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Rules and moderation

The eight house rules, the moderation tools that stand behind them, and what happens when something goes wrong.

Eight rules, and who they apply to

Blacklight runs on eight rules. They are short on purpose. Most of what a server needs from its players is covered by treating other people decently and leaving their things alone; the rest is there because a shared world with an economy in it can be broken in specific ways.

They apply to everyone equally, staff included. Where a rule and common sense disagree, common sense wins, and staff read intent before they read the letter.

Cheating, automation and the things that only look like cheating

There is no anticheat plugin here. Cheating is caught by people watching, by reports and by the traces an unlikely amount of loot leaves in the economy. That makes the rule wide rather than narrow: a client that gives you information or reach the game did not intend to give you is a cheat, whatever its name.

Refused: hacked clients of any kind, x-ray in every form including texture packs that make stone transparent, kill aura, reach extension, and flight mods. Allowed: anything cosmetic, performance mods such as Sodium and Iris, and minimaps, as long as the minimap does not show cave systems or entities you could not otherwise see.

Flight is not proof of anything

The server has a legitimate flight command. It is not a rank perk and it cannot be bought. Admission runs through a single access check with three arms: a staff permission, the administrator permission, and a named list of accounts that ships empty and is filled by hand. It exists for recordings and screenshots, so a player circling a build with a camera angle is very likely doing exactly that.

The same access check covers a per player sky time and a per player weather command. Both change only what you see. The world clock and the real weather are untouched, so a media account setting a permanent sunset is not altering the night anyone else is playing through.

Flight carries two refusals of its own: it is denied while you carry the combat tag, and it is denied in the dungeon world. It persists across relog, respawn, world change and gamemode change, and it grants a short no fall grace window when it ends, so a toggle in mid air is not a death.

Where automation stops being a farm

An AFK pool is a farm you built and left running; it is welcome, and so is every ordinary redstone or mob farm. The line is drawn at software that plays for you: macro clients, auto clickers, and bots that keep swinging, fishing or trading while nobody is at the keyboard.

The plugin does not detect these, but it does bound them. Job actions pass through a path with rate and duplicate safeguards before any coins or experience are awarded, so a throttled action still counts once rather than paying repeatedly, and crop harvesting is structurally single fire: a crop is only harvested at full maturity and is replanted to age zero in the same write, so a second call sees an immature plant and does nothing.

PvP, consent and the combat tag

Outside marked PvP zones and running events, you do not attack someone who has not agreed to it. The server cannot check this: it has no consent flag, and a hit is a hit as far as the code is concerned. Rule five is enforced by staff reading what happened, which is why an ambush at a shared farm and a duel both parties wanted look identical in the logs and completely different in a report.

Spawn camping is never allowed, in any zone, for any reason.

The combat tag

One clock decides whether you are in combat, and it lasts five seconds from the last damage you took. It is deliberately a single authority, so "in combat" means the same thing everywhere in the plugin. What it gates:

• The faction home warmup is torn down when you take combat damage. Moving does not cancel it, and purely environmental damage does not either.
• A field bandage is refused in combat, and the refusal cancels the event rather than eating the item.
• Media flight is refused in combat.
• The teleporter keeps its own five second tag, read from the same damage timestamp.

One consequence is worth knowing. Because faction friendly fire is now enforced by a plugin rule rather than by vanilla team membership, punching a faction mate while friendly fire is off cancels an event the combat tracker has already seen. The hit does nothing, and you are still tagged in combat for five seconds.

When your own faction can hit you

Friendly fire inside a faction is off by default and the owner can turn it on. It is also turned on indirectly by bounty infighting: if bounties allow faction targets, faction members can damage and kill each other in general, not only the one carrying the bounty. Allies were never protected from each other in the first place.

Faction guards hired from a treasury will only ever hurt a player who is online, in a fighting gamemode, not vanished, not a member or active ally of the owning faction, and hostile through an active war or through a thirty second aggression memory the faction builds when its people are attacked. Beyond a leash of twenty four blocks a guard disengages and walks home, so guards cannot be marched anywhere as an army.

Claims, griefing and how far protection reaches

Rule four has two halves. Inside a faction claim it is code. Outside one it is manners, and staff.

Every block change the plugin performs on your behalf, and every ability that breaks or tills for you, passes through one protection check, always in the same order:

1. Administrator bypass.
2. The dungeon world denies outright.
3. A WorldGuard region other than the global one denies.
4. A faction claim allows only members of the owning faction.
5. If the faction data cannot be read, the answer is no.

That last step matters more than it looks. The check fails closed, so during the first seconds after a restart, while the faction repository is still loading, non administrators are refused rather than allowed. A break attempt in that window is cancelled with the block left untouched.

The WorldGuard arm tests only whether a region exists at that point. It does not read the region's build flag, its members or its owners. On the crop path this means farming inside any non global WorldGuard region is denied, including for the person who owns the region. This is known and stated rather than hidden.

Mobs, creepers and end crystals

Mob griefing in claims is handled per claim rather than by switching the server wide game rule off, so vanilla behaviour survives outside claimed ground. Damage that cannot be attributed to a player is treated as mob griefing, and end crystals fall into the same bucket.

