from it and cannot be rolled anywhere in the expedition loot path.

Payouts

Clearing a floor pays the members who are alive at the moment it clears. Only a completed run pays the completion reward. Every figure below is per tier, so a tier 5 run pays five times the listed number.

Two limits to keep in mind. Anything you leave in your personal chest vanishes when the dungeon is torn down; the storage lives with the instance, not with you. And a party wipe pays no completion reward at all, though items you already picked up out of a floor chest stay in your inventory.

Going down: DOWNED and WAITING

You do not die inside a dungeon. The lethal hit is intercepted and cancelled, and you enter a state called DOWNED instead. From there the run either picks you back up or moves on without you.

DOWNED

Downed is deliberately helpless. You are laid prone and pinned in place: walk speed zero, Slowness, no jump, and a per-tick check that snaps you back if knockback or a swim nudge shifts you more than a fifth of a block. You cannot deal damage. You sit at roughly one heart, you glow so the party can find you, you have Darkness, and a red bleed-out bar counts down over your screen.

In exchange you are invulnerable to everything, and mobs will not touch you. Mobs already chasing you drop the target the moment you go down, scanned out to 48 blocks, and no mob can newly acquire a downed or waiting player at all.

A living teammate standing within two blocks of you for four seconds picks you up at six health. Progress shows on both players' action bars and on the bleed-out bar, and the timer pauses while a revive is actively running. Stepping out of range holds the progress rather than throwing it away, so you can back off from a swing and come back. A Respawn Token, used with the swap-hand key, is a self-revive; you cannot revive yourself any other way.

WAITING

If your bleed-out expires while teammates are still up, you become an observer. This is not spectator mode. You stay in survival with flight enabled, you are made invisible to every other player, you cannot fight, interact, break or place, and you are clamped inside the dungeon walls each tick with a block and a half of inset, so flying up over the ceiling or out through an opening does not work.

You are not out of the run. When the party clears the floor and descends, every waiting member is restored at the next floor's spawn pad at six health. A floor is a real second chance.

The wipe

When no member is alive and standing, the run fails. That happens the instant the last upright member of a multi-player party goes down, or when a solo player's ten-second bleed-out runs out. Everyone, downed, waiting and alive alike, is sent back to the overworld with no completion reward.

Leaving, and the rules inside

Exactly one piece of code moves a player out of the dungeon world, and it always does the same six things in the same order: work out where you belong, clear your state, teleport you, pay you if the reason deserves it, deregister you, and tear the instance down if you were the last one in it.

Where you end up is resolved in a fixed order: your stored pre-entry location first, then the in-memory copy taken at entry, then world spawn. A dungeon coordinate is never a valid answer at any step, so no exit can strand you inside.

/expedition leave works for everyone at any point in a run, the leader included. Leaving mid-run is not a disband and does not need one. The leader is only blocked from leaving while the party is still forming, and /expedition disband is refused outright during an active run.

Which commands work in there

Inside the dungeon world the command surface is deliberately narrow, and it behaves identically on Java and Bedrock.

• /expedition and /exp work for everyone, including /expedition leave. That is the universal way out and it is never blocked.
• Vanilla Minecraft commands work for operators only.
• Every other plugin command is blocked, including the server's own, and including for operators.

So a normal player has /expedition and nothing else. No shop, no home, no teleport, no economy commands. The point is that a dungeon is a closed room, and the only sanctioned way out of it is the one that runs your exit and cleanup properly. Outside the dungeon world none of this applies.

The room itself is protected too. Block breaking and explosions in a dungeon are cancelled or stripped rather than allowed to damage the arena, so you cannot mine through a wall to skip a floor or blow open a sealed exit.