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Getting Started

Your first thirty minutes on Blacklight: connecting on Java or Bedrock, reading the sidebar, picking a profession and earning your first coins.

Connecting

One address serves both editions. Java clients join on the hostname; Bedrock clients need the same hostname plus a port, because Bedrock speaks a different protocol and reaches the server through Geyser.

Bedrock accounts carry a prefix character on their in-game name, a full stop by default. That prefix is part of your name for anything that targets a player: /pay, /msg, faction invites, market purchases and teleporter links all expect it. If a command says it cannot find you, check that the dot is there.

The resource pack is optional

There is an external pack, blacklight_items, built on the 26.1 item model format. It gives forged weapons, forged tools, gems, the astrolabe, the home scroll and a long list of other custom items their own textures instead of the vanilla base item they are built on.

Nothing mechanical depends on it. A forged longsword without the pack is still a forged longsword: same stats, same sockets, same abilities, just rendered as a plain iron sword. Two limits worth knowing even with the pack installed. Only iron-tier forges carry the custom model cases, so copper, gold, diamond and netherite forges fall back to the vanilla model either way. And Bedrock renders custom models through a translation layer, so a model that looks right on Java may not look identical on Bedrock.

The first few minutes

There is no server-wide first-join tutorial. Nobody will walk you through the systems, no questionnaire appears in chat, and there is no guided spawn selection. This page exists because that gap is real.

The one tutorial that does exist is /forge tutorial, and it covers the forge only: ten tracks, nineteen steps in total. Steps are event-driven, so they tick off when you actually perform the action rather than when you click a button, and progress is saved. Each step you finish pays vanilla experience, 25 per step, and never coins. A step index only ever moves forward, so repeating the last action of a finished track does nothing, and a reward can be claimed exactly once.

Spawn and the return countdown

Your first join puts you at spawn and leaves you there. No countdown, no prompt, nothing to cancel.

Later joins behave differently. If the server has a stored location for you, it drops you at the spawn screen and starts a countdown that returns you to where you logged out. Type /tpc to cancel that countdown and stay at spawn. If there is no stored location, no countdown starts and /tpc has nothing to do.

/spawn takes you back at any time, subject to the combat and PvP rules: it will refuse while those rules say you are not free to leave.

Dying

Death does not scatter your inventory across the ground. A grave is created at the spot, holding your items, and you retrieve them through a GUI. Graves are free: creating one costs no coins. They do have a lifetime and a per-player maximum, so a stack of forgotten graves will eventually expire. /grave lists yours and can teleport you to one.

Reading the sidebar

The board on the right of your screen is yours alone. Every player gets a private scoreboard rather than sharing one, which is why the numbers on it are your numbers.

It carries ten entries. The ones you will use in your first session are these.

The board refreshes on a two-second sweep, and only when one of your own tracked values has actually changed. That is deliberate: a board that redraws every tick for every player is expensive. It also means a line can lag a moment behind the event that changed it.

One case where that lag is visible: the faction tag above your head updates immediately when you join, leave or are kicked, but the Faction line on the sidebar follows on the next sweep. Nothing is broken; the tag and the line are published by different paths.

Picking a profession

Open the picker with /jobs. The aliases /job and /j do the same thing. There are fifteen professions, laid out seven per page across two pages.

The controls differ by platform, and the screen tells you which one applies. On Java you shift-click a profession to select it; a plain left-click does nothing except say so. On Bedrock any tap counts as a selection, because Geyser does not report a distinct click type. The page arrows sit either side of the close button and accept a plain left-click on both platforms.

The five smith professions earn experience and no coins at all. Every forge award passes zero income by design. If your plan for the first hour is money, start somewhere else and come back to the forge later.

Slots and ranks

You hold two professions at once. A third slot exists and is unlocked through /shop for 150,000 coins; until then it shows as a red locked placeholder in both the job screen and /profile. All three slots earn, rank up and fire abilities identically once unlocked.

Your first coins

Job income starts from a base value decided by how rare the action is, then passes through a long chain of multipliers before it reaches your wallet.

Those are starting numbers, not what lands. The chain that follows can multiply or gut them.