The limit nobody can engineer away

Minecraft exposes no signal that distinguishes a naturally generated block from one a player placed. No tag, no protection check and no heuristic turns "never destroy player placed blocks" into a guarantee; the only way to guarantee it is to stop breaking blocks at all. This is why hired foragers are bounded three ways instead: by what the linked builder is actually short of, by a per NPC daily cap, and by how much the worker can carry. It is a paid convenience with an edge, not an open faucet, and if one of yours takes something it should not have, that is a ticket rather than a theft.

Chat: the filter, the channels and mutes

Chat runs through one listener that does four things in order: a cooldown, the profanity filter, channel routing, and the local radius. Five channels exist. Global reaches everyone and renders as [G] with any chat tag you bought in front of your name. Local is heard only by players near you. Faction and ally channels reach your own people. The fifth is staff chat, which you will not see.

The filter is the server's, not yours

The profanity filter is a server side filter applied to chat, and it does not stop at the chat box. Text you author elsewhere is validated against it as well: a custom death message is checked for profanity and for the required {player} placeholder before you are charged, so a rejected message leaves you in setup mode with your coins intact and a chance to retype.

Staff can turn the filter on or off, adjust it, and look at what it currently catches. A normal player who tries gets a plain refusal.

Mutes

A mute stops you talking. It is enforced in two places, and this is deliberate: the chat listener blocks the message, and a separate command listener blocks chat shaped commands. A muted player cannot route around the mute by sending the same sentence through a private message or a channel command.

Mutes are lifted by staff, and there is a matching unmute for exactly that. A mute is not a ban: you keep playing, keep earning, keep your claims. It is the tool for the case where the problem is what someone is saying rather than what they are doing.

The moderation tools, and what each one means for you

The plugin ships a small, ordinary moderation set. Nothing here is exotic, and knowing what exists tells you what a staff member can and cannot do to a situation.

The nametag layer carries a [V] marker in front of a vanished player's name, so someone who can see them knows why they are there. Every player has exactly one nametag team, which is what makes that marker survive a relog instead of quietly falling off.

Maintenance mode and the server list

Maintenance is a single switch with two effects. It gates normal access and normal commands, and it changes what your server list shows. The message of the day, the player count hover and the favicon are all written by the plugin through a packet listener, which is why the maintenance display is a genuine different screen rather than a kick message you only see after connecting.

That display is also the reason ProtocolLib is the server's one hard dependency. Five other plugins are soft dependencies and degrade quietly when absent; ProtocolLib is required at load, and without it the server refuses to start rather than running with a broken server list.

Who on the team can do what

Staff duties are split three ways, and none of them is something a player can be given by asking. What matters from your side is only this: a helper can remove someone from the server, a moderator can silence someone, and neither of those is the same job as the one that changes how the server itself runs, such as maintenance mode or a planned restart.

Bugs, dupes and the guards that only measure

If you find a way to duplicate an item, mint coins out of nothing, or make a shop pay twice, open a ticket on Discord. Reporting earns a reward. Using it costs you the progress it produced, and using it at scale costs you the account.

What the code measures on its own

A set of guards sits on the economy's measurement path. They exist to stop a manipulated signal from moving prices, and they carry one invariant above all others: they bound what is counted, never who is paid. A guard firing does not take a coin from anybody.

The caps are measurement integrity bounds rather than gameplay limits, and they are set generously; ordinary play does not reach them. They were originally declared per three day window and later re-expressed per day at a third of these figures, so sustained throughput is unchanged and only bursts behave differently.

What they do not catch, stated plainly

• Alt accounts. There is no IP or alt linkage anywhere in the plugin. Two cooperating accounts are two parties, so the caps bound a farm without ever identifying it as one. Rule six is a rule because it cannot be a check.
• Longer rings. A two party round trip collapses onto a single cap regardless of direction. A ring of three or more accounts passing goods along is bounded only by the individual caps; no cycle detector was built.
• Minting and burning. Grants, refunds, charges and burns are deliberately left uncapped, because they are real money creation and destruction and capping them would misreport how much money exists.

Alongside the guards, staff can run an automated dupe audit. It derives its own list of blocks to test from three independent sources rather than a hand written list, places and breaks each one through a real break event, captures every drop before it reaches the ground, and checks two things: that no more state carrying stacks leave the ground than vanilla produced, and that the total value dropped stays within each active bonus's own declared multiplier. Anything that fails is logged with the block, the combination, the excess and every listener that was registered at the time.

Penalties, appeals and the final word

Penalties scale with two things: what you meant to do, and how much damage it did to other people. A misjudged joke and a coordinated dupe ring are not the same event, and they do not get the same answer.

Read that as a description of how decisions have gone, not as a tariff. Nothing in it obliges staff to a particular length, and an honest account of what happened moves an outcome further than an argument about which row applies.

One person, two editions

Rule six bans alt accounts, not platforms. Blacklight is one server for Java and Bedrock, and playing from both is expected rather than tolerated: same world, same coins, same faction, same tab list. What the rule forbids is a second identity used to collect a second set of votes, a second set of daily bonuses, or a second seat in a faction. Since the plugin has no way to link accounts, this one runs on trust and on what staff can see.

Appeals

Appeals go to Discord. Say who you are, what the penalty was, and what you think was misread. A temporary ban ends on its own whether or not you appeal, so an appeal there is about correcting the record rather than about getting back in.

Decisions get looked at again. Not every one of them changes. The operator has the final word on rules, on penalties and on appeals, and this article carries no authority beyond describing how that word has been used.