Read the top half of that table as the reason grinding one seam in one chunk pays badly. Repetition and diminishing returns together take a Common action from 10 coins to well under one. The server is built so that moving, varying what you do, and playing at night or in the Nether pays better than standing still.

Set your expectations with these figures. A fresh Apprentice doing focused job work earns roughly 5,000 to 10,000 coins an hour. An Expert or Master earns roughly 15,000 to 40,000. That puts a Cooldown Pass at 3,000 within your first hour and the third job slot at 150,000 several evenings away.

Every coin that reaches you passes through the tax funnel, so a faction with a tax rule set may take a share. Sales, job pay and shop purchases all route the same way; nothing pays you around it.

Selling: sneak and right-click

Some goods sell straight out of your hand. Hold the stack, sneak, right-click: the whole stack goes and the coins arrive with a receipt in chat. There is no shop block to find and no menu to open.

The gesture is not universal. It works on a specific list of sellable goods, and everything else keeps its normal right-click behaviour.

Every sale on that list is removed from your inventory before the coins are minted, which is why a sale cannot be duplicated by disconnecting mid-click. All of them route through the taxed payout, so a faction rate applies. Money notes are the exception: redeeming one is tax free and adds nothing to the money supply, because the coins already existed when the note was printed.

On Bedrock the sneak plus right-click gesture exists but can be finicky through Geyser. Where a system offers a typed alternative it is worth using; /skill notes convert, for example, does the same job as the gesture it replaces.

The other ways to sell

/shop opens the admin shop, the market board and the cosmetics screens. The market board shows 28 player listings per page with framed navigation. Listing an item there costs a fee, which certain buffs discount, and any item can be listed, including custom goods that no shop buys directly.

/rshop covers regional faction shops: chest-backed shops inside claimed chunks, with their own per-shop tax rate set by the owning faction.

Chunk zones

Every chunk is classified into one of four zones. The classification is weighted by biome, seeded so it is stable, and cached for the session, so the same chunk keeps the same character while you are online. You do not need the Explorer profession for zones to affect you: the ore and income modifiers apply to whatever you are doing there.

You get reminders as you cross into a new zone. That is the cheap way to learn the map: walk, read the chat line, and remember where the green ground was.

The precise way is the Chunk Reveal Token, 1,500 coins from /shop. Using one consumes it and prints a three by three map in chat: nine cells, top row north, you in the middle in gold, each cell coloured by its zone. A neighbour that is not currently loaded shows dark gray rather than being classified, because the token never forces a chunk to load or generate. A legend below the grid names your own chunk's zone.

One token is one reveal. At 1,500 coins it is roughly four minutes of mid-game earning, so it is a scouting tool rather than a luxury.

The profile screen

/profile opens a 54-slot screen that gathers everything about you that is worth reading in one place. It is the screen to check when you are not sure what a system has done to you.

Your three job slots sit at fixed positions in the lower half. Each shows the profession's icon and display name, its current rank, and a Next: <rank> (<xp> XP) line telling you exactly how far the next rank is. The third slot shows a red locked placeholder until you buy it. The screen also totals your active buffs, so a faction buff that looks like it is not working can be checked here rather than guessed at.

Staff can open /profile on other players. That is why one card on it is deliberately read-only: your mob-drop mode is displayed with its rule spelled out, but clicking it does nothing. A click that silently changed your own setting while you were looking at somebody else's profile would be a nasty surprise.

Mob drop modes

That mode is set with /mobdrops, aliases /drops and /md. It decides what the mobs you kill leave behind.

Experience is never touched by any mode; XP Mode is named for what it leaves you with, not for anything it adds. Every mode is typeable, so Bedrock players who would rather not open a chest interface can switch from chat. When a mode removes something notable, you are told once per mode per session what went and which mode took it.

Where to go next

Once the first coins are in and a profession is chosen, the server opens up in several directions at once. None of them is a prerequisite for the others.

If you want one recommendation for the second half hour: take a gathering profession, walk somewhere you have never been so the Explorer chunks and the zone reminders both fire, and read /job info while you walk. That earns, maps and teaches at the same time.